Let me take this moment to wish you all a happy new year. I know we just wished each other this in September, at Rosh Hashanah. But this one is important too. I hear people looking for this to be a clean break, a new start. A desire to kiss that last year goodbye.
Of course when we launch a new year at Rosh Hashanah, we have ample ritual to go with it – a concerted taking stock and committing to do better. Whereas in our secular new year practice, we typically take less ownership of bringing the change we want to see. We make toasts, we make resolutions – which Mary Poppins would call “pie-crust promises” – easily made, easily broken. But we generally don’t undertake the kind of soul-searching on January 1st as we do at the High Holy Days. Instead we kind of expect the calendar to do the work for us: hooray, it is 2021 and it (not particularly we) will be better.
Despite the “good riddance 2020” memes, I actually feel that the last year, with all its challenges and surprises, needs to be seen and considered. I think about our forefather Jacob, who in this week’s Torah portion, Vayechi, gives a kind of farewell assessment of each of his twelve sons. He is on his deathbed, and it is not quite clear if his words are meant to be prophecies or blessings or just how he has come to understand this unruly lot, these sons who were endless sources of pride, shame, and heartache, and who would also be the future of our people.
I know how much we want to say goodbye to these last twelve unruly months that brought us so much angst and also some blessing. We were changed by this last year; even if we haven’t yet grasped the fullness of that change. It is a new year, but it is also just the day after yesterday; we are in the same spot, facing the same challenges. But maybe we’re better positioned to face them than we were a year ago.
So like Jacob in Torah, it’s time for a lookback at how these twelve months landed for us in the collective of our community.
A year ago, January – who can even remember it anymore? We might remember fires in Australia. We might remember an impeachment – does anyone remember the impeachment?
February saw a shadow growing – a new disease that by mid-month the World Health Organization had named COVID-19.
In March we realized how unprepared we were. We decided to ban hugging at Ner Shalom, and were about to institute the Shabbos elbow-bump, when suddenly it was clear things had progressed far beyond that. On the 18th, the County placed us under a shelter-in-place order, still in effect. We zoomed right past elbow bumping to Zoom itself.
In April we learned lessons. On the third of the month we were Zoom-bombed by anti-semitic trolls. That very day we learned how to hold the security and integrity of this room. We began stretching out, feeling into what we could actually do in this medium: support, prayer, ritual. We figured out how to have Seder together from our own homes, and learned the joy of eating Pesach dinner in breakout rooms.
May was arguably the month of absence. Absence of travel. Cancellation of plans. A congregational trip to Israel that didn’t happen and still lies vaguely in wait. False hopes swam by like fictional dolphins in Venice canals. And we began seeing more of the true beauty of the human spirit, as people sang from balconies around the world, cheering nurses like they were soccer players.
June was the month of uprisings. The racial injustices that so many white Americans could ignore in other times were no longer ignorable. Maybe America as a whole had acquired a different relationship with the notion of safety, and with the sanctity of breath. We flexed our grassroots muscle. People of color led; white people followed, not knowing if this was revolution or a practice round. June launched a reckoning that we carry with us into this new year.
By July and August fatigue was setting in. The presidential race had taken form; from a field of thousands there was now a Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidate. We saw the first Zoom Democratic National Convention open, and on the same day crazy heat and thousands of lightning strikes set off fires across California. We allowed ourselves some hope for the nation, even as we began to feel more hopeless about the safety of our own homes.
Early September’s orange skies kept us in a state of unsettledness. We soldiered on, arriveing at the long-awaited Jewish new year, surprised just a couple hours beforehand with the death of Justice Ginsburg. And still we entered into the new year with surprising beauty, swimming in “The River of Transformation,” receiving the gifts of so many community members, seeing the depth of creativity that came through music and video segments. We realized, if we hadn’t already, that this resilient community is too creative to contain, and that whatever limitations are placed on us, we will find the way to be together, to make music, and to explore the life of our spirits.
In October we waited. We waited for the election. We waited for the Glass Fire to be contained. We waited while writing get-out-the-vote postcards. We waited with go-bags packed, not always certain which eventuality they were packed for.
In November our democracy proved itself, even if civility has not yet prevailed.
And in December’s long nights we began to look inward again, like we had at the beginning of the COVID times, wondering what we were finding in ourselves and each other that is worth registering, remembering, bringing forward. As we lit Chanukah lights every night we noticed the light in each other.
And we noticed and began to tally our losses this year. The famous ones – Rabbi Sachs, Rabbi Steinsaltz, Rabbi Buxbaum – and the less famous ones: all the loved ones in our families and friendship groups. So many funerals over the year, all attendable on Zoom. So many funerals, as if the chiyut, the life force, had slightly loosened its grip on us.
We have been confined for 9 months now. We know more precisely where the dust settles in the corners of our homes. We feel our daily isolation and our struggle to keep going. We’ve relearned to cook. We venture outdoors timidly. We wear masks and try to convey smiles with the wrong half of our faces. We have new appreciation of quiet and rain and trees and touch.
In Torah, when Jacob dies, the story does not end. Joseph and his brothers keeps living. And their descendants. There is Egypt. Slavery. Liberation. Torah. The past that Jacob was observing and commenting on reached beyond that moment and into the future. And now, as we turn the page on the calendar, 2020 still reaches into this year and will reach far beyond. There is no slamming the door on it. No burning the calendar and walking away.
Nor should there be. It would be a disservice to all we have lived through, and to the nearly 2 million people worldwide who have died of COVID, for us to say ugh and move on, without collecting whatever grace there is to find.
There will be learnings and blessings (and mistakes) that we haven’t quite seen yet. Jacob gives over words to each of his sons, but Torah does not report the words of prophecy and blessing he gives to his daughters. Those remain in the white spaces of Torah, the spaces between the letters. They reveal themselves not through the text but through us.
And so we will patiently await whatever blessing, learning or prophecy has yet to emerge from the blank spaces in the text of this time. We will receive them with open hearts, with hope, as we continue to nurture the creativity, connection, humor, and endurance that we have already mined from the year we leave behind.
The image at the top employs “Jacob Blesses his Sons” by 20th Century American illustrator Harry Anderson.