Light shows can be mesmerizing. There are big ones, like fireworks shows; but even the little ones, like fireflies, have a way of casting a captivating spell on their observers. Little more than twenty-four hours passed from the moment that Adam was created, when Hashem infused him with the intelligence to create a man-made light show: fire. Just think about the last lag ba’omer bonfire you attended, and you’ll understand why I am referring to fire as a light show.
In more recent history, with the advent of microwave technology, Hashem has given man the ability to create a new light show. Diminutive in size, but gigantic in its ability to fascinate and ignite imagination. And emanates from something that one would have thought to be one of the least likely objects to be able to create such a light show: grapes. Yes, that’s right, grapes! Apparently, home videos of plasma-spitting grapes in microwaves have been circulating for decades; but it was only in recent years that scientists finally decided to “get to the bottom” of why this happens (read: observe what is going on in a more clear, precise manner; the actual “why” they can never figure out).
As reported by LiveScience and PhysicsWorld, Pablo Bianucci, an associate professor in the Department of Physics at Concordia University in Montreal, recently led an experiment wherein he and his colleagues used a modified microwave – the door was engineered to keep the radiation in but to be transparent enough to allow their 1000-frames-per-second thermal imaging camera to capture the show – to determine what exactly is going on with this grape-plasma phenomenon. And they didn’t just test grapes. They tested hydrogel beads and water-filled quail eggs too.
What they discovered is that grapes (and a number of other berry-like objects) are essentially mini water-spheres that are just the right size and composition to act as an electromagnetic hotspot. In other words, the size and conditions of the grape are an almost perfect fit for the 2.4 GHz irradiating wavelength. Or, put more simply, if you imagine the energy coming out of the microwave and being zapped into the food as tiny little strings, the grape is just the right size and composition to allow those energy strings to fit almost entirely inside the cavity of the grape. Like a snug-fit glove on a hand (the scientists call them Mie resonances, but I like my name better). Because the grape is able to “trap” the electromagnetic waves, it gets intensely energized. Instead of the grape getting heated from the outside in (which is how many foods wind up heating in microwaves to a great extent), it gets heated from the inside out.
However, that intense energization (yes, I just made up that word; remember it, because I am sure that it will become popular soon) is not enough to create the light show, it is only when you cut a grape in half, but leave it connected by the skin, or place two grapes next to one another so that they are touching, that the plasma party begins. The reason for this, Bianucci ventured an explanation, is that when the two halves or wholes are touching, each one of them has its own intensely energized core, and the radiation begins to “hop” from one side to another. The result is a really significant hotspot – a much stronger electromagnetic field smack in the middle – that becomes like a fountain of fire, spitting and crackling out its now-ionized sodium and potassium molecules in the form of brilliant plasma.
Now, the scientists are busy investigating how this discovery could possibly bring about major advances in the field of resolution imaging and enhanced spectroscopy, but I couldn’t help but get really excited (not to the point of extruding fiery plasma, but excited nonetheless) about the way this grape-plasma phenomenon is an amazing mashal for a well-known teaching of Chazal.
Chazal tell us that even one person who learns Torah by himself will be given tremendous reward (Avos 3:6). Yet, they also make it clear that if one has the opportunity to study Torah together with another person, and opts to go it solo, then the result will be far from the ultimate, desired goal (Brachos 63b). It is imperative, Chazal make abundantly clear, that, wherever possible, a person take advantage of the opportunity to study Torah with a chavrusa, a group, and a Rebbi. The result is greater by an order of magnitude.
And the grape-plasma phenomenon helps us to grasp why that is.
Yes, it is true that every Jew is the perfect “size and composition” for the wisdom and holiness of Torah to fit right in and generate an intense energy. But so long as he is a loner, that energy will not be able to realize its full potential.
Our Torah covenant with Hashem, HaRav Yaakov Weinberg zt”l once explained, was not to serve Him as individuals, but primarily as a unified people. A cohesive whole. We see this, explained Rav Weinberg, from the fact that the Torah refers to us as “the people” (העם) again and again in the pesukim that immediately precede Maamad Har Sinai. We need to be in contact and united with others, with the greater whole of the Jewish nation, so that all of the Torah energy fields that each one of us is generating are able to connect with one another, synthesize and synergize into the greatest light show of all: one brilliant, cohesive fire of Torah and closeness with Hashem.