Well, dear friends, we have reached the two-year mark. It was Erev Shabbat, March 13th, two years ago, that we realized that elbow-bumps were not a COVID-prevention plan, and upon advice from our congregational doctors, we cancelled our in-person Messengers of Peace Chant Circle, and Atzilah and I tried, not very successfully, to stream a chant circle on Facebook from the otherwise empty sanctuary. By the following Friday night, we were already on Zoom for the first time. Within a couple weeks, everyone understood more or less how to use the technology, and everyone was showing up in record numbers.
Since then we have held roughly 105 remote Shabbat evening services. We have been together every week. Every week. Unprecedented in Ner Shalom’s history, our having been a twice-a-month kinda place.
And here we still are. Our constancy is remarkable – an obvious digging in and grabbing hold of each other, even without any touching at all.
I remember viscerally those early days of pandemic lockdown. The anxiety. The not-knowing. The sense of emergency. I remember the unity we felt – we were suddenly connected with people around the globe. We were all in it together, all vulnerable – no vaccines, no treatments, no obvious leadership, no decent masks, no idea how long COVID might or might not hang in the air. It was a frightening time and also an encouraging taste of what global harmony might feel like.
We went online and watched Europeans singing on balconies and applauding healthcare workers. We ourselves went out nightly at 8, sometimes right during this service, and howled like coyotes in order to touch our neighbors with our voices.
I look back at my drashot from those early months. How I tried to make sense of my experience and our experience. In each drash it was my practice to articulate how many days it had been since we went into lockdown, turning that counting into another Jewish time-counting practice: the Omer, the Days of Awe, the Lockdown.
(For your information, as of today it is 723 days.)
I looked at those sermons this week. In them I see myself noticing what was stirring for me. The fear. The loss. The weight of grief. The untimely deaths of so many loved ones, not only from COVID but from other conditions to which an element of despair had been added as an aggravating factor.
I noted the collective cultural soul-searching that seemed to be unfolding. I spoke my fear that lessons learned would not stay learned, and my hope that on some level they would. I reflected about what it was like when anxiety took up residence in my home as an unwelcome guest, haunting every room, answering my emails, and judging me for my scant supply of toilet paper (click here). I noticed our grief, both actual and anticipatory (click here). I shared my dreams and how they were full of the shapelessness of time (click here). I noticed how the animals and trees outside were beckoning me to step not only out of my house but out of the narrow confinement of human consciousness (click here). I took stock of how haunted I felt by the way loved ones of mine and loved ones of others in this room were dying, and how they were not allowed visitors in the hospital, and how we couldn’t attend their funerals; and how this was giving me flashbacks to the AIDS epidemic, with armies of lovers barred from ICUs and banned from their beloveds’ funerals (click here).
Can you remember all this? Just two years ago? Hard, intense times. Do you remember how in that first year justice couldn’t wait and white people woke up – at last – to stand in support of black lives. And how that surge of anger and action happened despite pandemic and because of pandemic, because suddenly, finally, nothing felt as urgent as justice. Do you remember? We were not just sitting in our houses disconnected. We were shopping for each other. And calling each other. We had a presidential election. We had an insurrection. All of this before vaccines allowed any of us to breathe easier.
I look back at those early days of the pandemic and I notice how adept we became – and still are – at living on two levels simulatneously. On one level we were and are dealing with what is being thrown at us – disease, war, politics, climate. And on another level we are – how to express this? – reaching out and up and beyond the circumstances. Trying to make meaning. Trying to see a bigger picture. Trying to connect globally, support each other, care for each other; trying to think in new, creative ways. In other words, we are responding on a physical and worldly level, but we are also responding on a soul level.
I am proud of that. Proud of us. We are living on the level of circumstance, of conditions. And we are simultaneously living at an enhanced spiritual level, in which we respond to and transcend those conditions, trying to reshape them from another level of consciousness. In Kabbalistic terms, I might say that we are all embedded in the physical world of Asiyyah, but we also are surfing in the soul world of Atzilut.
There is a hint about this paradigm in this week’s Torah portion, Vayikra. The portion is is the opening of the Book of Leviticus, a book about how to be holy, how to cultivate and tend holiness in the world. And there is an anomaly in the very first Hebrew word of the portion.
The opening word, vayikra, means “and God called,” although it doesn’t use the word “God.” God is implied. Vayikra, “and God called.” But in Torah, the final letter of the word, a simple silent aleph, is written small, miniaturized, and raised like a superscript or an exponent. As if the aleph were trying to be there and not there at the same time. And without the aleph, the word would read vayiker, “and it happened.”
There is some kind of quantum fluctuation happening here in this first word of the Book. The aleph, winking in and out, winking at us to read the word both ways. Two meanings sharing one textual space. One reading meaning, pardon my language, “shit is happening,” and one meaning “the Divine is calling.”
As that tiny aleph blinks in and out, we experience a simultaneity of circumstance and call. In other words, the call we feel to aspire to something bigger, more intentional, more compassionate, more global, more Divine, does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in the muck of our actual conditions. The prophets of Torah didn’t get the Divine call while sitting around under their fig trees while all was well with the world. The call was embedded in, overlaid on, events, circumstances of war, of slavery, of crisis.
Every call happens in a circumstance, and every circumstance has, if we listen for it, a call.
It’s been two years. We are two years into this pandemic. We are two weeks into this newest war. We are however many days, weeks, years, centuries, uncountable time, into all the conditions that form our current circumstances on the planet.
And we are now heading into a time of some reemergence from our COVID cocoons, at least for those of us who have been able to benefit from the vaccines. We will be seeing each other more in shul and at seder and over coffee. We will hug and hold hands. But let us not stop being prophets just because we are getting some of the goodies back. Let us not sweep the pain we feel or the revelations we’ve received under the rug of “normalcy.”
Circumstance and Call. Event and insight. Torah tells us that these things happen in the same moment, in the same place, virtually in the same utterance. Vayikra – we are called. Vayiker – it is all happening. Let us continue to live and meet each other in both these realms. We have spent two years refining our ability to live in our conditions while responding to the Divine call arising from them. Maybe this is what the cultivating of holiness requires. Maybe this is the stuff of prophecy.
Vayiker – it is, all the time, happening.
Vayikra – and we are, all the time, being called.