COVID and Our Changed Society - Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon
Last year when I spoke to you on Erev Rosh Hashanah, I was hopeful. Rather than dwell on the challenges of the past year, I spoke about resilience, how the human spirt (and Jewish spirit) is stronger than we imagine and that we have the capacity to persevere when times get tough.
Now I stand here, one year later, and I must confess, I am tired. The early summer reprieve gave us a false sense that we were finished with COVID. And now we gather, once again, worried about challenges that the coming year will bring, hoping that the DELTA flare-up is the virus’s dying gasp rather than its next dawning.
But tonight, rather than dwell on where we might be going, I want to reflect a bit on where we have been, more importantly how we have changed.
When the pandemic first began, during those blurry days of crisis, we paused many of our programs and initiatives, including a re-envisioning of our religious school. There were a lot of reasons why we did this: parents had no bandwidth, envisioning meetings online lacked intimacy, we couldn’t plan for a next year that was uncertain to be in person. But perhaps more than anything, we knew that COVID would change everything and we would step out of this crisis into a world we could not yet imagine.
Before COVID, we had a handle on what our community looked like and what it needed. But no one knew how the world would be different when we came out of the pandemic. What would be our relationship to technology? How would we newly define community? Where would we fall on the tension between teaching Jewish content or building Jewish identity? Without those answers, we were nervous we might build a program that no one would want.
We didn’t come to this conclusion on our own. Crisis always necessitates change. In fact, in Hebrew, the word crisis, mashber, is also the word for birthing stool. Like childbirth, every emergency is a turning point as well, birthing new opportunities, new eras. We don’t change gradually. Instead, something happens that breaks open the present and new possibilities for the future rush in. We had a feeling early on in COVID that we would emerge to a radically different world, and that inkling has turned out to be correct.
Jewish history has shown us, time and again, that as long as crisis doesn’t break us, it will always birth possibility. The destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem gave birth to the Rabbinic era, the Talmud, to Jewish prayer, and to a host of our most important holidays. The Spanish inquisition gave birth to a mystical way of viewing God and the universe, known as Lurianic Kabbalah, and this became the basis for our Friday night services.
And times of plague are no different. Jews have lived through their share of pandemics. Jews were victims of the Italian plague of 1630 and the Prague epidemic of 1713, but perhaps no plague has been more consequential and transformative for the Jewish community than the Black Death in the mid 1300s.
There is a mistaken assumption that Jews died at lower rates during the Black Death because of our good hygiene practices. If they did, the difference was negligible. Everyone lost someone, spouses, siblings, even children. An epitaph still remains for a boy named Asher ben Turiel in the Jewish cemetery in Toledo, penned by his heartbroken father:
This stone is a memorial / That a later generation may know
That underneath it lies hidden a pleasant bud / A cherished child
...And the father is left, sad and aching /
May the God of heaven / Grant him comfort /
And send another child / To restore his soul /
However, the Black Death was a tragedy as much for the world’s reaction to it, as to what the disease did to the Jewish people. Jews were blamed for the sickness around them. In the years following the plague, Jewish communities were destroyed, towns burned and synagogues were sacked. The Jews emerged from the Black Death with their world in ashes. How could that not fundamentally change Judaism?
The Judaism we know today can be credited directly to how we dealt with the Black Death. Before the plague, rabbis and commentators saw their task in a specific way. Called the Rishonim, these pre-pandemic thinkers were highly creative. They wrote huge works, commenting on the whole of Jewish law, and felt empowered to make wide sweeping legal changes. Self-assured, their rulings were more terse in their wording. We know many of these thinkers' names. They are Rashi, Maimonides, Ibn Ezra, Rabbeinu Tam.
These thinkers however, disappeared after the black plague and the approach that subsequent Jewish scholars took to law looks nothing like their predecessors. Today, we live in an era known as the Acharonim. Rather than inventiveness, commentators of the past 500 years are more reserved, making change but with much more humility. Rather than terse and sure of oneself, Acharonim are discursive, making sure to cover all bases in proving points. Rather than commenting directly on the Talmud, like their Rishon counterparts, Acharonim write books on specific topics, be they childrearing, Kashrut, or the laws of Shabbat.
Though there is much debate about why the turn happened, many scholars think that the Acharonim’s current reluctance to innovate, their reliance on precedent, and their attention to detail is a product of watching a world ripped out from under them during the Black Death. The plague and its brutal aftermath upended everything, including the very lens though which we read Torah and legislate Jewish living.
I’m convinced that we are living through a similar time. Thankfully, society does not blame the Jews for COVID. Yet, this does not undercut the fact that we are in the midst of a trauma like the Black Death, one that has and will change the very nature of our society.
Bertolt Brecht, a German playwrite, and critic of the Nazis during WW2 famously wrote:
In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
—“Motto”
Whether we realize it or not, we have begun to sing a song, a new tune that is forever different than the one before. It is the tale of our current struggles, but also the seeds for a song we will sing when we emerge from this.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we have changed from COVID. And tonight, even in the midst of DELTAs eruption, even as we navigate the still dark present, I want to talk about how we are already different.
As a society we have been transformed.
We will come out of COVID with a new understanding of who and what in our culture is essential. How many of us before the pandemic thought about those who drove our trucks, who stocked our shelves? How many of us realized the danger that healthcare workers took coming to work every day? We understand the supply chain in a new way. If we tried to buy a car this year, we likely learned that the delay in a single chip, made overseas, could cripple a dealership.
COVID also taught us how connected we all are to one another. As Dr. King famously wrote we are part of an, “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” And these connections are global. Borders matter less. Illness on one side of the world will eventually catch up with every corner of the globe.
Though it’s daunting to think that the world is suddenly smaller, many found inspiration from the newly blurred lines between friends and stranger. We watched as brigades of people spent hours getting vaccine appointments for those they had never met. Others dropped off food and supplies for elderly neighbors they barely knew.
The pandemic has exposed systematic problems in our society. We have a crisis of childcare in our country. We realize now just how much our society undervalues it and are beginning to see that it is the engine of our economy.
After a year of delayed routine doctor's appointments, we are now realizing that healthcare maintenance is key to our health. At the same time we are more keenly aware of those who not have access to quality healthcare and routine testing.
Perhaps the biggest problem the pandemic has exposed is that our society is divided. Everything is partisan. I used to think that if faced with a great enough challenge, we would come together like our grandparents did during WWII. I now doubt that. We are where we get our news. And the pandemic has only affirmed the famous adage that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Unlike the above, not every change that will come from the pandemic is good. I mirror our society in that I am more cynical, less optimistic, and less trusting of the general public to do good than I was before COVID.
Yet, in a way, I’m also more sensitive to needs of others around me. We all are. We ask if someone would rather gather inside or outside. We show up at one another’s homes masked, asking if we can remove them, rather than forcing our hosts to remind us to put them on. If we do gather, we think about who is not there and often use technology to bring them into the room, albeit imperfectly. We are always negotiating between our wants and the needs of others. The pandemic has shifted the calculus, making it more acceptable to ask for what we need and making others more open to hearing it.
But perhaps more than these larger lessons, many of us have realized things about ourselves. Earlier this summer I asked the TNT community the following prompt: “What have been the greatest things you have learned during these 18-months of COVID? How have you grown?” I was blown away by the honesty of all of you. Some of you reflected on our changed society, but most of you spoke in a deeply personal way.
Some of you spoke about your newfound relationship to family. You eat more dinners at home, call your kids more often, some of you even lived with your adult children and their partners, forging a bond that would not have been there, pre-pandemic. Many of you stopped traveling or commuting. This helped you learn what you truly value and re-prioritize your time.
To many the world feels smaller. You have gone deeper with fewer relationships. And you have learned to want less. We have also become heartier, learning to enjoy outdoor brunch in 34-degree weather.
Others of you spoke about being more industrious. You learned you could problem solve when tested, getting food when it felt hard, educating your kids on zoom, even printing monogramed B’nei Mitzvah masks as SWAG. I heard from one of you that saw your job loss as an “opportunity” and pivoted, founding a business you had been meaning to start for half a decade.
Still others of you have found a sort of humility amidst COVID. You have learned you have less power than you think, that often you are not in control of your own wellbeing, and that you lack all the answers. You have explored the bounds of courage and learned in one person’s words that “courage can mean staying the course.”
You have learned to value life. You are more spontaneous. More present. In the words of one of you, “the blend of colors were as never before.” And you have a more mature relationship with your mortality. More to come on that on Yom Kippur.
More than anything, the pandemic has helped you clarify your values. As life slowed down you no longer had distractions to keep you from working on yourself. You have discovered a piece of who you are that will not quickly be forgotten.
Here is my sincere hope: next year, when God willing this is over, don’t fight the different world we live in. Whether it’s changes to society or to yourself, you cannot go back. It is futile to try. In the words of Ecclesiastes, it is like “the pursuit of wind.”
I can promise you that we will do the same here at Temple Ner Tamid. We are different now. The world is different now. And Judaism must rise to the challenge.
Since we realize how much we actually need people, our programming will reflect that
Since so many of us will carry fear for a long time, our care and outreach will address that
Since many of us have a new-found relationship with technology, our approach to what defines a “congregation” or a “classroom” will change too
Each of us have a choice. We can step into our new world, mourning what was and unable to move forward, or we can embrace the change, letting it carry us into a different future. Every crisis births these two perspectives, but history is shaped not by the nostalgic, not by the sentimental, but by the innovators, the visionaries, the hopeful.
We are venturing out into a new tomorrow and how we adapt to our new reality will define us. I do not know what will be of COVID next year, or next decade. What I do know is that we are up to the challenge. The world will change, and so will we. And we will look at the world with new eyes, singing our new song, ready to build a future we never dared to imagine.
