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Not six words. Just two

ROSH HASHANAH EDITION 5781
SECTION D PAGE 19

It’s hard to come up with the words to sum up a year marked by a global pandemic, especially knowing it’s still raging strong in so many places, leaving many to experience Rosh Hashanh in lonely, isolated lockdown.

Endless reflections about this past year of 2020, page after humbling page of reflections, could not even fit into a book.

To be sure, there were the big dramatic moments. The heroic doctors and nurses and EMT’s who endeared themselves to us in a deeper way than we ever dreamed, as we felt the urgency and the uncertainty, of the raging pandemic.

It was a year when time seemed to stop, frozen in place. A year when days melted into nights, often indistinguishable one from the next. A year where our lives seemed to transform into the grammatical “present continuous,” where day by day the routine futures we’d come to expect, the heretofore known “normal” tomorrows of our lives, the kol demama daka, the “still fine voice” routines moments of our lives, suddenly seemed out of reach. They were ripped from under us, or at the very least became fraught with uncertainty, leaving a question mark hovering in the air.

I don’t mean the process of hope and contemplation for awaited big dreams to come true.

I think of the daily cadences of our lives, disrupted. The “still fine voice” moments of our lives, casualties of COVID, that we now understand we took for granted.

Such as, perhaps, rising in the morning to prepare a cup of tea or coffee, just expecting the supply of something as simple as tea or coffee always to be there. Or eating breakfast together in what seemed to be “normal” proximity, something that was never given a second thought. Now in these times of social distancing these moments can feel more meaningful, almost intimate.

And the list of the daily details of our lives goes on: Participating in communal prayer. Grocery shopping. Going to the office. Sharing the touch of a hug or a kiss. Even just sitting side by side with a friend or a loved one, without barricading barriers in place.

All those quotidian moments of our lives.

We used to bandy about the phrase “status quo” or “comfort zone,” as if it were a bad thing, a resignation to mediocrity. Now, that routine, that status quo, is precisely what we all achingly long for.

“May you live in interesting times,” the curse attributed to the Chinese goes. On face value this actually seems like a blessing. Interesting times? Why yes, please. The idiom creates an implied contrast, that boring or bland is bad. Which is why the idiom is, in fact, considered to be a curse. All those accumulated quotidian moments, all that “status quo” and routine, with nothing more “interesting” going on to worry about? Wow, what a blessing, indeed. What a profound blessing.

Each year as we stand on the cusp of Rosh Hashanah, we dare to hope and dream yet again. No matter how battered we might feel from the previous year, we let our guard down a bit and dare to live in hope for fresh new beginnings. Sometimes even wishing for something extraordinary to happen. It’s very personal and, of course, depending on what is transpiring in our lives, the whispers of our hearts are different.

While that remains true, this year there is that added layer that even more than usual binds us all, every single one of us humans on this planet, to each other.

For this year, piercing through the individual whispers of our hearts, is a united collective converging cry and bellow of one prayer in one universal voice: End the pandemic!

Bring back the quotidian!

We want our ordinary lives back. Yes, ordinary. The kol demama daka that made up the tapestry of our daily lives.

The “ordinary” of communal prayer. The “ordinary” of holding a loved one. The “ordinary” of socializing. The “ordinary” of school. The “ordinary” of work.

I have been so inspired by witnessing so much supportive empathy and creativity blossoming as a result of COVID. Shuls, schools, meal-sharing, concerts, neighbors, restaurants, lifecycle celebrations — so many ways in which we tried to make the best, met a challenge and adapted with renewed spirit, or became more aware of a change needed in something we always did a certain way.

Something as transformative as this pandemic will no doubt serve as a watershed moment that will, literally, shed some of the negative norms we had accepted and lived with “just because that’s how it’s done.”

But its those smaller quotidian details, the ordinary typography of our days, that we wouldn’t change for the world; it’s those that we pray to be able to re-embrace this year.

I’ve thought about this simple life truth a lot over the years, how we tend to undervalue what we have until it is gone (and conversely we tend to overvalue what we don’t have). We wake up in the morning and the first two words we are guided to utter are: “Modeh ani, I am grateful” (for another day).

Depending on what we might be facing in our lives, those two simple words can mean so much at different times. Just another day. But just another day, as it turns out, it no small thing, it’s the greatest gift of all.

We then continue in the morning prayers with blessings of gratitude for “ordinary” health, such as eyesight.

As long as we never before had to wonder whether we would open our eyes to endless blackness or whether we would be granted to live another day, the Modeh Ani and Morning blessings seemed routine — until life comes along with a curve ball and disrupts that innocence of sorts; until we humbly learn just how truly extraordinary the ordinary is.

So it was with so many aspects of our lives until COVID hit. Imagine if we had had prayers or blessings like “Blessed Art Thou for enabling me to sit next to my friend,” “Blessed Art Thou that I no longer need to be masked everywhere I go,” “Blessed Art Thou for seeing a child’s smile,” “Blessed Art Thou for enabling me to go grocery shopping today.” It sounds ridiculous. But for us, for the generation of COVID, hardly so!

Of course, the cost of COVID has been so much loss of life. Yet, the loss of our ordinary lives has been a lesson too.

How would I sum up this year? Ernest Hemingway’s famous shortest short story made up of a sparse six words came to my mind: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I kept clustering different words, trying to meet the challenge of crystallizing this year into six words.

Then it came to me, ricocheting through my mind.

Only it was not six words, but two familiar words.

Mi ba-magefah?” (Who will die via plague?)

We enter this Rosh Hashanah in trepidation for the world, but also in hope and prayer that COVID will pass sooner rather than later, that a vaccine will soon be discovered, bringing healing to the entire world, an end to this cursed COVID magefah, plague. That we once again we can be blessed to live ordinary lives, only now with the awareness of how truly extraordinary they are.

Shana tova u-metukah to you my dear readers. May this be your sweetest year yet.

Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Tehilla Goldberg

IJN columnist | View from Central Park


One thought on “Not six words. Just two

  1. Lakesha Brown

    This year has been a complete disaster. Everything that I have worked so hard for is completely ruined. This mess needs to be done quick because I can not deal with this crap anymore. This year needs to have a happy ending and it needs one now. Everything is on the line, so it really is now or never.

    Reply

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