Now this is davening, Dave Geiss was thinking, as he started Shemoneh Esrei bracha #10, M'Kabeitz Nidchei Amo Yisrael. My kavanna was really pretty good there in that last bracha, Bareich Aleinu, I must admit. Yes, pretty good indeed.
Then he was in bracha #11, Melech Oheiv Tzedakah u'Mishpat, thinking: Yes, Mevarech haShanim. Pleading for rain for the crops of Eretz Yisrael, but at the same time having in mind my own livelihood and the livelihoods of all the Jews in the community. I think I touched all the main points.
In v'Lamalshinim: And when I refer to the Jews in the community, I even include those people who are thinking I'm kind of strange, since I've been putting more focus on my davening. I'm growing used to it, but does it still bother me? I'd say so.
In Al haTzadikim: I mean, I'm trying not to hold anything against those people, but I'm not a malach. At least, if I do find myself thinking negatively of them, and if I happen to remember during Krias Shema Al haMita, then I usually drop any grudges against them in that first paragraph we say over there.
In Bonei Yerushalayim: But even when I forget to do it there, I can get to it on one of the nexI few nights, or, worst case, the next gilgul, right? Although, I'm still in the dark about this gilgul thing.
In Matzmiach Keren Yeshua: I heard in a shiur that all of us at this point are recycled gilgulim, or something like that, here to rectify certain things we got wrong in previous lives.
In Shema Koleinu: I don't know about that; with all the stuff I've been doing wrong my whole life, I'm probably setting my gilgul back more than when he got here in the first place. I hope I'm not around when my gilgul gets the final results of this go-around – or wait, maybe I have to be ...?
In Retzei: Kav of bones! How'd I get here already? What happened to Shema Koleinu? To Bonei Yerushalayim? Noooo!
Dave had taken it as a given that if he would just slow down his davening pace, educate himself on the tefillos, and recognize what is at stake, then the kavanna would come along automatically, or at least without a whole lot of work. But that was a terribly naïve assumption. Rather, his kavanna was probably blown almost as frequently now as it was before, only he was in more pain about it.
Stopping before Modim to collect himself, Dave gazed out the window. That was a piece of advice he had read about somewhere. When davening, keep your head down, except ... if you needed a bit of inspiration to restore your focus, look up towards the sky, towards shamayim. Pause, breathe. “Modim anachnu loch...” he whispered softly.
That spurt of kavanna lasted maybe for eight or nine words before giving rise to consideration of the sky. There is not a cloud in the sky today -- nothing but blue. Why is the sky blue, anyway? Once I read about it, but now I forgot. Something to do with reflecting all the water on earth, maybe?
In Sim Shalom: That would make sense, since it's called shamayim, which is mayim with a shin in front. Mayim's water, and water is symbolic of Torah. What does the shin symbolize, then? I don't know. Wait, go back to the Torah symbology.
In Elokai N'tzor: Torah has taryag mitzvos, which the tzitzis remind you of, and the tzitzis should have a strand of techeiles, which is the color of the sky. There's a Rashi somewhere like that, if I'm not mistaken. So maybe I should start wearing techeiles on my tallis, like that guy over there. I better ask Rabbi Zinfin first, though. Suddenly Dave's feet took three steps backwards, which took him by surprise. What, already? What happened? And hey, they're saying the Kaddish after Tachanun!
Two big kavanna busts. Double pain. Of course, by the time he would get to work, most likely he would have forgot all about the pain. And that was another pain point. Whether that added up to a pain multiplier of 2, 3, or perhaps 1 was not a trivial calculation.
Dave was still sitting there, long after almost everybody had put away their tallis and tefillin, running through his kavanna pain math. The casual observer would simply see a fellow staring straight ahead, a glum expression on his face.
“Done in again?” asked Baruch Shplitz, one such casual observer who had just had a bite to eat downstairs.
“Yep,” Dave confirmed, not even turning to look at Baruch.
“What was it this time?”
“Got a little full of myself. Then it was the blue sky.”
“Blue sky? Sounds like a song I've heard somewhere before. 'Blue skies are all around us, put on a glum face!' Hmmm." Baruch fell silent, except for a few clucking sounds, as he thought this over. "That doesn't sound quite the way I remember it.”
“I was trying to follow the eitza to look at the sky to regain my kavanna, but instead it led to another thought train that didn't stop until Oseh Shalom Bim'romov. I mean, there were some good ideas in there, but it wasn't davening.”
“Interesting it should be 'blue sky' this time.” Taking the seat next to Dave, Baruch continued. “Dave, it occurs to me that you are taking too much of a 'blue sky' approach to davening.”
He turned his face to Baruch. “How do you mean?”
“It's business-speak for when everybody gets together to try to solve a problem, and they leave out all the factors which would stop their plan from working. Nice but impractical.”
“Oh yeah, right, I've heard them use that term at work before.”
Baruch continued. “That's like your approach to davening. It's impossible, at least for us ordinary folk, to do everything it says in the books on prayer. So the way I see it, if you make any improvement in your davening, you should be satisfied. Instead, you're looking at what you haven't done, and are down in the dumps about it. I'm sure your davening's been on an uptick, to use another popular business-speak term, since you started really getting into it. Am I right?”
“Well, yeah, I hope so.”
“So there you go. Don't be so hard on yourself. Give yourself a pat on the back – you deserve it. Your davening is just fine.”
“Time check,” said a voice that sounded like Dave's, almost.
“Um, hold on,” said Baruch, pulling out his cell phone. “It's around quarter to eight. Why do you ask?”
“I didn't ask,” Dave replied.
“Sure you did.”
“I really don't think I -- wait, I know what it is. My PDA!”
“Your what?”
“My personal digital assistant.” Dave took the device out of his pocket. “I mean this.”
Baruch gasped. “Those things still exist? The rumors are true?”
“Indeed they are. But please don't tell anybody.”
Something seemed fishy to Baruch. “So why was your PDA asking for the time? Isn't there a clock built into it?”
“That was something else. It was a little program I coded up to say 'Time check' at random times.”
“Oh, right. I can see how that can be very useful.”
“It is! You know what this program is called?”
“My guess is, 'Time Check'.”
“No, sorry, incorrect. It is called 'Yetzer Harald'.”
Baruch shut his eyes in concentration for a few seconds, then shook his head. “You'll forgive me if I don't see the connection between name and function. Or does it do other things you haven't told me about yet?”
“No, that's pretty much all it does. It's not so much the program itself, it's how you make use of it.”
“Well, don't keep me in the dark. How do you make use of it?”
“What I'm supposed to do when I hear it go off is to ask myself, 'Is what I'm doing now being driven by the yetzer hara?'”
“That's supposed to make you think about the yetzer hara? I don't see the connection. I'd have thought it would say, 'Now where's the yetzer hara at?'”
“One, that's not correct English. You wouldn't end that sentence with 'at'.”
“Yes you would.”
“No you wouldn't, trust me. And two, you don't take the yetzer hara head on, is what I'm told.”
“OK, I'll give you point number two, but I still take issue with point number one. But whatever, it's an interesting question to ask.”
“Yes. We really don't want the yetzer hara to be in the driver's seat, but it's just so easy to let your guard down, especially today. So many distractions. We don't even realize it's happening, and then, blam!, we're doing all sorts of stuff that doesn't help us be better Bnei Torah, you know what I mean?”
“Tell me about it.”
“So I was thinking, if there was something that could get me to stop for a second and think about what the yetzer hara was up to, maybe I'd have a fighting chance against it. Maybe even train myself to recognize at the outset when the yetzer hara was starting to assert itself. Anyway, that's how the theory goes. Whether it works or not is another question.”
“Now that you describe it, I think I heard of a product that does something like what you describe.”
“Yes, I checked into it, but that one costs a bit, whereas mine's free. I can also make mine go off at random intervals drawn from all sorts of probability distributions. I was concerned that, for me personally, I'd learn to anticipate it if it would go off at fixed intervals. That predictability could be leveraged by the yetzer hara. I like using, in particular, an exponential distribution, resulting in a Poisson process which – oops, sorry for the technobabble. Suffice to say that the next time it goes off is totally unpredictable.”
“Totally?”
“Yes, totally.”
“You mean, it could go off during davening?”
“OK, you've got me there, I had to tweak it so that that wouldn't happen. Although that's an idea. Maybe if this thing had a vibrate mode... But it doesn't.”
“Well, whatever it is, equal, expidential, I don't think it would help me out. I'd be ignoring it soon enough.”
“Yeah, that's one possibility with this sort of thing. At the other extreme, you'd be taking the time checks so seriously that you would end up in a situation where all you're doing all day is obsessing about the yetzer hara. That's known as 'yetzer haralysis'.”
“I have trouble believing that that ever happens.”
“You're right. It's theoretical at this point. Achieved thus far only in the laboratory, with rodents. I'm probably more likely to end up where you say, ignoring it. But I'm not there yet. This is the first time it has gone off, so accordingly, I'm supposed to think about whether the yetzer hara was active or not at the time. Now, where were we?”
“Talking about your hard-line davening attitude.”
“That I should lighten up... yes, I was starting to think, 'Maybe I am driving myself too hard here, and that it's OK to coast now and then.' Hey, you know who wants that? The yetzer hara! Well posul my eidus, this thing really works!”
“Oh, come on. Are you going to blame everything in life on the yetzer hara?”
“I don't know. But this one certainly smells like its doing. The last thing the yetzer hara wants to see is good davening. According to my recollection, the Vilna Gaon says that's how you know how much is at stake here – the yetzer hara is working so hard to keep you from davening with kavanna. That's for real - Just look at how much trouble I have in concentrating.”
“There you go again.”
Dave jumped to his feet. “Right, I am going, and I'm going to keep going. Because I'm not stopping. If I stop, I am a sitting duck for the yetzer hara.”
Baruch stood up as well. “So go! But with all the work you are putting into this, don't be surprised if you hit your limit in the not-too-distant future.”
“Maybe the business world has limits. But you know what? The Torah world is different. And you know why? Because H-shem can remove the limits!”
Clutching his chest, Baruch staggered backwards. “Aaaah, you got me there!”
“And if there's any possible way to get H-shem to remove the limits, I'm sure davening plays a big role in it. Not b'di'eved, fullfill-the-chiyuv davening. It's gonna take l'chatichila davening. Blue sky davening. I want, I need blue sky davening!”
“Hey, that Harald thing does work. Blue sky davening. Maybe we all want it, but we just don't know it.”
“Yeah, it's scary.” Dave leaned against the wall. “Whew, I'm wiped out. I could go for a chocolate frosted donut and a cup of coffee.”
Baruch's reply to this was, “Time check.”
