What Does Man Have in Common with a Toaster Oven?

Hashem reigns. Hashem has reigned. Hashem will reign. The Daily Siddur 

“Jake, we cannot eat that birthday cake on Shabbat.” 

“Why not, Dave? We aren’t exactly playing Happy Birthday on the electric guitar!” 

“According to the Code of Jewish Law, the Shulchan Aruch, erasing a letter is the same as writing a letter. Both are forbidden on Shabbat. If I cut into a cake with your brother’s name on it, I am breaking Shabbat. Whoever eats from that piece is benefiting from a Jew sinning against Shabbat.” 

“That’s fanatic. Will you stop with this primitive nonsense?” 

How many times have we heard this? It comes from non-religious leaders, cultural celebrities, members of our own community, and even our own evil inclination. 

Why do they use the word “primitive” to attack following Hashem’s law to the finest detail?  

The Modern World 

From the moment Hashem created the world to around 1880, the average life expectancy was 40 years. We rode horses. We communicated with one another via pony express, boats carried by the wind, and carrier pigeons.  

The world God gave us was miraculous.  

Since then, man has made improvements.  

Science in medicine doubled our lifespan. We replaced horses with man-made automobiles, planes, and electric-powered ships carrying thousands of people and tons of goods. The telephone reduced the time to contact someone from weeks to seconds.  

In every way, man has improved upon the physical world that God gave us. 

Today, our senses attack us from all ends saying, “If we are doing better than God now, why still cling to His ancient world where you couldn’t live to see your grandchildren?” 

That’s why the argument that equates “too much religion” with “primitive” is powerful and commonplace. 

Given the luxuries of life that we all enjoy from the revolution of the “achievements of man,” how do we rebuke the argument of the modernists and give God back His crown? 

What Man Has in Common with a Toaster Oven  

The modern world has something in common with every living creature: It depends on one thing.  

If any living being were to be deprived of oxygen for five minutes, it would cease to exist. For all our greatness, if we don’t receive air for 300 seconds, our brains stop functioning.  

It’s the same with every man-made achievement of the past 150 years.  

Every machine, from mobile devices to cloud-based server farms to generative AI applications, all run on electricity. Without a charged battery, a working outlet, or a solar panel, the most basic pocket calculator shuts down.  

Man is dependent on God for air. His man-made achievements survive on electricity.  

But where does electricity come from? 

One of God’s Divine Creations 

Man does not create electricity. He generates it. Electricity comes from the movement of sub-atomic particles from one nucleus to another.  

Let me explain that in English: 

We are all made up of trillions upon trillions of microscopic particles called atoms. An atom looks like our solar system. In the center are neutrons and protons. They ball up together like a sun to create the nucleus of the atom. Surrounding each nucleus are electrons that orbit the nucleus almost at the speed of light.  

What keeps the electrons in their orbit is the attraction between the positively charged protons inside the nucleus, and the negatively charged electrons circling it at nearly the speed of light. Sometimes, one electron will break away from the orbit of its atom and move to the orbit of another atom.  

This movement is electricity.  

Hashem created His world with legions of scientific realities. One of them is that when an electron, a subatomic particle, moves from one atom to another, electricity is created.  

Man cannot create this law of Divine creation. He can only discover it. For all our mastery, it took us 5,600 years to figure out what Hashem did on Day One of creation. Man can utilize Hashem’s laws of Divine creation to his betterment, but he cannot establish these laws or change them.  

God gives us electricity.  

God also gives us the raw materials we use to generate electricity: coal, oil, gas, sunshine, wind, water, steam, and magnetic forces.   

The same way we live on Hashem’s gift of oxygen, the machines that make up the modern world live on Hashem’s gift of electricity.  

Shabbat Shalom 

Shabbat is Hashem commanding us to cease work on His holy day.  

It’s a social statement. It’s a protest on behalf of right and wrong. It’s a modern-day demonstration against the arrogance of modernism.  

Some live lives according to the modern-day assumption that technology is everything and everywhere, and that the people who control it are gods who dictate what is good/bad and what is right/wrong. In contrast, we live our lives according to the Divine rule that technology, like everything else in our physical world, has its place among God’s creations. 

On Shabbat, we do not touch technology. We abandon it. We forget it. Its powerful reach cannot touch us. Our King is God. He reigned before the modern age. He reigns throughout the modern age. He will reign over the next generations of whatever else we develop – all within the world He creates. 

This is Shabbat. The celebration of Hashem creating man, the oxygen he breathes, and the electricity he thrives on.   

This is why we don’t cut into a birthday cake on Shabbat. We acknowledge that Hashem’s Torah is like oxygen or electricity: It was here before we were born, it will be here long after we are gone, and it’s something He makes that we cannot live without.  

*** 

David Ben Horin lives in the Jezreel Valley with his family, Afula’s famous sunflowers, and the local camel, Matilda. David loves to write about Judaism, Torah, Israel, and personal happiness.