The lights in the shul glowed brightly that morning. But unbeknownst to most of the kehilla, there was an energy crisis going on in that room, and it hit full swing during the Shemoneh Esrei.
Dave suspected something was happening, something bad. Combination of heavy overcast, market dropping 6% the day before, Cudgelwielders eliminated from the NCL playoffs in round 1 for the third year in a row. Whose mind was on davening? Even Dave was slogging through. Barely qualified for minimum kavanna in Magen Avraham.
His perceptions were echoed by Feivel Murglewitz, in the Gawlapur (Gertie and Wilhelm Loghschmeer All-Purpose Room) after Shacharis. "Boy, I don't know what it was today. My davening was really poor."
"Mine too," admitted Dave. "Energy level way too low. The whole room felt that way to me. Like an energy crisis."
"Energy?" wondered Feivel. "Yeah, I guess you could call it that. But I don't normally associate energy with davening."
This struck Dave as peculiar. "What do you associate with davening, then?"
"Um, concentration, I guess."
"Well, that's certainly part of it." Ticking them off with his fingers, he continued. "But so are energy level, direction, signal-to-noise ratio, amplitude..."
Feivel shuddered. "Sounds like a laboratory or something."
"I wish it were, sometimes. Speaking of laboratories... Hey, Mal?"
Mal Nikanoff looked up from his Mishna Brura and bagel. "What?"
"How was your davening today?"
"It was a Mars."
"Mars?"
"Yeah. Cold and lifeless."
Turning back to Feivel, Dave said, "See? What was going on the Beis Medrash today? Where was the energy? We can't just let this happen!" He conducted a mental googling for courses of action, but came up empty. It was a time to seek help from other sources. "Mal, where can we get a lot of energy from?"
"If it were up to me, I'd say, um . . . the Large Hadron Collider."
Not an answer Dave would have thought of. "True, the Large Hadron Collider does have a lot of energy, doesn't it?"
"Thirteen, maybe fourteen trillion electron volts, or so they say their proton beams are running at."
Dave let out a low whistle.
Mal went on. "If we could siphon off, say, a billion electron volts, they wouldn't even notice. But imagine what kind of energy that would bring to our davening."
"Does someone want to clue me in on what's going on at the Large Hadron Collider?" asked Feivel. "And why they need so much energy?"
"It's for physics experiments involving smashing things together," Mal told him. "Basically, they get these two streams of subatomic particles moving at incredible speeds around this huge circle, 17 miles in circumference. The two streams are moving in opposite directions around the circle. When those streams collide, crazy things happen, and they try to record it all to analyze later."
Billions of electron volts, and they wouldn't even notice! The prospect was astounding to Dave. "What does a billion electron volts buy you, Mal? Could you provide a year’s worth of power to a moderate-sized American city, something like that?"
"I forget. Hold on, let me check." Mal pulled out his phone and started thumb-typing. "Well, it says that the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito is about a trillion electron volts. So no, I don’t think you’re going to be able to light up anything with a billion."
"What?" Dave’s kinetic energy started climbing, well past mosquito territory, getting into Africanized honey bee range. "Then why are we making a big deal out of a billion electron volts? Why, for that matter, did they spend who knows how many billions of dollars to generate the energy capacity of a dozen mosquitos?"
"Good question." More typing. "Oh, it goes by weight. If you multiplied the mosquito energy by the number of protons in a mosquito, and take a dozen of those, then it should add up to the Large Hadron Collider energy. We can do a back-of-the-envelope estimate. First, do you know how many protons there are in a mosquito?"
"No."
"I don’t, either, but it’s got to be a lot. Suppose -"
"Mal, don’t bother." Dave calmed down, although it was scientifically impossible to explain why. Perhaps it was a concept brewing, still just out of the range of consciousness, though. "Out of curiosity, Feiv, how many billions of electron volts do you feel surging through you as you daven?"
"I would barely light up the ohmmeter."
Mal shook his head. "No, ohmmeters are for measuring resistance. You probably meant the voltmeter or ammeter, or probably both together."
"Oh, right, that meter. The arrow would scarcely budge from zero. How about you, Dave?"
"Same, most days."
Feivel got excited. A billion electron volts still sounded good to him. "Sounds like we’ve got a plan. Where is this thing, by the way?"
"It's ... in Switzerland, isn't it, Mal?" said Dave.
"Near Geneva, yes."
"So how would we get some of that energy over here?" asked Feivel.
"Dave didn't ask me how we would get the energy over here. He just asked where we would get it from."
"Well that doesn't do us any good."
"Maybe you can't bring the energy here," said Dave slowly. Then, raising an eyebrow, he added, "But maybe you can bring the Collider."
"Where would we put it?" asked Mal. "I don't have the space. Did I happen to mention that it was 17 miles in circumference?"
"Figuratively, I meant. How can we apply the concept of the collider to davening?"
"You can't, safely," warned Feivel. "It would mean that two of us would have to run around the Beis Medrash in opposite directions and crash into each other, then the rest of us would listen to their tefillos they said right afterward. If they were still conscious."
"It can't be people crashing into each other. Remember, the LHC smashes subatomic particles together. So we'd have to smash together things with nearly no physical substance. Things like ... ideas."
"You want to accelerate an idea, then smash it into another idea?"
"Well, yeah."
"How do you do that?"
"I don't know. Mal, how would you do that?"
Mal's beard started to bristle, indicating his growing excitement. "OK. Suppose we want to smash two high-energy ideas into each other. The energy of the idea would be reflected by how excited you get about it. Smashing an idea would involve taking a different powerful idea that you're really excited about but that looks like it can't co-exist with the first idea, and seeing what happens to our heads if we insist that they both are valid."
"Well, let's give it a try. We need an idea." There was an empty paper plate on the table, which reminded Dave of a diagram from a report that his son Yanky had done in 5th grade. The report was on chick peas. "Um, how about, 'chick peas are good'?" That was the title of the report.
"What's that have to do with davening?" asked Feivel.
"Nothing, this is just a test. If it doesn't work, I don't want to subject davening to it." Dave scanned the Gawlapur to make sure there was enough space for what he was about to propose. "So I'll walk briskly around the room in the clockwise direction, coming up with ideas about why chick peas are good. Feiv, you walk counterclockwise, and do the same about why chick peas aren't good. Then when we meet, each of us will speak out our ideas intensely. Mal, you take notes on what happens. Everyone ready?"
"Ready!" said Feivel and Mal together.
"All right!" And they were off.
What was ran through Dave's mind was something like this: Chick peas are good. They're real good. I can't wait to have some chick peas. I hope there are some cans of them at home. You can make falafel out of them. But maybe not the ones in the can, they're too moist.
At this point the two of them were at opposite ends of the Gawlapur. Dave glanced at Feivel and noted the look of grim determination on his face. He knew he would have to raise the intensity of his ideas or watch his end of the collision fizzle out like a havdalah candle in mevushal wine.
Chick peas! Yeah! I wish I had some right here! But I don't. Maybe we don't have any cans at home either. I know, I'll stop at the supermarket on the way home and buy some cans of chick peas! Because they are that good!
They met.
"Chick peas are very good indeed!" said Dave.
"No they're not!" replied Feivel. "Most people would disagree with that!"
"Which people are you talking to?"
"I don't have to. It's a commonly known fact."
"If it is, it's based on assumptions and prejudices which are patently false! Because it can't be denied, chick peas are delicious and versatile!"
"In your dreams!"
Dave turned to Mal. "Are you writing all this down?"
"I got down the first four words, 'chick peas are very,' but then my pen ran out of ink."
Feivel sat down heavily. "I don't think this is working."
Some of the sheen had been rubbed off the concept, but Dave was not willing to give up that easily. "Let's not jump to conclusions. Think about it. Didn't it seem we were more energetic?"
"Well, yeah, but, what are we supposed to do? Circle around the Beis Midrash as we daven? I mean, even when it's not Succos?"
"I'm beginning to think that the circling part wasn't the ikkar. It was knowing that you were going to come at me with some pretty strong counters to my arguments that drove me to make my points irrefutable. So--"
"What do you mean, irrefutable? You were grasping at straws! You were about to keel over before you tried that delaying tactic, talking to Mal."
Now Dave's beard was bristling, too, but for reasons different from Mal's. "Oh I was, was I? Well why don't we just ask the scientific observer?" Dave turned to Mal. "What did you observe, Mal?"
"I'm allergic to chick peas, so I wasn't really paying attention once my pen ran out."
"I've never heard of a chick pea allergy."
"Really it’s fava beans. G6PD deficiency, you know. But it's easier for me to remember to avoid whatever makes up falafel balls, so I consider myself allergic to chick peas."
Dave's bristle bout began to subside. "So maybe I am overstating the case about chick peas. But if it were about davening, and I knew that some one or some thing was throwing all sorts of anti-davening ideas at me, I'd ..."
"Yes?" said Feivel. "You'd what, Dave?"
"I'd fight back. I mean, I really hope I would." He shook his head. "So how does that shtimm with low energy davening?"
"Maybe there are no anti-davening ideas being thrown at you," Feivel suggested.
"That would be one possibility. But ... it's not the reality. The Yetzer Hara is always throwing that stuff already, directly or indirectly. So it must be that sometimes I'm not cognizant that it's happening. Or ... I overestimate my will to fight back."
"Hey," said Mal, who had just finished writing down some equations reminiscent of Maxwell's. "Dave, you are overlooking the energy released from the collisions."
"What?"
"Yes, all you need to do is maintain cognizance. This will accelerate your ideas, which will increase the intensity of the collisions. When that happens, more energy is released, and you tap into that energy to boost your will to fight back. It's like a – oh wait, I got the sign on that term wrong." He began to erase furiously. "Ignore what I just said."
"Wait." Something didn't seem right to Dave. "Mal, didn't you just tell me that your pen ran out of ink?"
"It did." Presenting the writing instrument, he said, "This is a pencil."
"So then why couldn't you ... Never mind. It's not worth the energy to ... Hold on! Mal, I think you were onto something. Here we keep talking about energy, without really defining it. What is energy, Mal?"
"The scientific definition is, it is a measure of the ability to do work."
"What kind of work?" asked Feivel.
"Basically, pushing or pulling things. Changing their location or the direction they are moving in."
"So that's it!" exclaimed Dave. "Think of all the ideas that the Yetzer Hara throws at you to derail you while davening. 'I can't wait to finish this up.' 'I just keep saying the same words over and over again.' 'Here's an interesting thing to think about.' 'I have no idea what this means.'"
"'What am I going to have for breakfast?'" added Feivel.
"Yes, that's another big one. It doesn't seem like it, but these have to be high-powered ideas if they can knock you off the path of getting close to H-shem via davening. We've got to visualize those ideas, think of them as, I don't know, balls of high negative energy being hurled at us constantly as we try to maintain kavanna." It is presently unknown how much the earlier mention of falafel balls influenced this idea.
Feivel was dubious about the proposition. "Thinking about balls is supposed to improve our kavanna?"
"Maybe, if it gets us to respond, with ... with mental images of balls of positive energy that deflect the negative balls." Dave jotted this idea in the memo pad he carried around with him. "Really, it's just a tool. But part of fighting back is having the right weapons and knowing how to use them. I hope. At least, I think it's worth a try. And if it works, you know what that means, don't you?"
"Um, a Swiss vacation with chick peas for everybody?" suggested Feivel.
"Yeah — wait, what did you just say?"
"I said, a Swiss vacation with chick peas for everybody."
"Oh, sorry, I thought you said something else. No, that’s not it. It did sound like what I was thinking of, though."
"Well, then, how about this: Swiss cheese, and then six hours later, chicken?" offered Mal.
"Getting closer."
Feivel's second try was, "Shift less than six inches from the lighter to the charcoal?"
"Even closer yet."
Mal took the hint. "Shellfish that is indigent only rises when it darkens?"
"No, but you almost had it. What it means is, you can be self-sufficient energy-wise when you daven!"
