COVID-Diary, Week Eight

As we enter the—what is it, anyway, the seventh week of stay-home/lock-down or the seventeenth?—well, whatever week this is (for the record, it’s the eighth: Governor Cuomo’s original state-of-emergency declaration was on March 7), as we enter this interminable period of unsatisfying stillness (if it were only possible, I think I’ve become even less good at Zen-style quietude in the service of inward-directly insight than previously), as we move forward towards the great goal of beating this damned thing without actually moving at all, I think I’ve had enough. (My prose is suffering too: that last sentence is only theoretically possible because it clearly does exist, not because it should.) I think we all have. And so, as we enter the third month (that actually is correct) of doing something by doing nothing, of moving forward by remaining in place, of feeling daring when we venture forth to the grocery to buy a package of cookies or a tomato (I bought several just a few days ago and have hardly calmed down since—big, red, juicy ones too: delicious and hopeful non-poisonous, perfect for making into delicious and hopefully non-poisonous sauce), as we do this thing that Governor Cuomo wants us all to do to make our state safe—and our county and the tiny piece of it we call home and in which we once used to interact with our neighbors and friends in physical space rather than in the context of semi-real virtual reality (and who are we really kidding?) projected on our computer screens—as we stick to the rules of non-interaction with the world other than when we venture forth to buy staples (in an amusing aside, I actually went to Staples the other day and bought, among other things, a package of staples), as we do The Right Thing and make ourselves and each other, ideally, safe, we need to be more proud of this massive effort we have undertaken than we are irritated by the way it has impacted on our former lives, versions of existence in which buying a tomato was an ordinary and uninteresting chore instead of a daring and death-defying act of survivalism. I suppose my mood is coming through in my prose. And it’s true: I actually am feeling a little all-over-the-place these days. The sauce, by the way, was delicious, even if served—regretfully but also responsibly—on our last package of Pesach pasta.

It would be easy to be cynical as we try to do something by doing nothing. Are we, to quote myself, like demented warriors trying to break into a walled city by throwing snowflakes at its ramparts? Or—as we all prefer to think—are we doing precisely the right thing by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the actual physicians, nurses and health care workers on the front lines—those specific people for whose wellbeing and whose safety we pray daily on our Shelter Rock Zoom platform—are we standing with those people by in our own way doing our part to wrestle the pandemic to the ground and own it in the precise way it has so far managed instead to own us? Surely, that latter option must be the correct one. And yet there’s a little bit of me seated on both sides of that specific aisle. To speak wholly honestly, I suppose I don’t really know what to think. The numbers seem slightly encouraging just lately. But that has to be weighed against the fact that 337 New Yorkers died last Sunday alone of COVID-19, bringing the state-wide total of those lost to the pandemic to 17,303. By the time you read this, of course, that number will be higher. By hundreds.

And so I present myself this week in conflict…with myself: optimistic and pessimistic, hopeful and worried, fearful and (sometimes, although mostly not so much) fearless, cynical and incredibly impressed by what we have done in only a few weeks to adapt to a new normal that none of us saw coming.

I spent two and a half hours this week watching—and loving—the 90^th birthday tribute to Stephen Sondheim on youtube. (Click here if you haven’t watched dozens of Broadway’s greatest stars singing a broad, cleverly-chosen selection of Broadway’s greatest composer’s best songs and I think I can promise that you won’t be disappointed.) I’ve been a fan my whole life, or at least ever since the ten-year-old me was taken by my parents to see A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Mark Hellinger Theater. (That was not my first Broadway show, however—my grandmother took me to see My Fair Lady when I was even younger than that—nor was it Sondheim’s: West Side Story and Gypsy were both earlier, but Funny Thing was the first huge hit for which Sondheim wrote both the music and the lyrics.)

Sondheim is our national muse of ambiguity. Not by any means a cynic, his lyrics more than anything else express a deep sense of ambivalence about…basically about everything: about love, marriage, and relationships in general; about friendship; about the value of work; about the nature of art and artistic creation; about the power of music; about the inviolate nature of those human relationships widely deemed to be the ones that simply cannot dissolve in irritation or pique, or even in fully justifiable rage—the ones between parents and children, between siblings, between the kind of best friends who truly are each other’s soulmates, between lovers, etc. That’s what I hear the most clearly, for example, when doomed Tony, blissfully unaware that he won’t live out the day, sings out that he’s certain there’s a miracle due, one that’s gonna come true, one that’s he's sure is coming to him even before he actually meets Maria. And it’s what I hear when the baker’s wife in Into the Woods, who will also not live out the day, sings about her decision to return to her husband after her brief affair with the prince, when she opts for “or” instead of “and” and decides to “let the moment go / don’t forget it for a moment though / just remembering you’ve had an ‘and’ when you’re back to ‘or’ makes the ‘or’ mean more than it did before.” And it’s what I hear when the maid sings out—I think I somehow understood this, by the way, even as a naïve twenty-one-year-old watching A Little Night Music for the first time—when she sings out that “it’s a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension / it’s a very short road to the ten thousandth lunch and the belch and the grouch and the sigh.”

None of those sentiments is at all foreign to me. You do make your decisions in life and then live with the consequences. You do eventually have to choose “or” over “and.” You basically never know what’s about to happen. And it really does all fly by in the flash of an eye.

But there’s also a different side of me, one that also keeps jumping out at me from the cupboard these days: the one of non-ambivalence, of commitment undertaken and maintained, of values somehow becoming more, not less, firmly held as I grow older. Someone sent me a video created by the Masorti Movement—the Israeli version of Conservative Judaism—in which are intertwined the words of the 126^th psalm (“those who sow in tears shall reap in joy / those who go forth weeping bearing seeds for sowing shall return shouting with joy as they carry their ripe sheaves back home”), the words of Hatikvah (“as long as the Jewish spirit yearns deep in the heart…then our two-thousand-year-old hope to be a free people in our own land will be realized and not come to naught”), and the words of Saul Tchernikhovky’s famous short poem “Laugh, Laugh at My Dreams” (“Go, make fun of me for believing in humankind / for I even believe in you / and, indeed, for as long as my soul yearns to be free / I shall not sell it out for a calf of gold”). I’m usually a bit impervious to that kind of video, but I actually found myself moved—and incredibly so—by its sincerity, by the profundity of its single idea, and by the way it so perfectly framed the sentiments that co-exist in my own heart with the Sondheimian ambivalence about the universe referenced above. (To see the video for yourself, click here and you’ll see what I mean.)

Do I have to choose? This week brought more horribleness, more sickness, and more death. But it also brought us Yom Hazikkaron, the day of remembrance on which we recall the 23,816 men and women of the Israel Defense Forces who gave their lives in the defense of the State of Israel since statehood was declared in 1948, and Yom Ha-atzma·ut, the seventy-second anniversary of Israeli independence. My native cynicism dissolves in the contemplation of both those days and is replaced by a deep sense of purpose, commitment, and faith. There will always be a bit of Sondheim in my soul, which is probably a good thing. (I heard that. And, yes, I am being ambivalent about ambivalence. How amusing!) But, at least this week, I feel that part of me overwhelmed by other sentiments featured on my constellation of personal emotions, on my private zodiac—and faith and hope foremost among them—as I look out at the trees suddenly in full bloom all around and feel inspired to look neither to the past nor to the side, but to the future.

Bouncing Back

We human beings are essentially adaptable creatures, but we don’t think of ourselves that way most of the time. In fact, just the opposite is how we usually see ourselves: as creatures of habit so used to our ways that it takes a seismic shift in the environment to move us into new modes of behavior or attitude. But then, when there is simply no alternative and we suddenly do have to adapt, we somehow manage it nevertheless. We all exemplified that ability in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy back in 2012, for example, when so many of us were suddenly without electric power not for minutes or hours but—for many of us—for almost two weeks. Somehow, we figured it out. We cooked on disposable hibachis in the backyard. We read by flashlight or by candlelight. We drove into Queens to retrieve our email in the first public library we passed that had wi-fi available to the public. For the first day or two, it was challenging and almost exciting to figure out how to survive. By day three, not so much. A week later, we had all had enough. But my point for today is not really how adaptive we were, but how fleeting all those changes proved to be: as soon as the power went back on, no one was interested in frying eggs in the backyard or in reading in bed at night by candlelight. It was real change, real adaptation. But it didn’t last: as soon as the power went back on, we all went immediately back to where we had been before the storm hit.

When the COVID crisis was just upon us, I imagined at first that this would be like that, that the coronavirus would be the viral version of Sandy. And, indeed, in the beginning, that was exactly how it seemed. We struggled for a while to figure out how to get things done. And then, when we really were out of eggs and toilet paper (and not in that order for most of us), we adapted because we simply had to. We figured out how make face masks out of t-shirts. We figured out how to order groceries, toiletries, and prescription drugs online. We figured out how to get our daily exercise without a gym to drive to or a public pool to swim in. Houses of worship learned how to conduct their services on zoom platforms. Teachers of all sorts, myself included, figured out how to teach on those same zoom platforms. Here and there, the cloud even showed a bit of silver lining as people conducting zoomed seder meals suddenly realized that they could invite relatives from all over the country, even from all around the world, who would otherwise never have been able even to consider coming. Instead of declining, participation in daily worship actually increased as the possibility of coming to minyan in the morning without having actually to go outside in the cold beckoned to non-regular worshipers and inspired them to embrace daily prayer in a way that they either never had or at least hadn’t for a long time. So, because we had to, we adapted quickly and—speaking of our life at Shelter Rock specifically—almost remarkably efficiently and effectively.

Will things just go back to normal when this is all over? In 2012, that’s exactly what happened when the power went back on. But I don’t see that happening this time ’round. Indeed, what I’ve been sensing just recently is that we are being altered by this experience in ways that will remain with us long after the crisis passes, and that that is going to be true in many different settings. All sorts of businesses currently conducting business from their employees’ homes will wonder why—given that they have no walk-in trade anyway—they bother paying all that rent to have a central office in the first place. Houses of worship that are attracting more, not fewer, people to worship will wonder what the benefit would be in going back to the previous mode of operation. Schools too will be prompted to wonder if their entire operations couldn’t be streamlined—and made dramatically less expensive to operate—by making off-site learning the rule rather than the exception. True, there’s no way to conduct a choir on the zoom platform. And neither would it be possible to teach lab-based science classes to people with no physical access to the kind of equipment in well-stocked labs. But listening to lectures about history or literature, or learning a language—it seems less obvious that these couldn’t be conducted with as much success via distance learning as when teacher and pupils are all in the same physical space.

At the core of the issue is not really the question of ease, however, but one of human nature. And that is my real topic for today.

Jewish tradition is crystal-clear about the need for a minyan—a prayer quorum of ten—if worship is to take place in a non-abbreviated way that reflects the sanctity of the undertaking fully and meaningfully. The reason given in classical sources for that specific number—or, for that matter, for there being a number at all—is, however, not particularly satisfying. The Mishnah offers a list of all the parts of regular worship that require a quorum of ten. The Talmud then responds by asking where that rule came from and then by offering an answer to its own question in the form of a tradition taught by Rabbi Chiyya bar Abba in the name of Rabbi Yochanan, one of the great rabbis of the talmudic era, according to whom the requirement derives from a verse from Leviticus 22 that features the statement that God, by divine nature, seeks to become sanctified amidst the people, which the rabbi took to imply that all the most sacred parts of the service—the parts that lead to the name of God formally and publicly being sanctified—may only be undertaken in the presence of a quorum, of a minyan. The Talmud finds that assertion obscure and wonders aloud how that verse can possibly lead to that conclusion. It’s an excellent question, but most moderns will find the answer somewhere between obscure and unsatisfying. The verse from Leviticus says that God will be sanctified amidst the children of Israel. And a different verse uses that same word, amidst, when—in telling the story of the desert rebellion of Korach—God is cited as telling Moses and Aaron to separate themselves from amidst the congregation of rebels so that they will not suffer their fate. And then, because the word “congregation” had been used just a few chapters earlier to refer specifically to the ten spies Moses sent out to reconnoiter the land and who later opposed Caleb and Joshua and encouraged the people to give up any hope of ever establishing themselves in the Land of Israel—that, the Talmud triumphantly concludes, is why we need ten people to constitute a minyan.

I first learned that passage of Talmud when I was a student at JTS more than forty years ago. It didn’t seem too convincing to me then. It still doesn’t. The whole notion that that kind of elaborate word play can be used to develop actual laws that affect real people in the course of their daily lives is not something I would particularly want to defend in public. Mustn’t there be some other reason for needing a physically real, extant, present community of people in the same place to worship fully and meaningfully?

The journey to spiritual fulfillment is a journey each of us takes alone. The ancient model has to do with the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that the Torah ordains be undertaken three times a year: each pilgrim is best imagined traveling as a party of one to commune with the one God, as a solo traveler making personal progress, yes, to the glimmering real city in the distance, but also to a private Jerusalem in which the two—the Israelite and the fully present God of Israel—will henceforth be able to dwell in each other’s presence even after the former returns home and resumes normal, everyday life. It is, in fact, in that specific way that the pilgrimage was deemed to be a transformational experience and not merely a task to be undertaken thrice annually.

That is not the full story, however. Each pilgrim following a private, wholly idiosyncratic path towards a personal destiny in God was also a traveler moving forward with countless others on the real road to the real Jerusalem, the actual city that in ancient times housed the actual Temple in which God was imaged to have settled the divine name and thus at least in some sense to have become approachable and knowable. And that image of people pursuing their personal redemptive moment fully alone, but also in the company of countless others attempting to do the same thing along the same path—that is the model for worship in our day that serves as the equivalent of the pilgrimages undertaken thousands of years ago to the Holy City. In my mind, in fact, it is that specific concept of being alone together that this whole zoom-worship experience has taught me to value in a way that I hadn’t really previously.

I like joining our zoom­-minyan each morning and evening. (Readers who haven’t tried it out are welcome to enter through the Shelter Rock website at www.srjc.org. Morning worship is at 7:30 from Sunday through Friday; evenings are at 8 PM Sunday though Thursday.) I too like the idea of not having to go out into the cold when it’s blustery and freezing outside! But there is something about the physical presence of others traveling the same road to the same golden city wholly on their own but also in the same space I myself am occupying that I find very satisfying, and that no virtual community will ever be able wholly successfully to recreate.

In our modern world, aloneness—equated by many with loneliness—is rarely a sought-after thing. The books about aloneness that I’ve written about in this space over the years—Thoreau’s Walden; Admiral Byrd’s terrific Alone, his deeply affecting account of his time spent totally on his own in Antarctica for several months in 1934; Clark Moustakas’s many works on the topic including particularly his final work, Loneliness, Creativity, and Love—these are all about the way that image of being a lonely pilgrim on a personal journey to redemption can work in the secular context. In the spiritual one, though, the image is of a room of people together in the same space as each pursues his or her personal path forward, lonely (because the spiritual quest is by its nature a lonely one) and also not lonely (because the room is filled with friendly, encouraging faces, some of whom the worshiper has been davening with for decades). And that is why life on the zoom platform, for all it has to recommend it, will never replace a real-life minyan of people lifting their hearts in prayer to God as individuals in the company of others who, together and alone, are at the very same time also progressing towards their private Jerusalems along the dusty byways of ancient Israel…and also in the context of real life as it is lived in the bosom of a community of caring friends.