Operation Inspiration
While not one of my proudest moments, at the time I thought myself pretty clever, when I made a comment to an employee at a kiddie amusement park I visited. As I got off the little train that circled the park with my six-year-old, I thanked the fellow with the striped cap and overalls who’d been driving the train and quipped, “I bet when you told your mother you wanted to be an engineer, this isn’t what she had in mind.” I don’t recall if he laughed, but looking back I can’t imagine that he would.
Being an engineer, as in machines, not driving a locomotive engine, has an air of prestige about it. That’s because it conveys a certain level of knowledge and understanding about how things work. For example, I once met a fellow who spoke five languages and had a degree in mechanical engineering. What did he do for a living? He played professional football and was a placekicker whose accuracy level at the height of his career bested 90%. (His name is Morten Andersen if you want to look him up.)
So why, if he had such a prestigious degree, was he spending his time kicking a football? Precisely because he had an understanding of how things work and he recognized that he could make a whole lot of money kicking a ball, while not risking getting beaten up too badly (kickers are rarely tackled) and he would do much better than if he’d found a job as an actual engineer.
Well, I’m far from an engineer, but sometimes when the need arises, I attempt to get technosavvy and fix things. In Yeshiva I once took apart a tape recorder. When I put it back together, it worked pretty much as it had before… yeah, pretty much. I also found that I had a few screws left on my desk that didn’t seem to have a home. A friend told me, “That’s what happens when they over-engineer something.” You get superfluous parts that you don’t really need in order for the item to work. Of course, I’m not really an engineer, and maybe that’s why the tape recorder “seemed” to work properly, but I wouldn’t know for sure.
It’s like vortex generators on an airplane wing. They seem like a simple little piece of metal that nobody would miss if they were gone. But. in some cases, without them, an airplane might fall out of the sky. Oops!
Recently, I had occasion to do more of my technical wizardry. I’d put my laptop computer in my suitcase when I flew. When I unpacked it, I found that though it started up, the screen was black. I searched for answers and videos on YouTube and when none of the key-combinations worked, I finally realized that I had to unscrew the back of the laptop. I wasn’t exactly sure what I would do once I did that, but first things first. As I used an eyeglass screwdriver to remove the numerous little screws, I made a neat little pile of them as I removed each one. After about the fourth or fifth, I realized that they were not all the same size! Oh no! I didn’t know which hole had the long screws and which had the short ones. I tried to match them up by the corresponding screws on the other side, to thereby figure out which ones had been long or short, but as I would soon find out, that was sadly a failure.
I wasn’t sure what to do once I opened the computer, but with numerous prayers on my lips, I tugged on various wires and plugs which didn’t actually move, and I reseated the RAM (the memory chip mentioned in one of the DIY videos.) Then, having no other plan, I closed the laptop and found myself struggling with those screws but managed to put them all in. As I turned the laptop over to open it, a couple actually fell out. Clearly, they had been short screws in long holes. Oops again. Meanwhile, I turned on the laptop and lo and behold, it worked! Baruch Hashem!
A person watching this story unfold, who didn’t know much about how things work, might have been tempted to say that since, once I removed those screws, the laptop was able to work, obviously those had been the problem. The problem is that this person lacks a fundamental understanding of why each part is in the machine and how it functions. Therefore, to offer an opinion would be presumptuous.
What about those people who feel that various mitzvos don’t make sense? Maybe they feel something is archaic or incorrect. Society frequently changes its position on things and sadly those sentiments seep into our consciousness as well. But we need to realize that we are not engineers and we are not qualified to identify how or why things work in Hashem’s universe. How do we know if that part was holding together something critical? We don’t, but yet we foolishly offer our opinions.
My computer experience reminded me that we don’t know what we’re doing, but Hashem does. We therefore need to follow His instructions and recognize that if something exists or is a mitzvah or a prohibition, it’s because that’s how things work. Those people who fail to realize that? Well, let’s just say they may be missing a few screws.
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