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Sat-Nav wisdom I don’t possess a sat-nav but I’m sure that for many the satellite navigation system which is carried in the car and which guides us as to which road to follow, is a most useful piece of technology.
However, to those who are unfamiliar with them, they can, I’ve no doubt, even be terrifying. A passenger in a taxi late one night had his mouth open to tell the driver the way to his home when the computerised voice suddenly broke in, to advise the driver to take a completely different route. ‘Can I argue with that advice?’ asked the passenger. ‘I’m afraid not,’ answered the driver, ‘but at least I don’t get called an idiot if I disobey the instructions!’
The Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sachs, in a newspaper article, described the sat-nav as a tutor in hope. He imagines a driver protesting that he knows more than the machine does. He’s been driving for more than twenty years and knows the area like the back of his hand. Any local knows that you turn left here. However, wrote the rabbi, the computer’s response, if you disobey instructions, is an education of politeness. It goes quiet for a moment, as though reflecting on the greatness of human foolishness, and then says, quite simply, ‘Recalculating the route’. In a few seconds, it gives you a new route, based on how to get where you want to be from where you are now, ignoring the fact that you got there by disregarding the wisdom it first gave you!
This, concluded Rabbi Sachs, is one of life’s great lessons. If you know where you want to be, then no matter how many wrong turnings you have taken, there’s always a route from here to there, and he want on to say that this should always be a source of hope for us, no matter how lost we feel.
I suspect that at the back of the Rabbi’s mind was a verse from the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, which reads: ‘When you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying “This is the way; walk in it” ’.
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