Learning the True Meaning of Community

I’ve been thinking for many weeks about what I wanted to share in my blog next. Lots of reading, lots of thinking, lots of ideas passing through my head during this long string of Jewish holidays. So many profound things that I was hoping you would be able to take in and be able to walk away feeling uplifted.

So what am I finally writing about? A totally personal incident in my life! I went through the entire month of Elul in preparation for the High Holydays. Readings and prayers, mikvah and group study, even a haircut. Whatever I do never feels like quite enough. Rosh Hashanah catches me off-guard somehow and I am just not really ready for it.

I prayed and thought and read and sang my way through the Ten Days of Penitence. I took out my sukkah and put it up and ate all of my meals when I was at home out there (except for that one rainy day!).

The culmination of this very long, very intense period of introspection and rebuilding of ties to family and friends for me is Simchat Torah, my favorite holiday, even more fun than Purim in my mind. Finishing the entire Torah and then starting it all over again! Hallel! Hakafot! I want to dance with the Torah, to march around the sanctuary, to have an Aliyah with my portion of the community, to end the long holiday season on a hugely upbeat note.

Yesterday, I woke up with a mildly sore throat. When it didn’t fade away during the day, I took a home Covid test and it came out negative. But then I got an email that I had enjoyed dinner with somebody who was subsequently diagnosed as positive. I have been planning for many weeks – you might say all the way since Simchat Torah last year! – to go to my synagogue today and participate once again in the absolute joy of the holiday. But I would have failed the entry questionnaire that some locations still require you to answer – having been exposed to somebody who tested positive within the past 7 days, having had at least one of the named symptoms within the past 48 hours – and I knew I couldn’t in all good conscience go to services. Even though I would wear a mask the entire time, as do most others. Even though I tested negative. Even though nobody was going to make me answer that questionnaire at the synagogue.

This period of the last few years has been so long and so surreal. We have learned how little control we have even over events in our most immediate lives. We have learned how important it is for each of us to put consideration of the other on an equal level, if not higher, to consideration for ourselves. And we have missed so much! The passing of loved ones. Joyous occasions, weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, postponed or redesigned. Even those events that are relatively minor milestones in a family’s life, such as the graduation of a child from elementary school. Funerals and in-person shiva minyans, where we can surround the bereaved and offer the comfort and support that only being engulfed by a caring community can do.

I’m so tired of the pandemic. I’m tired of wearing masks when I go indoors anywhere. I’m tired of answering questionnaires about my recent exposures or symptoms. I’m tired of being anxious when each new shot is offered and I haven’t been able to schedule it yet. I’m tired of thinking it’s almost over, only to hear that still more family and friends have just tested positive. And oh, I know so well, I am very far from alone in this weariness!

I wasn’t in my synagogue today. I followed along at home with my prayerbook as I watched the service on my television screen. I was wistful as I watched the joyous hakafot while sitting in my room. I stood by my screen and made myself part of the Aliyah that was set aside for my segment of the community. And I sang along with Hallel and cried when Moses died and cried some more when we turned back to the beginning of the chumash and started right in with the Creation story.

Technology has been a wonderful thing in preventing us from total isolation, total missing of significant days in the calendar and in our lives. Zoom fatigue is very real, but sometimes there is no alternative, and at least I got to enjoy Simchat Torah in a pastel way, rather than the normal sensation of blazing with colors and sound. But I could not in good conscience go into a place, even masked, and risk being the bearer of a virus that so many have been trying to avoid for so long. Others who were there were trusting me to be operating in good faith rather than risking their well-being. They innocently relied on each attendee to be policing himself or herself.

And so it goes. The pandemic, among other things, has been a very stern teacher of the importance of putting the welfare of the community over our own personal pleasure. I would have given anything to have been there, but I could never live with myself if I were the cause of a wave of illness. My personal rights stop where they might encroach on the rights and welfare of the community. How well we have learned this lesson now that it has been a matter of life and death for so long! L’shana tova to all of my brothers and sisters, wherever you might be around this beautiful world of ours.