Innocuous, hidden cameras are all around us. I tell customers who are dressing/trying on clothes or undressing/dressing their kids in a corner of the store where I work that there are people watching and filming them. It’s actually no secret that there are cameras all around. There’s a screen alternating the various camera feeds for all to see at the קופה ראשית Cupah Roshit, “mini-office,” customer relations corner in between the entrance and exit of the Sha’ar Binyamin Rami Levy supermarket. They’ve recently upgraded to color from blurry black and white, so I asked jokingly to the manager of the shift if I should now start worrying about wearing makeup to work.
Just a couple of days ago when the American security authorities began asking the public who had been taking pictures of the Boston Marathon at the time of the bombing for all pictures, still and moving, so they could try to get a filmed record of what happened and who could have left the bombs, I thought of a book I had recently read, Act of Treason by Vince Flynn.
In Flynn’s book, the fact that someone had placed himself behind a pole (or was it a tree?) at the time of the fatal explosion made one of investigators suspicious and ended up being the key to the successful investigation. That summary of the book doesn’t do it justice. I did enjoy reading it but had to throw it out, since my copy was old and falling apart. Who would have thought that just a couple of months after I had read the book, it would be so timely?
Most of us are totally oblivious to the fact that in today’s world there are security cameras all over. And even if there aren’t security cameras, there are other cameras filming us. I remember reading that a philanderer was caught cheating when his wife saw him with another woman when they were watching the then popular Woody Allen movie Annie Hall. Allen had filmed some real life street scenes, without asking each and every person’s permission and inadvertently included that man driving around with his lover.
Some more food for thought: Someone is watching us all of the time. Why are we more afraid of being filmed and spied on by humans than the fact that God sees, hears and knows everything we do, all places and all times? We can’t hide from God, even though men can’t always catch and punish the guilty…
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