Ma Nishtana? How is this night different from all other nights? This year, the refrain might be, “How is this Passover different than all other Passovers?”
In every generation, the Jewish people faced a threat or a struggle to prevail in their observance of Jewish tradition. We’ve heard the harrowing stories from our grandparents: The Holocaust. The Great Depression.The fledgling Jewish State of Israel.
Now it’s our generation’s turn. And we too shall prevail and overcome this coronavirus crucible.
Yet, as we pass the time practically welded to our apartments, as the bleak coronavirus forecasts keep intensifying, we know things may become unbearably painful.
The truth is, it already has. Just a little over one week ago when the quiet of Shabbat came to its conclusion, the news in New York was steep and startling: 24 people had died. One person every hour. This past Shabbat, it was a person every 9.5 minutes.
Every life is incalculable. Each of these people was not a statistic but a world unto itself.
The death scenes described are wrenching. Loved ones, desperate, trying to find ways to connect with their beloved, but siloed, unable to say a final farewell; to somehow whisper one final I love you; to utter just one final thank you.To cry out a Shema. Instead, the relatives all too often find themselves left trailing, mutely, with no way to pierce the divide.
The constant ambulance sirens puncturing the eerily silent and empty streets of New York City — an atmosphere of horror, yet mixed with urgent hope. You just know in your soul its another ambulance hero trying to coral the coronavirus before it’s too late for yet another person.
The brevity of some of the stories is chilling. A young healthy person in the prime of life, brought into the hospital on Thursday, gone by Saturday.
To watch the news and see a swath of Central Park transformed into a corona field hospital, with temporary morgues popping up in the city, feels surreal. It feels like wartime at our doorstep. And in a sense, that’s exactly what this is.
Then seeing the Navy hospital ship, tall, strong and pure white — marked with the Red Cross — sail into the New York harbor, was iconic. Help was on the way.
Seven o’clock p.m. Each twilight, on the dot, Manhattan explodes into electrifying cheering. Hundreds of thousands of Manhattanites, shouting, clapping, banging pots with salad servers — whistling and whopping, for all the health care personnel heroically working the front lines.
Every window frame in every building around me as far as the eye can see becomes illuminated, silhouetted by a person or two.
The first time I heard the ruckus, I stuck my head out my living room window. It was raining. With soaked hair, I too joined the cheering, thinking, if only all the doctors and nurses could somehow hear us now.
The exploding emotion, no words — just shouts — such raw primal gratitude. It could crack anyone. The tears became mixed in the rain wetting my face.
By the next night I began recording these sacred seven o’clock outbursts of gratitude. Its like one big catharsis for everyone.
The parallels to Passover are striking. We are in the midst of a biblical, epic plague. While we can’t paint the lintel of our doorways and be guaranteed the plague will pass over our homes, we are homebound, praying that everyone be spared.
Right now, we are all trying to stay alive and not be ensnared by this invisible killer.The solidarity in this odyssey with all of humankind is palpable. We literally are one human chain whose choices and actions really do impact one another.
Passover is a time of bitterness and sweetness, ultimately, enmeshed. The charoset and the marror are tangibly and symbolically entwined together in the famous Hillel sandwich.
Passover is a story of oppression, but ultimately, of exodus and redemption.
This year, as we approach the holiday of Passover, there’s certainly more bitterness than sweetness in the world.
For me, this year, for the first time in my life, the seder will be solo, a Haggadah monologue I will have with myself.
This coronavirus has forced so much chametz, so much extraneous puffery, materialism, dissension, and artifice to be stripped away, making us reassess what is truly essential, important and the essence of our lives: human connectivity.
As we are busy constantly washing our hands, hopefully washing the deadly coronavirus away — and as washing our hands is also the first ritual of our Passover seder — I wonder what else we are shedding and cleansing away, perhaps in preparation for redemptions to come.
When I read the following Facebook post I found inspiration in this story from an ER doctor, Mert Erogul, working at a Brooklyn hospital.
Ultimately, its the simple yet profound stories of acts of kindness and humanity such as this one that will become the stories of redemption within this nightmare:
“So today in the middle of all the madness there was a 100-year-old chasidic lady with Covid pneumonia and I was desperate to send her home so she wouldn’t die in the hospital, but she dropped her blood pressure and we had to keep her. And then for an hour her son kept calling me to find out how she was and I finally told him look, she’s 100 years old with pneumonia in both lungs. She’s not good. She’s not going to do well. And then he wanted to talk to her and I said you can’t, I’m too busy and he called back 10 minutes later and I said, listen sir, your mother is not conscious anymore.
“And he said, that’s OK, its very important that I do a prayer for her, could you hold the speaker to her ear. I had 10 other pressing things to do.
“But I stopped what I was doing out of respect for this 100-year-old woman and put the cell on speakerphone and told him to talk. He started the prayer of the dead and he began to cry and could barely get the words out. And I saw she had numbers tattooed on her arm. He was crying for his mother and praying the Shema, the verses of unity and it woke up some emotion in me that I had forgotten about. Time slowed down and I felt restored to myself. When he was done he thanked me and blessed me and I said thank you to him.”
Blessings to you all, dear readers. Stay safe and may it be a chag sameach.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
