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.