All were invited to a shul breakfast sponsored by Avrumie Vizovic, in commemoration of the yahrzeit of yet another deceased person whom Avrumie recently discovered he was related to. A convivial buzz permeated the Gawlapur (Gertrude and Wilhelm Loghshmeer All Purpose Room). Avrumie himself was called away at the last second by a business deal not to be passed up, but he was thought of fondly by the other attendees as they dined on warm bagels and cold cereal.
The temperature of Dave Geiss's own bagel was swiftly cooling towards the melting point of butter. It was a time for action. “Hey, Rod, would you please pass me that container of whipped creamery butter, pronto?”
“My pleasure,” Rod Miltar replied, delivering the requested item.
Relief washed over Dave as he pried off the lid. The surface of the butter was not like the smooth and well-groomed one that Mrs. Geiss enforced at home. This one presented a more interesting landscape, with mountains and valleys, ridges and dry riverbeds, outcroppings of boulders (those were the toast crumbs).
Unrestricted in where and how to extract the butter, Dave gleefully jabbed his plastic knife into a foothill and applied it to one of his toasted bagel halves. The job was not complete, so on his next foray, he extended a ravine and smeared. Then a couple more excavations, and the first slice was done.
He was about to do likewise for the other half, when his eye suddenly interpreted the bas relief of butter in quite a different way. It was no longer a landscape he saw. There, engraved into the butter, was the miniature, inverted image of the face of Dr. Chaim Potleck, principal of secular studies at Yeshiva Kol Torah Kulo! And even more alarming yet, Dr. Potleck himself was seated at the next table!
It was at times like these that Dave most keenly felt the deprivation of not having attending a yeshiva. For if he had, he imagined, he would have been able to rattle off all halachas pertinent to graven images, and whether there was a issur d'Oraisa going on in the butter container. It was safest to assume that there was, at least until further information was collected, and he therefore began to sweat profusely. Mentally he scheduled some serious Cheshbon haNefesh sessions at the next opportunity, to see whether he could fathom why H-shem had brought this to his hand.
The sudden change of Dave's skin hue had caught Rod's attention. “What's wrong, Dave?” he asked. “Toast crumbs getting to you, are they?”
The question penetrated Dave's consciousness, taking a bit of the edge off his panic. Maybe I'm not really seeing what I think I'm seeing, he thought. The obvious course was to get a second opinion. He tipped the mouth of the container in Rod's direction. “Here, Rod. What does this look like to you?”
“Eh what, there's not a speck of mold on those toast crumbs.”
“No, I mean what does the butter look like to you?”
Rod took another look. “It's just butter, isn't it? I mean, it's the right color and all.”
“Yes, it's butter, but it's in the shape of something. Can't you see it? Can't you see a face in there? Or am I seeing things?”
Rod took another look. “I don't know, Dave, maybe you've been davening too hard. Or are you back on coffee?”
“Wait, you're looking at it upside down. Here.” He turned the container 180 degrees. “Now do you see it?”
After rubbing his eyes for good measure, Rod took a second look. “Honestly, Dave, I can't see a face in there.”
The exchange between Dave and Rod had stirred the interest of Baruch Shplitz. He approached the two and said, “What is it with you guys and the – my goodness, if it isn't the inverted face of Dr. Pot--”
Dave's finger went to his lips in a split second. “Sssh!!” he whispered feverishly. “He's sitting over there!” And Dave had his confimation.
Squinting, Rod was giving the butter another look. “I still don't – oh, wait, if that's his left eye, and that over there's the scar on his forehead, so that this here is the other eye, the one with the monocle in it, then... no, I still don't see it.”
“Funny,” remarked Baruch, “Dave and I do, and you don't. Isn't there a scientific term for the ability to perceive inverted images in dairy products? Contralactovoyant, or something like that?”
“What I want to know is, is this assur?” asked Dave. “Does it count as a graven image?”
Already struggling with his visual processing, this possibility vexed Rod all the more so. “Are you suggesting that someone did this intentionally? It's not just all us dipping our knives in there, and out comes whatever it is you're looking at?”
Dave's breathing was labored, coming in short, irregular bursts. “It wasn't intentional!”
“You did this?” asked Baruch.
“Well, I was the last one to use the butter,” Dave replied.
One bracha and two potato chips later, Baruch said in a thoughtful way, “Hmmm, could be a shaila. I haven't learned that sugya recently.” The cup of orange juice was in his other hand, and he took a sip. “But if you are to be believed that you did this b'shogeig, at worst you're on the hook for a korban when the Beis haMikdash is rebuilt, bim'heira biyameinu. Say, do you have that smartphone app where you can keep track of your future korban liabilities?”
“I do not, because I don't have a smartphone to put it on.”
“Too bad. I kept losing the notebooks I was tracking them on. That's not a problem anymore. Now the problem is, where do I put all the livestock?”
Dave's panic had subsided somewhat, but only for about five seconds, at which point Dr. Potleck called over from the other table, “Gentlemen, would you please send the butter down this way?”
The three of them – Dave, Baruch, and Rod – froze.
“I say, I would like some butter. Our table is stocked with cream cheese, but no butter.”
“I-I'll pass it right over,” stammered Dave. “Er, I was just about to take some more.”
“You've had it there a good long while now. Do finish up and send it in this direction without further delay.”
“What do we do now?” asked Dave with hushed voice.
“Just give it to him. You really think he'll notice?” asked Baruch.
Rod said, “Well, wouldn't that depend on if he's contralactovoyant or not?”
“How do we find out?” Dave wondered.
“Some sort of test is what we need,” said Baruch.
“A blood test?” asked Rod.
“No,” replied Baruch, “I think you just need to get a swab of the inside of his cheek. Who has Q-Tips?”
Dr. Potleck called, “Really now, this is most unfair. I am coming to get it myself.”
“Quick, we need to think of something!” Dave gasped. “And we can't let on anything's amiss! He'll be here in seven seconds!”
“Gestures only!” whispered Rod. They nodded in assent.
Baruch had an idea. He rolled his right hand into a fist and made dipping and twisting motions. Dave, not catching on, pointed to the side of his head and wobbled his hand a little. Rod wrapped a paper napkin around his index finger, stuck it into his cheek, and produced an interesting popping sound, which he repeated several times. In response, Dave held his hands up and shook them back and forth.
Dr. Potleck was four seconds away.
Baruch continued with his gesture, but with thumb stuck out now, and the dips and twists even more accentuated. Then he opened his left hand, palm upwards, and brought his right hand down on it with a mighty slap.
Of course! Dave realized. Hastily he grabbed the plastic knife and prepared to scoop out some butter. But the knife caught in the depression representing Dr. Potleck's nose, and snapped in two. The blade lodged in the butter while the hilt flew out of Dave's hand. Baruch caught the hilt in mid-air, and Dave quickly plucked the blade out. The two of them, Dave and Baruch, simultaneously gouged out pats of butter from different parts of the image. Each hastily spread his pat on the unbuttered half of Dave's bagel.
Dave managed a final glance at the butter in the tub just as Dr. Potleck's hand reached it. The image of the face of Dr. Potleck had been transformed. But was the transformation signficant enough? To Dave, it kind of looked like someone different; then again, it kind of looked like Dr. Potleck with a bad headache while blowing a bubble with bubble gum.
Indignantly, Dr. Potleck picked up the container, spun around, and headed back to his seat, Then he stopped in mid-stride, staring at the butter, studying it. Finally he said, “It's uncanny! Absolutely uncanny! I see ... I see ...“ -- and here he paused, staring and thinking.
The hearts of Dave, Baruch, and Rod beat frantically in their throats.
“... the face of Arnold J. Carmichael, proprietor of the Green Pool Motel, where my family and I stayed during summer vacation when I was eight years old!”
The three sank into a deep silence that lasted for the better part of a minute, during which they tried to regain normal breathing patterns. Baruch was first to recover, and said, “I've got indigestion. I'm taking off before the next stressful incident. Besides, I think I may have cut myself on that plastic knife.” And off he went.
Baruch's departure left Rod alone with Dave. He said, “You know, my not being contralactovoyant could explain a lot.”
“About what?” asked Dave.
“About the problems I'm having with my davening. Like I'm seeing little bits here and there, but I'm not getting the whole picture. The words start looking all the same to me. Maybe lack of the contralactovoyant gene is linked to a missing or defective, eh, contratefillavoyant gene, do you think?”
“Rod, I've got news for you. A lot of us contralactovoyant folks are in the same boat.”
“Well, that's disappointing. I thought I had a dead-on diagnosis there and was on my way to a cure that just involved a little genetic engineering.”
Dave looked at the spot on the table where the tub of butter had been. It gave him an idea. “Rod, do you remember what I did when you weren't seeing the face in the butter on the first attempt?”
“Eh, you turned it around. Didn't help all that much.”
“No, but we made the attempt to look at the butter in a different way, at a different angle. I guess that's a way to look at what I'm trying to do in my davening, when it starts getting stale.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, let's pick a bracha in the Shemonah Esrei that I often have trouble on – hashiva shofteinu.”
“Yeah, that's a good example.”
“Right. The restoration of judges, or of justice. So I was thinking, why don't I think of a halacha that doesn't get much respect these days -- something from Choshen Mishpat, say -- and feel its pain. Imagine that halacha, crying out that he's always ignored. But don't worry -- he's going to get restored to his rightful position when H-shem answers this tefilla. Now I've set up a kavanna for that bracha -- a show of solidarity with that halacha.”
“Well that's a different way of looking at it.”
“Yes. Or how about t'ka b'shofar gadol? Think about some family in, I don't know, Kazakhistan, that barely has a connection to Yiddishkeit. But they had a great-grandmother who davened, I mean really davened for her future generations. So watch me, now I'm trying to link up with her tefillos, maybe help give them that final push that does the trick. Based on what I've learned from magazines, that might be all it takes to trigger their teshuva. So my focus can be on davening for that event to happen.”
The sogginess of Rod's bran cereal did not deter him from popping a spoonful in his mouth. “You sure have some weird ideas about davening, Dave.”
“Given what happens to my davening when I play it too much by the book, I'll take weird.”
Adding the taste of Rod's soggy bran cereal as another factor caused him to rethink his decision. “Ecch. Well, even if I wanted to try one of these ideas, won't it take my attention away from the words I'm saying?”
“When you're saying the bracha, you should be thinking more directly about the meaning of the words. I figure, think about it before you say the bracha.”
“But that would mean I'm thinking about it during the previous bracha.”
“No it wouldn't. You finish the previous bracha, then contemplate one of these ideas about the next bracha for a few moments, then say that bracha.”
“Aha! I knew something was off with this. You don't get a few moments before a bracha to think about it.”
“Sure you could, if you want to.”
“Really? Not from what I've been observing.”
“Well you can. Don't let anybody say that you can't, or that it's not cool if you do, or whatever. You need to grab any advantage you can get when davening, and thinking about the davening is an advantage, let alone a downright requirement.“
“So you're saying you're doing this all the time? You must be getting straight A's in davening!”
“Halevai! Sometimes I remember to do it, and sometimes when I do it, it works. It's always a struggle for me. But I figure that, when davening stops becoming a struggle, that's when you need to start worrying.”
“Finally, something I don't need to worry about! Eh, this cereal is a mite past its prime. I'll take this bagel right here instead. Would you pass me that cream cheese over there, if you please?”
“Sure.” Dave grabbed the container and was about to give it to Rod, when he chanced to look into it. There, engraved into the cream cheese, he saw the inverted image of his own face.
