March,2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
I saw my first trillium yesterday! It was poking up right next to a little woodpile on the side of our house. When I saw it, I stopped and said shehechiyanu: “Blessed is the Source of Life, Who has kept us and sustained us and brought us to this moment!” We say shehechiyanu when something new and good comes our way, or something we haven’t been able to enjoy for a long time. Trilliums are harbingers of spring. Amen!
Spring this year, and March specifically, also marks a year since the COVID lockdown began in the USA. I remember my own utter shock and confusion a year ago when, over what seemed like the course of a weekend, regular life ceased. At first I thought it might be for as long as two weeks. Two whole weeks! Without shopping, visiting, hugging, popping in for a coffee at the Good Life? Two weeks without the shul??? Impossible for me to imagine!
Last week, at what was probably about our 48th Shabbat morning service on Zoom, someone suggested that we say shehechiyanu for the impending reopening of life. And this led to a quick discussion: is it time to say shehechiyanu YET? Have we really been brought to a new moment? Or are we in something more like the season of “not yet, but we can sort of see a glimmer of hope ahead”? We decided we would save our shehechiyanu for something more definitive.
For me, COVID awareness began last year in the second week in March, when I started checking the UC Berkeley Theater listings to see if my long-anticipated Pussy Riot concert was still going to happen on March 14. Each day it was still on the schedule, still on. And then, just a couple days before the 14th, poof! It was canceled. So that date in March is my personal COVID anniversary.
Now I am thinking both backward and forward from this anniversary. Forward is easier: we have no idea. Though there is much speculation about what post-pandemic life will be like, so much is unknown. One practical note: like the rest of the Jewish world (and all other faith groups as well), MCJC’s board and I are busy thinking about how to return to in-person gatherings. It won’t be very soon; there is plenty of time for us all to discuss and imagine and plan.
I just want you to know that the conversation has begun.
Looking backward, it feels a little like Elul, that month of account-taking before Rosh Hashana. We’ve lived through a very strange, challenging, powerful, and in some ways transformative year. I want to share a bit of what I am thinking about as Rosh Hashana l’COVID rolls around:
First, I am deeply grateful that here on the Coast our most dire speculations have not come to pass. People in our community certainly have gotten sick, and COVID may have contributed to the deaths of people we have known and loved, but our hospital was never overloaded to catastrophic levels. The people I know who have had COVID seem for the most part to have recovered well (keinehora! may it continue). Even as I write these words, I am aware that some of you know people who have died, or who are terribly ill with the virus or its aftereffects. Since we are all connected, it is not more easeful here than anywhere.
I am grateful that so many people around me are masking and distancing. I am grateful for all the precautions taken by local businesses to keep customers safe. I am grateful to our local public health folks, who seem, to my untrained eye, to be making sane and clear decisions amid great confusion. I’m grateful to everyone who cares for people who are sick. I’m grateful to the Food Bank, to Safe Passage, to Project Sanctuary, the Children’s Fund, FLOCKworks, and everyone who has stepped up to try to keep the bottom from completely falling out, even as COVID falls most heavily on the poorest people in our community.
I think of our friends at Sherwood Oaks, our local skilled nursing facility, who have pretty much been confined to their rooms, without visitors or recreation, for the past year. How utterly unbearable. I think of the brilliance and heroism of our community’s teachers, figuring out how to teach without a school or a classroom or a lab or a gym. But still, for many students the school year has been pretty much a wasteland. Or worse: a lonely, lost time to struggle with depression and anxiety.
I think of the economic blows to local businesses, whether or not they have managed to stay open in some way. And the bigger blows to their employees, especially at the lower end of the wage scale, who have had to struggle for the basics. I think of our neighbors without documents, who can’t benefit from what public relief there has been.
And there’s the world. I can’t possibly make a list here, but I think of my beloved South Africa, struggling with a new and apparently more deadly variant of the virus. I think of Israel, boldly exporting vaccines to allies around the world while failing to share them with the people they occupy in the West Bank and Gaza. On the other hand, I think of the vastly reduced driving and flying that may be reducing carbon in the air and helping us imagine transitioning away from petrochemicals in the long term.
There are many softer and more personal effects of the COVID year. Take fashion, for example: I am sitting here right now at my computer in my old patched sweater and sweatpants, my hair in an elastic, barefoot—pretty much my uniform this past year. Time feels so different, a bit like shiva, mournful but sweet in its way, in time but outside it too, in the presence of death but alive.
Time also feels different because I hardly ever drive. I’ve even been able to share my car a bit, because I use it so little. I’ve read some long books. I haven’t had nearly as much time with friends as I’d like. But I’ve had more, and sweeter, time with Mickey than ever before. I feel like I’ve had time to think differently—more slowly, more broadly, more wonderingly.
I’ve had the Torah in my house all year. I’m sitting three feet away from her right now. I don’t even know the full impact of that yet, but it’s demystifying and intimate. I’ll miss her when she returns home to the shul.
What would we have done without Zoom? It’s both my new best friend and biggest taskmaster. This year would have been inestimably different without Zoom. Zoom has both saved and stunted our Jewish communal life this year. It has made possible so much contact, so much prayer and study and conversation and business, and even a certain amount of fun. Unfortunately, it’s not designed to allow us to sing together. Nor can it help us touch each other or eat together: I miss the great food you all cook! It’s enabled many of us to stay connected in ways both familiar and new, and has made it possible for wonderful and beloved people who don’t live nearby to be a regular part of MCJC’s goings-on. But it also hasn’t worked for some people and they have been cut off from their Jewish community just when they most wish for it.
This year has been like tectonic plates scraping slowly past each other, like every other year of life, only more so. I wish there would be no more illness, and no more brokenness or broke-ness, but I am also appreciating a journey I never imagined a year ago. I hope we can return to whatever was best about pre-COVID life, and that we can hold on to whatever is best about the possibilities we didn’t know about a year ago. Mostly, I hope that you stay well and safe. And smell the triliium!
