COVID-Diary, Week Eleven

I had the most remarkable experience this last Tuesday, one I resolved on the spot to write about this week. And I also want to bring you all up to date on my COVID-era project of re-reading Mark Twain and learning what I can about the human condition from one of its greatest and most keenly trenchant observers. So, a two-part letter this week!

First, the Tuesday experience. As some readers know, I served the Canadian Jewish Congress (Pacific Region) as its chairperson for Interfaith Relations for more than a decade when we were still living in British Columbia. (This was long before the organization closed down operations in 2011.) I enjoyed that experience a lot. For one thing, I met all sorts of interesting people into contact with whom I would almost definitely not otherwise have come—particularly Sikhs and Muslims, but also Hindus, Christians of all flavors, and a sprinkling of other types. For another, serving in that capacity meant I was invited to all sorts of events and celebrations that I’d otherwise never have even heard of, let alone be invited to attend. So that was the good part. But there was also something almost irritatingly anodyne about the whole operation, almost as though it went without saying that the only sure way to maintain friendly relations between the various faith groups involved was almost obsessively to avoid controversy at all costs, a goal attained by refusing to discuss any topic that could possibly lead to friction, debate, or disagreement. The last thing any of these people wanted was to disagree, at least in public, about anything at all! And that part I didn’t like much at all.

The notion that the members of different faith groups can get along solely by ignoring the issues that divide them rather than by listening carefully and respectfully to each other and agreeing to disagree—that notion felt (and feels) to reflect a basic insecurity about the ability of people courteously and civilly to speak honestly to each other. Some other time I’ll write about some of my actual experiences serving as Interfaith Chair for the CJC during our Vancouver years, but I only bring it up today to provide a sense of the background I brought with me on Tuesday when, in the middle of the afternoon here, I signed onto a world-wide zoom platform to participate in a truly remarkable interfaith encounter, one spearheaded by my friend and colleague, Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum in Jerusalem. 

I’ve known Rabba Tamar (as she’s known—the Hebrew title rabba is what non-Orthodox Israelis call female rabbis) for years and had the privilege of editing her very interesting commentary on Pirkei Avot as part of the Pirkei Avot Lev Shalem volume published in 2018 by the Rabbinical Assembly. But Joan and I are also her occasional congregants: when we’re in Israel, we often attend the Friday night service at Tziyon, the congregation she serves in the Baka neighborhood of southern Jerusalem. And it was for that reason, I think, that I received an invitation last week to participate in something the flyer referenced as “a one-of-a-kind online global gathering” to be hosted by a group called Maaminim (“believers” in Hebrew) that was also to be “a spiritual joining of religious faiths and art from the sacred city of Jerusalem” and also “a digital prayer for healing by religious leaders and communities from across the globe.” I get lots of invitations to events like this, particularly in these last months. But because I know Rabba Tamar—and also because I met one of the participants, a Hebrew-speaking Franciscan monk from Italy named Alberto Pari whom I once met at Rabba Tamar’s Friday night table—I decided to bookmark the event and to tune in at the appointed hour.

The experience was exceptional. For one thing, there were hundreds and hundreds of people gathered on the Maaminim zoom platform. Some people added their locations to their signatures, so I could see people signed from all over North America and Israel, but also from many European countries (including Vatican City), from Australia, and from many Asian countries as well. It was a varied group, too: not only multinational, but also multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and very multi-spiritual. The event was led by Rabba Tamar and a Christian priest, who began by speaking to each other—openly and deeply—about the specific way that the vulnerability that the COVID-era has naturally engendered in us all has also made us all more aware of the degree to which we need to rely on each other, to turn to each other, to encounter each other in ways we might otherwise not have even realized possible. There was music too—and lots of it, mostly performed in Jerusalem by members of the various faith groups represented and all of it soulful and heartfelt. And then we were all asked to participate by writing a word or two on a piece of paper and holding it up to the camera, a word we wished to share with this remarkable gathering of people of faith from all across the globe.

Some of what people wrote was what you’d expect: shalom, strength, courage, unity, health, etc. But there was a secondary theme present too, one suggestive of the core idea that the way to negotiate the COVID-crisis is precisely by engaging with each other, by using the sense of brittle fragility we’re all experiencing not solely as a negative thing to be avoided for as long as we can and then abandoned as quickly as possible, but as a positive thing to be embraced, as something to be accepted as native to the human condition (albeit one we generally try to repress or ignore) and then used as a basis for reaching out to others, for building a community of people who are—paradoxically, but really nonetheless—made stronger by acknowledging their weakness…and more sturdy in their faith by facing the instability that crises like the one upon us naturally engender.

I am usually more than slightly cynical about this kind of undertaking. And yet here were hundreds and hundreds of people from all across the globe, people who looked different from each other and who would normally have no way to join together—and yet who had been prompted by the pandemic to see themselves in the eyes of others and thus to find the common humanity we all share in the contemplation not of how similar we all are, but how different…and how the right dose of humility—and particularly one rooted in an acceptance of the precariousness of the human condition—can allow us to look past the cosmetic and see ourselves as each other’s partner in the great goal of coming out of the COVID-age whole, sane, and well.

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In other news, I finished my re-read of Tom Sawyer. I first read the book back in high school, at which time I remember finding it irritating that we, sophisticated tenth-graders that we were, were being asked to read a children’s book. And that really is how it struck me back then—as a book about children and meant for children. Twain himself promoted the book that way back in the day, but he knew perfectly well that it was going to be marketed to adults and read by them—he was, after all, one of America’s bestselling authors when the book came out—and he obviously also knew that a lot of what he was saying in the book would only be intelligible to adult readers anyway.

In the 1870s, the nation was still reeling from the terrible carnage of the Civil War, America’s bloodiest conflict. So by setting his 1876 book in the 1840s, Twain was inviting his readers to look back to an earlier, happier age. Indeed, by making Tom and Huck into eight- or nine-year-olds (their actual ages are not made clear) in the 1840s, he was also making them precisely the right age to have become soldiers during the Civil War and thus inviting his readers to remember a time when the young men of that generation were not soldiers trying to kill each other, but little children wholly unaware of the conflagration to come and its terrors. In his own way, then, Twain was doing something not entirely dissimilar from what Rabba Tamar was trying to do the other day: to invite people reeling from catastrophe to find comfort and resolve not in contemplating the catastrophe itself but in accepting the vulnerability the contemplation of catastrophe can engender. The book is set in Missouri, a border state that never quite joined the Confederacy—by war’s end 110,000 Missourians had served in the Union Army and only 30,000 in the Confederate Army. So would Tom and Huck have fought for the North or the South? It’s hard to say…and that, of course, is the point: by setting the book where and when he did, he makes of his children-heroes into future soldiers who could have ended up on either side of the conflict and who only might have survived. (Twain himself spent exactly two weeks serving as a volunteer in a Confederate militia called the Marion Rangers before quitting, a detail that seems to have been more or less totally forgotten by most. For more, click here.)

The story, unlike how I remembered it, was far-fetched and unlikely…but just possible enough to lend the book a breezy, almost dream-like quality. The children are innocent beings throughout: even when contemplating lives of crime and piracy, Tom and Huck are depicted as naïve and unambiguously pre-pubescent. (When, for example, Tom and Becky Thatcher end up spending several days together secluded in a labyrinthine cave, there is no hint at all of untoward behavior.) And that too was the point of Twain’s goal, I think: to remind readers that all people start out innocent and guileless, that forgiveness can come from reaching over the present into the past, that the sense of extreme vulnerability engendered by the horrors of day-to-day reality in wartime (be the enemy a virus or an actual enemy army) can be exploited to bring people together and make them feel connected and eager to support each other, just as do the people in the Tom’s town—who are depicted as being kind without being insensitive to wrongdoing, moral without being blind to the nature of childhood, and mutually supportive without transcending the mores of their own day.

So that’s what I learned from my COVID-era re-read of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Next  I’ll report to you on my re-read of Huckleberry Finn, possibly the greatest American novel of them all and one that was for several different reasons specifically not assigned to us in high school.

COVID-Diary, Week Ten

The prize for Scripture’s least celebrated rhetorical question should probably go to Zechariah ben Berechia ben Iddo, one of the three prophets who presided over the initial stages of Israel’s mid-sixth century BCE return to Zion after captivity in Babylon.

Looking out at the unfinishedness that characterized basically everything his eye could see—the so-far-only-partially-rebuilt walls of Jerusalem, the so-far-unsuccessful effort to rebuild the Temple and turn it into a functioning place of worship, the so-far-fruitless effort to place a scion of the House of David on the throne of Israel, and the so-far-failed effort to bring the descendants of the original exiles en masse back to the Jewish homeland and there to re-establish themselves, if not quite as a free people in its own place, then at least as a semi-autonomous ethnicity within the vast reaches of the Persian Empire—looking out at all that (and possibly remembering his older prophet-colleague’s promise that theirs was to be a day of “wholly new things”), the prophet acidulously asks his best question. Mi baz l’yom k’tanot? Are you really going to disrespect our moment in history as a nothing but a yom k’tanot, as “a day of small things” and negligible accomplishments?

It won’t matter in the long run, he promises, because the naysayers and scoffers will eventually all abandon their pessimism and rejoice in the nation’s future successes in all of the above undertakings. And, the prophet adds, the eyes of God are truly trained on the people at this specific juncture in their history, taking it all in and watching to see whether the people can summon up the will to do the right thing, to persevere, to keep at it…even despite the overwhelming nature of each single one of the tasks facing it. And who can say that small successes won’t turn into big ones? If I can summon up optimism in the face of the overwhelming nature of the tasks facing us all, the prophet almost says out loud, so why shouldn’t you also feel at least slightly hopeful? Is that really asking too much?

It’s one of my favorite passages in all the prophetic books, bringing together all my favorite COVID-era themes: guilt, irony, hope, resilience, and courage. And this truly is a day of small things, of small advances that feel unimportant in the larger picture. Last week, I wrote to you all about the dangers of magical thinking. This week, I’d like to write about a different danger facing us all: the danger of sinking into depression born of what we perceive to be realism, of doing precisely what the prophet forbade: being dismissive of small things because they aren’t big things, thus missing the opportunity to build on what already exists and, at least possibly, make small accomplishments into large ones.

The plague has taken a lot from each of us and some things from us all. Pleasures that once seemed have-able merely for the asking—heading out with a friend for a walk or a coffee somewhere, successfully finding an hour in an otherwise jammed week to work out at the gym, or to go for a swim, or to stop by the kids’ place to take the grandkids for an unexpected ice cream—even these simplest of life’s pleasures have all been taken from us. And yet these horrific weeks in which deaths in New York State have almost hit the 30,000 mark (of which almost 2,000 in Nassau County alone), these weeks that have taken so much from us and made us afraid to turn on the news at night lest we hear even more bad news, these weeks have also brought us small things—Zechariah’s k’tanot—to be grateful for.

There are lots of things I could mention. The curve has clearly flattened. At least some of the most dramatic efforts to deal with COVID—the transformation of the Javits Center into a US Army-run COVID hospital, for example, or the setting up of a field hospital for COVID patients in Central Park—have been abandoned as local hospitals have become more able to deal with all the COVID patients who require hospitalization. The transformation of society—something I once thought Americans, and particularly New Yorkers, would balk at taking seriously—feels almost completely successful: I went for my daily 2-mile walk yesterday and do not believe I passed a single person in the street who wasn’t wearing a protective mask. We’ve all learned how to deal with risks that must be taken—learning how to go shopping at 6 AM, for example, or how to order groceries without venturing into a grocery store—and the disruption feels, to me at least, minimal. Yes, these are all small things. Yes, well over 80,000 Americans have died in the course of the last few months. Yes, almost 1.4 million Americans have been confirmed as COVID-ill, which number is definitely far too low since, as of today, a mere 9,623,336 Americans have been tested for the virus…out of a population of over 331,000,000. Yes to all the above! But mi baz l’yom k’tanot? Are we really going to look past the successes because they are, in the end, our latter-day version of the prophet’s small things? It wasn’t a good idea in ancient times. And it’s not a good plan for today either.

I have lately sought solace in familiar places. You all know that I read a lot, that reading is my refuge from the world, my go-to place when I need to withdraw for a bit from the maelstrom and regroup internally and intellectually. It’s been that way with me my whole life, even when I was a boy and certainly when I was a teenager. And in this way too the boy became the father to the man—but it’s the direction of my reading that the age of COVID has altered. I’m usually all about new fiction. In my usual way I will share with my readers—possibly in this very space—an account of the books I have read in the past year and recommend as summer reading. And I’ve read some new authors this year that I’m eager to share with you all—American authors like Richard Morais or Madeline Miller, but also writers from more exotic climes like Cixin Liu, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, or Daniel Kehlmann. For the last few weeks, however, I’ve been finding solace and calm by returning to some familiar places and expanding those specific horizons slightly.

I somehow realized that I had read all of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels but one, so I found and read a copy of his first book, Fanshawe, a work he was later on so ashamed of that he personally bought up all the unsold copies he could find and burned them in his own oven. That led me to notice that I had read all of Herman Melville’s novels (regular readers of these letters will know how great a fan I am) except for The Confidence Man (his last novel other than the unfinished Billy Budd), so I read that too. And now I have moved on to Mark Twain.

I am among those who think of Huckleberry Finn as the single greatest American novel. Like most people my age, I first read it when I was in high school. (I’m sure I had no real idea what it was about, which was true of any number of books assigned to us back in the day.) My idea was to re-read it, possibly after re-reading Tom Sawyer. But then I began to realize just how many holes there were in my effort to read all of Twain. It turns out there are “other” Tom Sawyer novels, books I don’t recall even hearing about and am certain I never read. So I decided to read them now…and then moved on to my current plan to read or re-read all of Twain. And it’s working, too: the more I read of Twain, the more comfortable I’ve been feeling, the more grounded, the more calm, the more ready to contextualize this whole corona-thing and see it in the context of the larger pageant of life in these United States over the last century and a half. 

I began with The Prince and the Pauper, yet another of Twain’s books I somehow never actually read. Does reading the Classic Comics version count? Probably not. Nor should it matter that I remember watching the book’s three-part adaptation on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color with my parents in 1962. Nor that I loved the 1977 movie version featuring Rex Harrison, Charlton Heston, Ernest Borgnine, George C. Scott, Oliver Reed, and Raquel Welch, which was for some reason distributed in the U.S. under the title, Crossed Swords. Twain didn’t write any of the above: he wrote a novel, published it in 1882 (just after the birth of one of my grandmothers and just before the other’s), and that is what I set myself to read.

On the surface, it’s a funny story about two eight-year-old boys, one the crown prince of England and the other an impoverished beggar living with a violent, angry father, and about how they manage (almost believably) to trade places and try on each other’s life for size. It’s well done, too—lots of surprise plot twists and a very engaging style that held my interest for as long as I was reading even despite the fact that I knew how it ended. But on a deeper level, it’s about something else entirely—about the nature of identity, about the question of whether you are how you perceive yourself  or how others perceive you, about the fragility of individuality, and about the fluidity of the sense of self we all take for granted when we look in the mirror and, seeing ourselves looking back, take that experience as reflective of immutable reality.

And, for readers in the age of COVID, it’s also about finding a way to retain our sense of ourselves as unique beings when the entire world changes on a dime, when the palace vanishes and you find yourself suddenly on your own in a world you barely recognize, when you wake up one morning and—for reasons even you yourself can’t really fathom—nothing is as it was and your sole choice is between negotiating a brand new normal or being left behind as the universe moves forward. It’s a clever book about the nature of self-awareness, about the durable nature of personality, about the ability of the background to alter the foreground—but also about the limits that inhere in that ability when the people standing at the front of the stage insist on maintaining their allegiance to their own personalities even under the most peculiar and unforeseen circumstances.

If you’ve never read it, I recommend Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper as a good place to re-introduce yourself to one of our greatest authors. I plan to keep reading too, and I’ll report back to you as I make progress. When summer comes, I’ll share with you my recommendations for summer reading as I always do. But in the meantime, it’s just me and Sam Clemens on my back porch when the afternoon coffee is ready and I find the courage to turn my phone off for forty or fifty minutes and step into the world of a great man’s imagination. Within the context of appropriate social distancing, I invite you all to join me!

COVID-Diary, Week Nine

One of the laws that governs our Pesach-seder retelling of the story of leaving Egypt is that it has to start with g’nut and end with shevach, that it has to move forward from the dark, upsetting part of the story to the one bathed in light, to the redemptive story of a nation made safe and free. I’d like to apply that thought to this entry in my COVID-diary of weekly letters on the epidemic and its effect on us all.

Starting with g’nut is the easy part. As we make our way deeper into the forest and the tightly-intertwined boughs overhead let in less and less sunlight, we are all beginning to lose our nerve. We are, after all, too far along on this journey for any of us to turn back. But neither does any of us know just how huge the forest we are negotiating actually is…or how long it will take us to reach the sun-drenched meadow we are all imagining simply must exist on the other side of the woods. (Nor, of course, does any of us know if that meadow exists other than in our eager fantasy to imagine ourselves being somewhere other than where we actually are.) Still, we reassure ourselves, all forests have outer edges and so must also this one through which we are hiking. And if that really is the case, then all we really have to do is to persevere, to keep walking without getting lost or losing our nerve, and to remain steadfast and determined even when our calf muscles start seriously to hurt, as we become more and more weary, and as we all succumb—at least now and then—to frustration born of the fact that we cannot simply turn back the clock and decide not to undertake this interminable journey through this damned forest, through this woods which feels as though it is growing colder and darker by the moment.

And then, just as we begin to think we actually can hear Dolly Parton singing our national anthem of aloneness-in-the-forest (“If I had wings, I would fly away / From all my troubles, all my things / And I would fly to a place of comfort. / Heaven knows I need a change. / If I had wings, Lord give me wings”)—just as we collectively all become batty enough to imagine the divine Miss Dolly actually is singing to us personally from some unseen perch in the sky to encourage us as we march forward through the gloom, that is precisely when the siren call of magic thinking beckons and we risk wandering off in precisely the wrong direction just at the precise point in our journey that we need to hunker down, to keep steady the tiller, to move forward with resolute intensity, and not to forget that this is specifically not one of those journeys that serves as its own destination but a real one that—if we continue to move forward—will actually bring us to a real destination and, at that, the one we began the journey in the first place to attain. The will to wrap the story up with shevach is intense: we all want this story to end well. But we are not here free people enjoying a seder, but the actual people wandering in the desert without any clear sense of where we are going…or when we’ll finally get there. That is the specific task tradition lays at our feet at this point in the COVID-era: to resist wrapping things up neatly with a rousing chorus of Chad Gadya and then to clean up the kitchen and go to bed for a well-earned night’s sleep.

I just finished reading a remarkable book, Madeline Miller’s Circe. I recommend it very highly as a well written, intelligent, and extremely engaging novel—and publicly thank my younger son Emil for steering me in its direction—but I mention it not just to suggest it to you as something I think you will all enjoy, but to highlight one of its most powerful passages. Odysseus is somewhere on his interminable voyage home to Ithaca. He and his crew have successfully dealt with cannibals, pirates, and monsters of various sorts. And then the man lands on Aeaea, island refuge of the sorceress Circe, and things really get hairy. Irritated by her intruders’ arrival, she turns half of Odysseus’s crew into swine. But then she falls for their brave captain and ends up not only releasing the crew from her spell so they can continue their journey, but also offering them all sorts of important tips about how successfully to negotiate the rest of their journey.

And there’s a lot to negotiate. There’s the six-headed monster Scylla (depicted almost sympathetically in Miller’s book) and the ever-churning, ship-destroying whirlpool called Charybdis. But there are also the Sirens. Their number keeps shifting throughout the sources. Their unpronounceable names (Theixiepeia, Aglaopheme, Parthenope, etc.), ditto. Their appearance—always some combination of womanly features and avian ones, including feathers and wings—are also in flux from ancient source to ancient source. But what all the sources, Homer included, agree upon is the Sirens’ singular ability to lure sailors to their deaths by singing to them so sweetly that they, the sailors, are driven to ignore their normal safety standards and instead to sail directly to the Sirens’ island, which invariably leads to their ships foundering and sinking on its rocky shoals. 

Left unexplored in the sources is how exactly this works, but Homer himself offers the most cogent explanation: the Sirens’ song was not just music but also magic, and was thus able to inspire those who heard it simply to ignore the dangerous shoals towards which they were recklessly sailing—not not to see them at all but rather to see them and to understand the danger they constituted, but at the same time to be so mesmerized by the beauty of the Sirens’ siren song so as not to care.

I’m not sure if high school students these days read Homer, let alone if they are taught how to take its lessons to heart. But the notion of magical thinking—the specific phenomenon exemplified by the Sirens’ story in which people who can see the world clearly are nonetheless so seduced by desire that they simply ignore what exists plainly and unambiguously before their eyes—that absolutely exists in our world.

We all sail occasionally towards the Sirens’ mythic isle, but we can’t afford to fall prey to magical thinking at this juncture of the COVID-crisis. The urge to wrap things up with shevach, with the good news that this is all almost behind us, certainly beckons, though! The numbers are improving. For the first time in a long while, the number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in our state dropped to under 10,000….and that was on the same day that the number of people with COVID-19 newly admitted to the hospital dropped to under 800. That sounds so encouraging and so heartening! Yes, 280 New Yorkers died yesterday of COVID-19, bringing the state-wide total of losses in the last two months to over 19,000. But why focus on the negative? There are, after all, more than nineteen million New Yorkers. And not even 20,000 have died. What’s not to feel positive about? And then add to the mix the ever-improving weather and the intense cabin fever many of us are experiencing. And, voilà: the framework for precisely the kind of magical thinking that will get us all killed.

The people in Williamsburg who gathered in illegal and dangerous numbers last week to attend the funeral of Rabbi Chaim Mertz are an excellent example. You are already feeling that it’s enough already with the g’nut, that the time has come to wrap the story up with long overdue shevach…and then someone has the nerve to say that it would actually be a mitzvah not to attend the funeral of a beloved, highly respected teacher and rabbi. So you simply develop the fantasy—despite the fact that hundreds of hasidic Jews like yourself have died of COVID-19 in these last week—you will yourself to imagine that the greater good of showing respect to a deceased rabbi on his final journey will somehow make you safe from infection even if you fail socially to distance yourself from the other attendees. You know that makes no sense. You understand perfectly well that the virus has no moral bearing, that it doesn’t decide who does or doesn’t deserve to become infected. You know that, but it doesn’t suit you for it to be so. So you just unknow it…for as long as it takes to do what you have no convinced yourself is the right thing. And you do this even though some other part of you knows perfectly well that the “right thing” in this context is precisely the wrong thing. And so you go to the funeral and profess amazement when the world condemns you and your fellow mourners as reckless and irresponsible purveyors of infection rather than as sober and respectful mourners.

Yes, Mayor de Blasio’s comments were out of line and hurtful. Tarring the entire Jewish community because of the thoughtlessness of a few hundred magical thinkers was not only impolite and impolitic, but also prejudicial in a way that the mayor of New York City really cannot afford to be. I suppose the mayor regrets his intemperate words now that they’ve been so universally condemned, but the lesson we all need to learn from this whole incident is not about looking both ways before you step into the tweet: the lesson for us to learn is how potent magical thinking can be when you really, really want reality to conform to your own wishes and desires.

As the days grow warmer, as the siren call of the beach grows stronger, as the rules of the lock-down feel more and more onerous, and as the numbers seem to be registering improvement on a day-to-day basis, it is going to become more and more challenging to follow the rules, to have masks in place whenever we venture out into public places, to wear gloves when touching surfaces we ourselves haven’t first disinfected. I hate my mask! (I particularly hate the way it fogs up my glasses, but I also hate the whole concept.) And I don’t like wearing latex gloves either! I’m sick of the restrictions the universe has placed upon us too, and I’m somewhere between unhappy and enraged about having had to cancel our plans to travel to Israel this summer. In many ways, I am not a happy camper. But I am going to do my best not to succumb to the kind of magical thinking that beckons at almost every juncture in the course of the day. Instead, I’m going to do what it takes to remain safe and sound. And so must you all of you! This story will surely end up with shevach. But there’s a lot of the forest we have first to negotiate before we find ourselves safe and sound on the other side.