It is heartbreaking watching what is happening in India. Thrice daily we include in our prayers this verse from the book of Psalms, “G-d, have mercy on all Your creations,” and these are the words I am thinking of now. “G-d have mercy on all of Your creations.”
It’s jarring to be living here in America, in New York City, through what feels like healing steps toward a post-COVID world, yet at the very same time watch the devastating COVID surge in India. Here, for the first time since COVID ripped through our lives, people walk outside unmasked. Faces upon faces are again seen. The pleasure and delight of spring blooming in shades of lime, pinks, and whites, are in the air.
By contrast, reading the news and seeing the news in India, it’s death literally in the air right now. While here it’s the visage as a symbol of recovery that is exposed, there, as masks are layered on even more, it’s the depth of COVID devastation that is being exposed. The angel of death is palpable in India. Seeing the photo of a huge open field of vertical structured kindling — pyres of burning corpses — while a lone living man stands amongst them, dwarfed by this heat of death, is nothing short of haunting.
In our preglobal-COVID pandemic world, when disaster would strike in third world countries, I would obviously feel sadness for their suffering, but it certainly felt removed. Like something happening over “there.” This time, it’s different. We have all been victims of the same onslaught. We fought the same invader. We’ve lived the very same COVID panic, COVID desperation, COVID isolation, COVID mortality. We lived the same COVID world.
When I read the catastrophic COVID news coming from India, it throws me back to spring, 2020 — to our own COVID world of shaking in fear of who will succumb, and who will be spared? Now India is living through that again — only to a much deeper extent. COVID is ravaging India. You watch the news and you feel helpless.
You realize — I suppose only if you were spared — how lucky you are to be American, or Israeli, or whatever country you’re from that was blessed with enough first rate medical treatment and vaccines.
Last spring, it felt like with each bud that unfolded or pushed through the ground, a shrieking siren piercing the air matched its blossoming. But gradually it passed. Spring unfurled into healing and the beauty of summer.
It’s clear, right now, India’s battling of this wave of COVID is the fight of the country’s life, and as of now no terminal point is coming into view.
The world is joining forces to help. But only time will tell how this painful story will end. Right now, in India life is literally going up in flames.
When the recent shootings in Atlanta and Boulder occurred, there was this terrible sense of “oh no, there it goes again; now, with post-COVID life resuming, so is all the brokenness of the ‘normal’ world.” There was a certain internal grieving for the brokenness of our normal pre- and post-COVID world, that struck anew with renewed force, because this past 13 or 14 months have been a COVID bubble. Our normal problems were suppressed or rather repressed. Same goes for Israeli-Palestinian tensions. They were on hold this past year. Yet as soon as normal life resumed in Israel, along with the Independence Day celebrations, rose the tensions of the conflict — and loss of human life as Jews were once again attacked. Rockets, too.
The resumption of normal post-COVID life is not simple. Not simple at all. It’s not just reopening shuls, restaurants, Shabbat meals and Broadway shows.
Yet, when you see what India is enduring right now, it’s like a movie of what could have been our world right now, had COVID not been corralled and reached this phase of change.
Our regular normal non-COVID world is broken, too. It needs much repair and there is much work to be done, plenty to be worried about. But it’s a life to be lived, people among people, the opportunity for collaboration as we navigate our challenges. As well as blessings to celebrate. After all, it is a life of living for the living.
The heartbreaking scenes from India — trying to live solely to escape death — can only leave us with these few simple words: “G-d, have mercy on all of Your creations.”
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