Who knows? Perhaps it can all be traced back to early sustained exposure to Shabbos afternoon Pirchei groups or some other long-forgotten traumatic experience. What I do know is that my mind is perpetually set on mashal-sensing mode and with no discernible way to reset it either. Everything I see and hear is at risk for being perceived in my mind as a rich juicy parable for some deep truth about life and Torah. It happens unthinkingly automatically and — these days — silently.

This is something you see that as the appliance warning labels put it “one should not attempt at home ” at least once the kids hit a certain age. I clearly recall one particular trip taking my youngest son back to yeshivah when I began to wax eloquent on a newly discovered lode of scintillating — I thought — insight: the innocent-looking GPS. I proceeded to mine this rather benign machine for its glaringly obvious moral implications oblivious to my son’s level of interest.

“Do you see how the GPS parallels Hashem’s Hashgachah allowing man to take the lead even if it means making mistakes along the road of life a perfect illustration of b’derech she’adam rotzeh leileich bah molichin oso? Hashem just recalculates using man’s own mistakes to get him to move toward what Hashem knows is best for him.” Silence from the next seat. “And wow what a great lesson in how to react to those who ignore us. We ask for its guidance and then when we do just the opposite it takes no offense reacting in a calm manner with just one word — ‘recalculating.’ What savlanus….” Prolonged silence.

Suffice it to say that I’ve since come to realize that what worked wonders so many decades ago in Pelham Parkway Pirchei as I sat spellbound by the Chofetz Chaim’s classic tales isn’t necessarily transferrable to other times and places. Maybe it’s a parent-kid thing. Maybe it’s that I’m not the Chofetz Chaim. Maybe GPSs and dogs and mailboxes — mailboxes?! — aren’t the stuff of meshalim. Or maybe it was something in the Mayim Chaim soda way back when.

Whatever the case while I may have largely lost my audience for now (although baruch Hashem there are now eineklach to enthrall) I’ve still got a captive audience for my mind’s mashalic meanderings: me. Case in point — this past Erev Shabbos I was standing on the bench on our front porch trying to figure out why our newly installed lantern wouldn’t illuminate despite my having activated the light switch.

Perplexed I looked around for the instruction manual. And then looking straight down I spied it snugly underfoot. I’d struck Mashal Gold! Forget about how to get the light on — here was an illustration of all of modern Jewish history: How Jews keep trying various ways to light up the world even as they unthinkingly trample upon the very Guide to that role.

Opening[YK1]  the manual I learned that this fixture contained something called a photocell making this fixture a dusk-to-dawn gizmo whose bulb springs to life only as darkness approaches. That sure solved my mystery. But more importantly is there a more perfect description of the light of Torah of which Yalkut Shimoni says on Koheles 2:9[YK2]  “Torah she’lamadti b’af hi she’amdah li ” — that the Torah’s greatest effect is during times of darkness and travail?

I could go on elaborating on the deeper meaning of the manual’s troubleshooting section with its ideas for what to do when the “light bulb will not illuminate” but happily for readers — those who haven’t already turned the page — I’ve run out of space….

Now what could be the message in that?

WATCH OUT FOR SELF-PROMOTION Writing in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal Benjamin Plotinsky shares his observations on the MTA’s subway ads:

New Yorkcommuters have long entertained themselves with the advertisements thoughtfully posted in subway cars for their amusement: [a dermatologist’s] promises the even grander promises of theSchoolofPractical Philosophy the competing offers of the chiropractors who will adjust your back and the trial lawyers who will sue them for you.

But since late 2010 the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) which operates the subways has treated straphangers to a series of ads that are altogether different. These ads tout the MTA itself. Their purpose is to tell you what a good job the MTA is doing a message that’s emphasized by the tagline at the bottom: “Improving non-stop.” Get it?

If you’re wondering why the MTA would give up so much ad revenue from paying advertisers to line subway cars with its own propaganda— er self-promotional campaign Mr. Plotinsky thinks he knows why:

The likely answer is that it desperately needs good publicity. The agency plans 7.5 percent fare hikes in 2013 2015 and 2017 even though it passed steep hikes less than two years ago…. The agency’s current ads implicitly assure you the exasperated commuter that you’re getting “improvements” for all this new money.

True that assurance flies in the face of what the MTA’s own director of government affairs Hilary Ring recently told the city council: that the upcoming fare hikes wouldn’t result in any service improvements. “So essentially the fare and toll increases it is almost dollar for dollar being eaten up by our increases in pension and retiree health-care costs ” Ring said.

But if you’re inclined to blame your rising fare on the transit workers well there’s an ad for that. Its headline admonishes you that “improvements don’t just happen” and its kicker administers the moral: “Our thanks to our fellow employees for their hard work. And solid results.”

The author allows that it “would be easy to dismiss the MTA’s ad campaign with a smile including its “[a]musing … attempt to imitate trendy Madison Avenue syntax. With incomplete sentences. And lots of periods.” But he also senses — as I did when I got my first look at a subway car plastered with these signs — that “there’s something disturbing about government-sponsored advertising.…”

Plotinsky notes that the MTA campaign is only the most egregious example of government — New York’s in particular — inserting itself into the private lives of its citizens and then mounting ad campaigns spending their money to tell them how wonderful this all is for them. As he puts it:

These days New Yorkers are increasingly bombarded with government-sponsored ads telling them to stop smoking stop drinking soda start [nursing] their babies and so forth. These ads are inappropriate uses of taxpayer dollars the work of a government that’s impudent enough to take people’s earnings for the express purpose of telling them how to improve themselves. But the MTA’s ads are even worse since their aim is to encourage you to approve of a government agency that’s misspending your money — chiefly on outsize benefits for retirees but also on self-promotion. It’s a vicious circle: citizens’ taxes and fares fund ads that encourage citizens to agree to still-higher taxes and fares.

This governmental overreach the product of a billionaire final-term mayor with a nanny-state experts-know-best worldview is relatively innocuous when its worst excesses are regulating trans fats and soda pop consumption. But it never ends there asNew York’s Orthodox community has begun to learn. In recent months two different city agencies have eschewed the traditional governmental approach of seeking accommodation and reasonable compromise with faith communities balancing the sensibilities and legitimate needs of the community with governmental responsibility for the public welfare.

Instead regarding reporting of abuse and the practice of metzitzah b’peh — each of which raises a distinct set of complex considerations — government with the mayor vociferously in the lead has sought to dictate unilaterally and obtusely to its religious citizens often at the instigation of the media and others who to put it mildly don’t have our community’s best interests at heart. In so doing it has studiously ignored the Orthodox voices of reason that have sought to arrive at a modus vivendi based on goodwill and mutual trust one that takes full account of the relevant science law and facts.

These localNew Yorkdevelopments raise an issue that should concern religious voters of every stripe come November. Consider: the Obama administration’s mandate forcing religious employers to fund insurance benefits that violate their conscience and faith is now law. It enacted this unprecedented assault on religious freedom in the very midst of the most politically sensitive period possible six months prior to the presidential election. And it did so over the outraged opposition of the Catholic Church a religious bloc infinitely more powerful than the Orthodox community.

If Mr. Obama expects to have more “flexibility” in foreign affairs — as he put it to Putin’s puppet a few months back — in his politically impervious second term what then are Americans of faith to expect in days to come?