I tend to be a steady mispallel at the Minyan
Vasikan in my neighborhood, which means that at 3:30 A.M. this time of the year
I am groping for the alarm clock to shut it off.
But that’s only if it was ringing to begin with.
And when it isn’t,
my day has been turned on its head before I have even had a chance to distinguish
it from night. That this is so is beyond
dispute. That this is the ruination of my
purported plans is a different story, as was spelled out in EmunahSpeak: PLAN B.
With all of this in mind we can better understand the
bad run I had a few weeks back when my alarm clock and I went our separate ways
three days in one week.
The first piece of brilliance on my part was
forgetting to turn on the ringer. As one
can readily understand, a ringer that does not go off at 3:30 A.M. as expected
is not a poster boy for on time vasikan attendance. I had relied on it and it had failed me.
I’m not one to repeat such mistakes and I didn’t. What I did do was to mess up a second time in
one week in a totally different way. Apparently,
my alarm clock wasn’t programmed with any wiggle room for minor indiscretions
so when I set it for 3:30 P.M. instead the usual 3:30 A.M. the alarm went off about
nine and half hours after the vasikan minyan was over. Again I had relied on it and again it had
failed me.
By my third try that week I had the clock thing
under control. I was very careful to turn the ringer on and to make sure that
it was set to 3:30 A.M. and, Boruch Hashem, the alarm went off at 3:30 A.M. exactly
as I had planned it with only one caveat.
I didn’t hear it.
I’m quite sure that I’m not the first person in this
world to make such mistakes nor will I be the last. But I’m not just another guy from the shuk. I’m the guy who laid out this very scenario almost
three years ago in EmunahSpeak:
So Who are You Relying on… where I pointed out that we
foolishly rely on our cars to start when we turn the key in the ignition.
We rely on that same car to go when we press down on the gas pedal and to stop
when we do likewise to the brake. We rely on our fridge to keep our food
fresh and the mailman to deliver the mail every day. We rely on the
government to deposit our Social Security checks directly into our bank
accounts on the third of the month. We rely on El Al to get us safely to
Israel. And we expect Hatzalah to show up within two minutes of our call,
if not sooner.
All of this reveals that the lives that
most of us live could be characterized, at their core, as lives of misplaced
reliance on machines that break, people that are unreliable, on events over
which we have no control and a Weatherman that is right less than fifty
per-cent of the time.
I
also referenced foolishly relying on crock pots to keep the cholent warm and in
another place I did the same vis รก vis coffee pots.
And
I wasn’t just talking the talk. For the past three years I have
been making a concerted effort to keep in mind that Hashem is taking care of
all of the things that I mentioned in EmunahSpeak:
So Who are You Relying on…
Unfortunately, my alarm clock wasn't one of them.
