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Angetevka: Remote Possibilities

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Having just left my chiropractor’s office, I unexpectedly pass my friend, Nancy, on the sidewalk and she asks me what I’m doing on the east side. I tell her I went to my chiropractor to work on my sinus condition. She asks me what he does to treat it. “Different stuff, but he has this massage thing which he uses on my lower back and my chest.”

Nancy lifts an eyebrow, smirks and says, “It sounds like the vibrator play.” When I look perplexed, she clarifies, “There’s a play on Broadway, In the Next Room that takes place in the late 1800s about this doctor who treated women’s hysteria using a vibrator.”

“For real?” I ask and she says, yes, for real. Apparently, this was not an uncommon medical practice because whatever ailed women was considered “hysteria” (from the Greek, hystera, uterus, which was considered to be the origin of all female ailments), and could thus be cured with “pelvic massage.” The vibrator, Nancy explains, was invented specifically for that purpose – by doctors who were tired of spending time manually massaging women to treat their hysteria. The play is, in part, about a doctor who takes his patients in the next room to “cure” them.

This reminds me of a joke a friend e-mailed me from Israel the day before, so while the pedestrians rush past us, I tell Nancy, “This couple goes to a marriage counselor, and the wife complains bitterly that her husband doesn’t pay attention to her, and she feels neglected and unloved, and after 20 minutes listening to the tirade, the shrink gets up, goes over to the woman, unbuttons her blouse, massages her breasts, kisses her passionately and says to the husband, ‘This is what your wife needs at least three times a week. Do you think you can do this?’ And the husband says, ‘Well, I can drop her off here on Monday and Wednesday, but on Friday, I play golf.’”

Nancy laughs, and we ask about each other’s families, and say our goodbyes, and then I’m back home where my laptop has finished downloading a program that might help me retrieve my son’s history paper that disappeared the night before. After I go online, I call my computer guy, Mendy, who is in Brooklyn. He asks for permission to take over the computer remotely, and I say yes. While I watch the screen, the cursor is flitting all over, clicking and opening various boxes, seemingly on its own. Of course, somewhere in Brooklyn Mendy is virtually inside my computer, with access to all of my personal documents. It feels slightly invasive, as if someone is trespassing on my territory, but it’s reassuring too that someone more clued in than I is just taking over and getting the job done. Technology makes me nervous at times, probably because I don’t truly understand it, and it changes faster than I can keep up and I’m uneasy about the capacity that technology has to spy on us, to slither into our space without our consent. Nonetheless, I’m not giving up my vacuum cleaner, and we’re all grateful that there are far fewer hysterical women around.

Mendy sighs now and says, “Nothing. I’m just not getting anything.” We’ve been working on finding the document since the morning, to absolutely no avail. Finally, I give up and I tell Mendy, that’s it, I’m not doing anything more. My son will have to re-write the paper.

I hang up and take over the screen myself and check my e-mails. My friend from Israel has forwarded me a YouTube link, a video featured on Fox News of a new military device that Israel is testing. It’s called a RoboSnake. The robot-like snake, controlled elsewhere by someone on a laptop, slithers and undulates, mimicking a real snake. It has an all-seeing eye which records video and sound, and can theoretically creep into enemy territory to gather information without being detected and without risking soldiers’ lives. (It occurs to me that a snake is so typically a People of the Book invention – why not a lizard?) Naturally, I’m reminded of Mendy remotely controlling my computer, and also of the vibrator doctor and the husband in the joke who were trying to figure out ways of getting the job done without performing any manual labor themselves.

Then, because I am who I am, and I always feel there’s a Divine link in the most mundane and seemingly unrelated events of the day, I think about remote control in terms of our relationship to God and the old free will versus fate debate. Is God somewhere out there, pulling our strings, determining our lives for us, and if not, does God have any power over us at all? This takes me back to the phallic RoboSnake and the Garden of Eden where Adam, in making a choice to eat the fruit despite being told not to, exercises his free will. God the all-seeing, all-hearing Eye doesn’t push Adam’s buttons, maneuver the cursor on behalf of Adam and force him to do God’s will. Rather, and it’s a bedrock of Judaism – we are all responsible for our own actions.

I do believe that it’s quite possible that in the remote vastness In the Next Room of the universe, our prayers, our actions, are being recorded remotely and are registering on someone else’s screen. I also believe that there are times when, unbidden, we might find our own screen taken over when we can’t do it out on our own. Because, you know, God isn’t actually so remote, and God always has access.