What does it mean to be alive at this time, during this unprecedented period in the lives of every person now alive?
In the midst of crisis, it is difficult if not impossible to sort things out. The best we can do is set down immediate reflections, some of which might be at odds with one another.
One compelling thought comes to mind: time travel. The real thing. Call the current time an undreamed of opportunity, call it a jail sentence, call it what you want, but to live in the present time is to be pushed way back into the past, before the time of mass transportation, when people might spend their entire lives within a radius of a few miles; or when people might rise with the sun and lay down with the sunset. There was no night life and, for that matter, no light either, save for the moon, a candle or perhaps a crude oil burner. Of course, now we have electricity and one may access the light on the screen all night long if one chooses; but for me, to live in the present time is to experience life as close as possible to the way it was centuries ago. I have reduced screen time to virtually nothing.
This is a history lesson I could never acquire via the finest professor of history. This pandemic, which confines us to (at best) a few square miles, is an exercise in time travel; not an imaginary back-to-the-future, but a visceral back-to-the-past.
Integral to the past was a lower life expectancy and an unpredictable life trajectory, with death lurching at every corner. We read about families long ago only a percentage of whose children were expected to survive childhood. We read about mysterious maladies of centuries past, most of which, we now know, were bacterial infections suddenly felling the strong and the weak alike in a pre-antibiotic age. Alas, what surrounds us now is chillingly similar, even if the medical cause differs. The shock, the unpredictability, the sudden death of so many people, yes, toward the end of their lives, but also in the prime of their lives — we hear about it every day. We live in the past.
Another thought, a frightening comment made almost a century ago, comes to mind.
In 1924, the pious Rabbi Nathan Z. Finkel brought his Slobodka yeshiva from Europe to Hebron in Palestine. It was a tremendous act of faith in a renewed Jewish community in the Land of Israel. What did his students do? They studied Torah, nothing more, nothing else. In 1927, Rabbi Finkel died. Of course, Hebron is the site of the Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs (Me’arat ha-Machpelah). Sometime before Rabbi Finkel died he was bedridden in Jerusalem. He urged his son-in-law, Rabbi Ezekiel Sarna, to move the yeshiva out of Hebron. He said: “I don’t know if the Patriarchs are satisfied with our conduct.” He did not specify the specific conduct that plagued his conscience.*
In August, 1929, the Arabs of Hebron slaughtered 69 Jewish residents of Hebron, including more than 20 yeshiva students. This has come down as the infamous pogrom of 1929 in Hebron. (We marked its 90th anniversary just last year.) The pogrom put an end to the yeshiva in Hebron, indeed to the entire Jewish community there. (It did not begin to rebuild itself until after the Six Day War of 1967.)
Rabbi Finkel was a legendary educator; he bequeathed students who became major Jewish thinkers and educators themselves. His influence is honored and felt to this day. Yet, he said, he did not think the Patriarchs were pleased with the conduct of the students in his own yeshiva, which he himself transferred from Lithuania to Palestine. This is counterintuitive. Not to mention, how can Rabbi Finkel (or anyone else) know the posthumous power of the Patriarchs, that is, the perception of G-d? Was the pogrom in Hebron two years after Rabbi Finkel died a confirmation of his spiritual intuition?
There are no answers to these questions. But this does not relieve the human soul of the felt need to seek answers. A pogrom hit the Jewish community of Hebron. Why? A plague has hit the entire world, COVID-19. Why? The answer may never be forthcoming, so is there any value in posing this question, why? It depends on how we formulate the question. Instead of asking, why is there a pogrom, or why is there a coronavirus, let us ask something very different, “why is this happening to me?” I probably can’t explain what’s happening to the whole world, but I must make sense out of my own life.
So, for me, not necessarily for anyone else, what does it mean to be alive at this time, during this pandemic?
Paradoxically enough, I cannot ask this personal question without knowing that to live through the COVID-19 plague is to be unable to separate personal fate from the community’s and indeed the world’s. Never have borders, languages, ethnicities and all the other markers by which humanity has divided itself collapsed before our eyes. Masks and spooky “protective gear” emerge as unifying icons of a new human race.
How strongly this sense of commonality across the globe will sustain remains to be seen, but, at a minimum, life at this time will carry over in streaks and threads in the post-COVID-19 age that we hope will emerge.
Commonalities. They transcend our particular plight, be it total isolation, or, to the contrary, being cooped up with a large family; be it lost wages, lost hopes, upended health, dreaded loss, or, to the contrary, a rare opportunity to catch up with oneself; be it celebrating or mourning alone; be it virtual classes or stilted conversations.
There is a pervasive awareness that whatever my particular fate may be, it is tied to a swath of humanity larger even than during a world war. Surely not the solidarity intended by John Donne, but we are each a part of the whole, and the death of any one of us diminishes the continent.
We know this instinctively, instantaneously. We shoot an email to someone half way across the world and instantaneously they know what is on our mind and we know what it is on theirs. We may send this email in any language. The commonality is the same.
All this said, we cannot escape our individual fates and I cannot escape mine. My interconnection with the fate of humanity during this plague cannot divert attention from myself. This is not ego. This is the force of circumstance. Even though I work in an “essential service” and come to work, most of the office staff is not here and I go nowhere else. Work. Home. Work. Home. I am radically closed in. Thank you, Mr. Dickens, for the worst of times and the best of times.
The best? Really? The pandemic affords me more time, less hassle, less mental clutter. All those books I never had time to pick up. All those pieces of Talmud I wanted to pursue. All those projects that piqued my curiosity. All that time I promised I would spend with my wife and my family. Now I can do it, even if, vis-a-vis out-of-town family, it must be indirect. Small things: the time it takes me to drive to shul every day, the time it takes me to shop, the time it takes to pick the dandelions, to do an awfully lot of things — the great bulk of that time is eliminated. Time opens worlds.
So much for the best. The worst: All of the time that I am not going to shul, I also am not in shul. I am cut off from fellowship with man and in a way from fellowship with G-d. Of course, I am cut off in many ways at this time, but the worst is to be cut off from the fellowship of the minyan, from the meaningful dvar Torah I hear every morning at the conclusion of the prayers. At this unique time, when I am cut off from the normal channel of connection to G-d, what does G-d want from me? What is my particular purpose?
As I ponder these questions, many of my thoughts are still inchoate. Yet, let me share one chastening thought, crystal clear: It is not so important. It: this type of food, this type of conversation, this type of clothing, this type of friend, this type of newspaper, this type of opinion, this type of rabbi, this type of car, this type of weather, the list runs on. The way commercial society has developed, I, at least, but I suspect most, have slowly descended into the vortex of needing all kinds of things that one might legitimately enjoy but also should not feel a need for. All of these things, which either I do not have right now or don’t loom so important right now, maybe it is time to rethink them. Maybe this 21st-century life of constant bombardment with signals and images — maybe it is time to rethink it, to adjust it, to diminish it, not to go on as before, once this pandemic is over.
As COVID-19 put my life on pause, it summoned a mirror that honesty compels me to admit I find unacceptable a bit more than I care to acknowledge. Whatever Rabbi Finkel meant when he said that he did not think the Patriarchs were pleased with the conduct in the Slobodka yeshiva, perhaps I can say the same of my particular, private service. Rethink it. Locate the path to transformation.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
