In this era of the coronavirus, when so much of our lives as we know it needs to be recalibrated, when each person in their life stations and circumstances needs to marshal the energy for adjustments and adaptations never before imagined, I’ve found myself as if looking toward a tall strong lighthouse at sea — looking toward Israel for much of the inspiration I’ve been drawing.
It started with those rooftop or courtyard balcony weddings. The bride and groom encircled by the raw joy, making merry and singing, sometimes with strangers on neighboring balconies turned into wedding guests.
Then came the news of weekly Friday twilight prayer gatherings of separate-yet-together balcony Kabbalat Shabbats. If only I could be there, I sighed, as I could imagine Shabbat descending upon golden Jerusalem as neighbors’ songs crescendo in unison, greeting the Sabbath Queen, from their respective balconies.
When Passover was approaching, the emotional challenge of seder-ing solo arose. Who will sing, or to whom shall be sung, the centerpiece Ma Nishtana, the famous Four Questions? Israel’s extraordinary response: The whole country, every city, every town, every village, out on their balconies at 8:30 p.m., sang Ma Nishtana together into the night, as a nation, so as to mitigate the loneliness for those whose seder would otherwise have meant singing into silence.
Yom Hashoah ve-Hagvura, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, was this past week. Israel’s striking tzfirah — the blaring siren that punctures the clear spring air — in an instant brings the entire country to a standstill. Survivors can feel the national embrace. Entire highways as far as the eye can see come to a halt, as tens of thousands of drivers step out of their cars and stand by their sides, heads lowered, unmoving.
Now, the streets are deserted. Along with everyone else, survivors are tethered to home.
How could precious survivors feel the embrace this year? In a very special gesture, Israeli Police Force dispatched cops all across the country to stand together with these survivors in the moments proceeding the tzfirah. Standing across from their apartments, speaking into their hand microphones, their amplified message could be heard loud and clear beyond just the Holocaust survivors’ balconies, into the whole street:
“Dear So and So. My name is So and So. I am a policeman from your local precinct here to salute you in the name of the State of Israel.
“We recognize your contribution and sacrifice for our nation and country.
“We wish you the blessing of health and together we stand with you during the tzfirah in memory of the six million who perished.”
Then a line of uniformed police force in blue, standing erect, saluting from the street below, eyes locked upward looking toward the surviving man or woman alone on the balcony, as the siren blares out for its full minute, until the siren’s whine winds down.
Most recently, and most painfully, Israel is leading in its humanitarian response to the wrenching deathbed scenes. After witnessing the unbearable sorrow of the first few coronavirus patients dying alone, a hospital staff member cri de coeur followed. If a gloved and masked journalist is allowed into the hospital, why not a family member at the deathbed of a loved one? This was his outcry.
If there’s an ultimate liminal moment in this world, it’s the sacred space of death; as a human life recedes from this world, when life is in retreat. Even in better times, these painfully precious moments of parting, when a loved one is slipping away, even when there is a chance for a farewell, are the rawest moments of pure grief.
The added burden of leaving a relative, laden with the crushing emotional black hole of never having the chance to say goodbye, can prove to be psychologically too much. Maybe even more important, to leave a human being to die alone in a hospital bed, surrounded only by strangers, is to fail that person, to deny the most essential meaning of compassionate care.
Hauntingly, all too often, there is no choice. Maybe that’s one of the biggest most difficult and significant casualties of this coronavirus: the imposed limits on our being compassionate.
Nurses and medical staff have been angels. They are the intermediaries between dying patients and their loved ones, uttering the desperate and urgent, if proxied, “I love you’s.”
But Israel responded to a hospital staffer’s cri de coeur, and is changing its policy. Where possible, Israel has begun to allow a family member to be at a loved one’s deathbed.
The essence of bereavement is the loss of a loved one itself. Yet, what in our pre-coronavirus era was often taken as a foregone conclusion — a deathbed parting, a surrounding of loved ones — has now become a luxury. Loved ones have been robbed of the chance to say goodbye.
Bedside farewells are not always possible. A death scene is not always a tidy denouement. Certain in my grandparents’ generation they had to cope with far worse. But to be so close — just outside the hospital — is its own king of wound.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
