I sit here mulling over the new results of my latest PET Scan (Positron Emission Tomography), a nuclear medicine imaging technique which produces a three-dimensional image or picture (in color) of my innards and of latest ‘actions’ of the ‘bad buggars’that have invaded me (as I live through quite a serious case of cancer).
The interesting thing I am noticing in my ‘mind/body’ reactions is that I am pretty calm and thinking of both the GPS and Sukkot.
The GPS (Global Positioning System) was developed in 1973 and is a satellite-based navigation system made up of a network of 24 satellites placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS was originally intended for military applications, but in the 1980s, the government made the system available for civilian use. GPS works in any weather conditions, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. There are no subscription fees or setup charges to use GPS but you need some kind of gizmo to get it to work. Its commercial iteration is available for purchase for cars or even to walk around and find an address when you are lost.
It takes ‘your’position and searches for the address you load into it and gives you visual or oral guided directions to get there.
I can’t seem to find the author (it may be ChaCha) of these lyrics to the GPS song on Google but I am quoting them:
“I’m driving down a road that I don’t know. I need some help along the way. I can’t see the street signs. Which way do I turn Then I hear a familiar voice say: “Recalculating”.Where am I and how do I find my way out? Make a U Turn! At the very next intersection”(ChaCha)
At the same time as these lyrics are bouncing around my head, I am thinking of Bnai Yisrael not long out of Egypt walking with the help of Clouds of Honor (Ananai HaKavod) directing them and protecting them. It is only generations later when they arrive in Israel (according to the Rambam, Maimonides) that they are told that now that they are ‘HOME’ they have to leave their houses and move into a temporary booth (Sukka) for the week of Tabernacles, Sukkot!
My mind wanders and wonders what Hashem was trying to teach us and alights on kind of weird idea. This idea being that here is an important lesson to keep our internal GPS in tune with our surroundings. There is no better way to appreciate and re-think about where we are and where we are going, if not to step back from a place of comfort, in this case our home, and move out to a temporary dwelling.
I am frequently asked how I’ve managed to keep a (somewhat) even keel during this turbulent period of my life, I say the GPS helps me. This is usually received with a somewhat odd look (funnily enough I am used to my patients and colleagues looking and my responses with these odd looks). I will explain with a personal story.
When the GPS in cars first came out my husband and I had just rented a car at LAX (Los Angeles) and as an introduction Hertz, or the GPS company, provided one such gizmo free of charge firmly lodged in the car. I sat in the parking lot reading the instructions as my husband loaded our luggage into the car. By the time he came into the car I asked him if he wanted a woman’s voice giving directions or a man’s voice.
This turned into a psychological discussion about dealing with authority figures in an area where one feels super qualified. He finally decided, with a twinkle in his eye, a woman as he was used to taking ‘orders’from a woman. “Oh”, I said with a twinkle in my eye, “for example your mother”. In any case the ‘gender’ of the voice was easily changeable if he thought differently about it as we drove to our destination.
I should add that we had lived in Los Angeles for over three years and been back many times a year since we left, so we knew short-cuts.
We began on our way hearing the not-unpleasant female voice saying ‘take a right’ and left and so forth. There was a place where we didn’t listen as we knew a short-cut. ‘She’(the voice on the GPS) began to get somewhat hysterical telling us to “make a right NOW!!” We didn’t and there was a moment of silence and then ‘she’ said: “Re-calculating”, and began to give directions from our ‘new’location.
This became an epiphanous (‘ah ha’) moment for me. The idea of being on a path and seemingly knowing the way you are going and then having to change as your surroundings threw you a ‘curve-ball’ as it was, became a watch-word for me in my working with patients and with my own ‘relationship’ with my disease.
I must add that I ‘altered’ the word ‘Recalculating’ to ‘Recalibrating’ for the simple reason that although I took years upon years of math in university, I never felt that it ‘spoke’ to me. (My husband and children, math wizzes all, used to speak of an ‘elegant math problem’, a concept that still eludes me!)
And so as I ponder the new PET scan data before me I think about our fore-fathers, mothers and cousins the very first Olim to Israel, celebrating in their first Sukkot not long after they finally thought they had arrived at a place that was going to be comfortable, familiar and home. They had to Recalibrate, as we do every year, and maybe those of us who have life changes AND celebrate Sukkot do more often.
May Hashem grant us all a wonderful and healthy year with clear paths for our personal GPS to follow when one or more roads are blocked.
G’Mar Tov
Dr Judi Guedalia