Generous Gifts Funds Listings Summer Bulletin July 2010
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Rabbi's Message
A Meaningful Connection
A couple of weeks ago I fulfilled a life-long ambition: I passed the test to earn an amateur radio license. In the lingo of the initiated, I am now a “ham,” which is a pretty funny thing to be for someone who does what I do.
This ambition goes back well over forty years, to Troop 7 in Champaign, Illinois. Our scoutmaster was a serious ham enthusiast, with equipment filling his “shack” and a tall, tall antenna on top of his house. All the boys admired him and wanted to be like him, so of course we took his interest in radio seriously and made it our own.
Some of my friends got their licenses at an early age. This is pretty impressive given that there were no computer-based study programs at the time and, unlike today, you had to learn Morse code. I, alas, was not so enterprising. I don’t remember exactly why. I am sure learning the code was daunting and there was a lot of information to memorize, but I suspect the main reason was that those around me were really into the gadgetry —and no one is into gadgetry like a radio amateur. For me, however, the gadgetry had no particular attraction. I just wasn’t interested. Even today, it is only under duress that I carry a cell phone.
Yet my interest in amateur radio always stayed with me, and that had nothing to do with the electronics. It was all about the communication.
Early on, I fell in love with the image of the lone operator, up in his “shack” (what you call the place where your equipment sits, even if it is just a closet or a corner of your bedroom). I imagined him late at night, when propagation (radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere) is best, talking to people – strangers, but after a few minutes no longer so—halfway around the world.
On occasion I have sat in with others engaged in this process. It is hard to describe, but it is moving. To “connect” with another person, in whatever way, is always meaningful. To do so, however, with someone who is so far away, yet with whom you can engage in so intimate and substantive an act as conversation…how wonderful to learn about their life, their ways, their outlook on the world at large.
Yes, one can travel, but you can’t just walk up to someone on the street in a foreign city. And funnily enough, with all the powers of the Internet, amateur radio brings a different, closer kind of connection. And while one can certainly spend thousands of dollars on a fancy “rig” (to use another piece of jargon), a trip around the world via radio can still be had for a fraction of that.
So what prompted me to go back and get the license now? I am not sure. Part of it, surely, is that new computer programs make the studying a lot easier, and since the code requirements have been relaxed, I don’t have to worry any more about my dots and dashes.
But I suspect a key reason is that this last decade as a congregational rabbi has reinforced to me the value and the meaning of the individual connection. I like giving a well-received sermon to a large group as much as the next rabbi. But it is the individual conversations, whether taking place at a time of joy or a time of sadness, whether in the context of a counseling session or simply two people getting to know one another…it is the individual conversations that touch the most.
And so I look forward to more of them, and of a different kind, as my radio “career” progresses. I’ve achieved one level but need to achieve another, hopefully within the next couple of months, to be able to use the frequency bands that will take me where I want to go. And I will have local company along the way, as I have discovered that several Temple members are also hams. If they find themselves on the 30 meter band one evening and hear a voice identifying himself as KC2WJB…there’s a reason that voice sounds familiar!
But most of all, I look forward to meeting new people and learning about them. I look forward to going places I have never been and seeing life from a different perspective. Perhaps I am hoping for a lot, but in this way, I hope the world, or at least my world, will grow a little smaller.
