HaMotzei Smartphone Min HaChashmal 

When it comes to making fruits and vegetables, God does all the work:  

• He provides sunlight.  
• He provides rain.  
• He provides soil where a seed the size of a fingernail can sit in the dirt for three months and become a 10-foot-high sunflower that produces over 2,000 seeds.  

Lebron James grew only 7 feet high, and he needed 18 years!

When we eat strawberries, we take what Hashem makes right off the plant and eat it. We recite, Blessed are You Hashem, our God, Who Creates the fruit of the ground.  We call Hashem the Creator because He does 100% of the work.  

Bread is a different story.  

Man plants the seeds. Man works the land. Man harvests the wheat stalks. He separates the wheat berries from the stalks and then removes the shell to extract the kernel. He grounds the kernels into flour. He waters the flour, mixes it, and after all his work, man bakes bread.  

Hashem provides the sun. He showers water on the field. His soil creates a field of dreams where a single wheat kernel produces a stalk with over 40 wheat kernels. 

Hashem positions the sun 93 million miles from the Earth. He sets it in a perfect orbit where the wheat won’t burn or freeze. He sends the rain at the exact time and creates the wheat stalk in such a way that the water runs down the sides of the stalk, directly into the center, so the wheat inside can grow.  

The total input Hashem puts into a slice of bread is over 99%. The total input man contributes is less than 1%. We bless Hashem for bread by saying, Blessed are You Hashem, our God, King of the universe, Who brings out bread from the ground.  

It’s a reminder that despite Him doing virtually everything, He blesses us as His partners in baking bread. Blessing the toil of our hard work is an exercise of humility and appreciation.  

The Same with Technology 

We love to marvel at our modern creations.  

Before the modern era, fortune seekers from New York needed six months to travel to California by horse and carriage. Man created the airplane. Now the same journey takes six hours.  

 

Before the modern era, sending a message from New York to California took 45 days. Now, you can send a text message that will arrive in 45 milliseconds.  

 

Before the modern era, in 1860, human life expectancy was 39 years. Today, it’s over 79.  

Our scientific and technological creations have improved Hashem’s world. It also spawned a dangerous era in which we feel like gods, like we can extend our “dominion” over science and technology to the territory of right and wrong.  

We can summarize the claim of secular modernism in five words: “We know better than God.”  

The claim is as valid as saying “We produce our own bread.”  

The truth is that our contribution to science and technology in relation to Hashem’s is the same as our contribution to baking bread.  

The Godly Origin of High-Tech 

All modern technology runs on electricity.  

Electricity to a machine is like air to a person: Deprive a man of air, he is dead in three minutes. Deprive a car, smartphone, or AI powered cloud server farm electricity, and it’s dead in three seconds.  

Air comes from Hashem. He created Adam, the first man, by breathing air into him. Our souls are called neshamot, entities that exist by breathing His air.  

Electricity also comes from God. Electricity was never invented. It was discovered. Hashem created the basics for electricity on the first day of creation, and man in his “superior” intellect – needed over 5,600 years to figure it out. 

Electricity per se isn’t created. It is generated when electrons, circling the nucleus of an atom, break free of their orbit and move to another atom.  

Just like wheat cannot grow without God’s perfect placement of the sun from the earth, technology cannot develop (or exist) without God’s perfect creation of sub-atomic particles moving from one nucleus to another, induced by a magnetic field which He creates that pushes them along. 

Technology, like bread, is a partnership with the Divine. Hashem does more than 99% of the work, and we do less than 1%.  

Just don’t tell a software developer.  

Where is the Blessing? 

The blessing hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz is the constant reminder that no matter how much we create, alongside God’s contribution, it rounds off to zero.  

It’s not a stop sign towards extending God’s world – it’s a guardrail.  

The blessing is a compassionate reminder that for every major step we take forward, we must remember Whom we are taking it with, and how much He is helping us.  

It begs the question: If we have a blessing for bread, where is the blessing on technology? 

What bracha can we recite to humble ourselves every time we turn on a Smartphone, a laptop, or a self-driving automobile? 

How can we work to resist the inherent arrogance of feeling that, since we created the world that we live in, we can dictate its morals?   

What blessing can we say over and over again, as many times as we check our email, that burns inside our neshama that we are not the creators of anything, merely junior partners at best? 

To the Rabbis of our generation: Help! 

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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.