Adath Jeshurun

The Google Box

Rosh Hashanah 5771

Rabbi Laura Metzger

It was one of those car con­ver­sa­tions. My daugh­ter, Nata­nia, was telling me her pet peeves. I was laugh­ing and telling her she could make it into a stand up com­edy rou­tine or a blog post because it was not only enter­tain­ing, it was provoca­tive. So she wrote it for me and gave me per­mis­sion to share it with you. Here’s what she wrote:

You know what I really hate? That lit­tle Google box on the top of the com­puter screen. Sure, it saves you time to type your search in there, but is it that much harder to type in google.com?

So say I’m search­ing toma­toes. But I type it in wrong and end up search­ing yoma­toes. At the top of the screen it will say “did you mean: toma­toes?”. Well of course I meant toma­toes so I click on the word and then pro­ceed to find what­ever I need to know about tomatoes.

Okay so I’m done with Google right? Now maybe I want to go check my Face­book. I log in, and that lit­tle Google box is still sit­ting there on the top of the screen with yoma­toes still in it. That box fol­lows me every­where, remind­ing me of the stu­pid spelling error I made. It never goes away! Sure later I’ll get off the com­puter and yoma­toes will go away, but I’m bound to make another mis­take again later, and that, too, will show up in the Google box, fol­low­ing me, and taunt­ing me with my mistakes.

One day in sci­ence class, toward the end of the year, we went around the room telling our pet peeves. When my turn came, of course I said I hated that Google box! Every­one laughed, and then my sci­ence teacher, being the expert with com­put­ers that he was, said, “Nata­nia, you know you can remove that box, right?”

Now before we remove that search box, let’s look at what is so irri­tat­ing about it. That search box at the top of the com­puter screen helps us find what we’re look­ing for, after all. But it also replays typos end­lessly, right up there at the top of the screen. Now you might think that see­ing our mis­takes would prod us to do bet­ter next time. But, at least in this case, it doesn’t. It doesn’t make us type any bet­ter and it doesn’t make our searches any more focused. It’s just pretty irritating.

It’s like a nag­ging par­ent — annoy­ing and, after the first reminder, not help­ful. Once we’ve got­ten the mes­sage, we’ve got it, we don’t need it in our face again and again. We want to ignore it or delete it. Nag­ging doesn’t work. For par­ents or for Google.

There’s a lot of advice out there on nag­ging. Most of it is aimed at par­ents and wives who nag. It’s called How Not to Nag and things like that. Some of it is use­ful. Like: Be clear and rea­son­able. Set expec­ta­tions and con­se­quences. Be patient. Good advice, all of that.

There’s much less on how to pre­vent the nag­ging in the first place, though I did find one arti­cle aimed at teens. It said, pretty much, if you do it first, then they won’t nag. Duh.

But most of us don’t do every­thing right and right away and with­out flaw. If we did, we wouldn’t even need the words “I’m sorry”. Most of us do make mis­takes and it’s not such a bad thing to be reminded. We don’t like to hear it, but we do make mis­takes. That’s why we’re equipped with our very own inter­nal nag­ging voice. We can call it “con­science”. Yes, that use­ful, if painful, human adap­ta­tion to liv­ing with oth­ers. The dis­com­fort we feel when we’ve done some­thing wrong. Whether we call it super-ego or that still small voice that’s some­times too loud for com­fort (to quote both Sig­mund Freud and Bert Mur­ray), it’s our inter­nal warn­ing system.

So what hap­pens when we take Natania’s sci­ence teacher’s advice and apply it to the inter­nal search box? He said of the Google search box, You can delete it. And you can delete the Google box. I did it. I liked the clean look of the com­puter page. It was kind of zen. And I liked not see­ing my typos returned to me every time I opened my browser.

When I really dug into the info, though, (via a Google search, of course), here’s what I learned. The searches are all still there. [like the inner parental voice … nag nag nag.] What you’ve typed, cor­rectly or not, is still there. It might not pop up in front of your eyes, but it’s still there. You can delete your search his­tory, you can remove the search box from your tool­bar, you can empty your caches and expunge your trash. But your mis­takes are still there, some­where, in the machin­ery and in the net­work in the browser in cyberspace.

That’s like every mis­step we’ve ever made. We can for­get them, blot out the mem­ory, but they’re pre­served. In us, in our lives. In our mem­o­ries and in our very wiring. Some mis­takes we’ve tried to over­come, some we’ve made into bad habits. They’re all part of us. And part of the world.

In every ser­vice of these High Holy Days, we pray כתבינו בספר החיים inscribe us in the Book of Life. The image is of a heav­enly tome in which the deeds of all humankind are recorded along with God’s judg­ment. We might update that to celes­tial super com­puter. It’s all there, every step and mis­step, wait­ing to come flash­ing back at us from the top of the screen.

If we haven’t paid atten­tion all along, we’ve amassed quite a file of errors that, because we blocked them out, we haven’t done any­thing to ame­lio­rate. We’ve piled sin on sin and ignored them. We’ve filled our Cache of Life with error codes and they can’t be fully erased.

Now we can only cor­rect what we can cor­rect and try to avoid mak­ing the same and other errors. We can only learn and grow and go on. We call that teshu­vah.

Teshu­vah is turn­ing from our errors, not in avoid­ance, but in mov­ing for­ward. A sage said, the start of teshu­vah is turn­ing around. See the error, know it as an error. Face up to it. Try to repair what can be repaired. And then, don’t do it again.

Don’t do it again is the most pow­er­ful part of teshu­vah. It’s what makes us bet­ter peo­ple. To do that, to avoid sin­ning again and again, we have to make use of our con­science. Nag though it might be. We have to undelete, if we’ve deleted it. We have to pay atten­tion to it. The spir­i­tual search box, a.k.a. con­science, is our BFF (best friend forever).

So go ahead and delete or hide the search box on your com­puter if it both­ers you, but make sure you’re tuned in to the inner voice, notch it up, even. We need it. With its help, we can make fewer errors and make amends for the inevitable mis­step. Then next year at this time, when we clean out our caches, there won’t be quite so much botched code.

Shanah tovah.