The first pandemic wedding I did was for Allie Wilkinson and Scott Weiner. It wasn’t a wedding, really; just some “you sure you want to do this?” and a signing of their civil license. I wore slippers and a ratty pair of sweats, and signed the documents on the hood of my car using an old pen I found in the kitchen. Allie and Scott knew better--she wore a beautiful white dress, and he, a suit and bow tie. Before I ran back inside, they asked if I would take a picture. Of this? I must admit I thought. This isn’t their real wedding. They had postponed their “real” wedding to 2021. This was just some document signing.
I’m an idiot sometimes.
The second pandemic marriage document signing was for Regina Hogle and Mark Raugust. I got a little more dressed up for that one; I actually put on clean sweatpants, and we met in a local park rather than on my front stoop. We signed their documents on the day they were supposed to have been married, April 5, 2020.
And then there was a certain point in the spring in which I, in which any thinking person, realized that COVID was not going to just go quietly away, that we were in a different reality, and that this one required many new ways of living to which we were not accustomed. That we were, to quote an article by Juliette Kayyem, inside a new combination of “insanity” and “monotony”--and it’s not clear which one is worse.
I’m not much of a futurist, but I think it’s safe to say that for those of us who are alive today, there will forever be a “before” and an “after.” It’s tough to stand on this bima and not picture the last big event we had here at Sixth & I, the last time that this sanctuary was filled with you all standing shoulder-to-shoulder: Purim. The holiday on which we acknowledge that with one casting of lots, your whole world can turn on its head.
On Purim, we read one book so absurd that many rabbis think it was written as a parody: Esther. This afternoon, synagogues around the world will read a second biblical book with--and this is an actual phrase--parodic features: the Biblical book of Jonah, the reluctant prophet. As it begins:
The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come before Me”
To God, Jonah says: nope. Instead, he tries to escape, and hops the first boat to Tarshish, directly away from Nineveh. God, angry, causes a storm, tossing the boat violently, but yawn! Jonah’s tired. He does what many of us do when stuff gets hard, when we are being asked to do something different, or unpleasant - we deliberately numb ourselves. Even though the lives of all the people on the boat are at risk, Jonah goes to sleep below deck, in the belly of the boat, hiding from reality.
The sailors awaken him, to see if he perhaps can pray to his god to save the ship. “Heave me overboard,” Jonah tells the other sailors, “and the sea will calm down for you; for I know that this terrible storm came upon you on my account” (Jonah 1:12). Jonah is here choosing death, the BIG sleep, over acknowledging to God that Jonah has done something wrong, over facing what he doesn’t want to face.
Reluctantly and with great reservation, they throw him in. He falls into the water, and descends into the depths.
These last months of preparing for the high holy days, I’ve been a little envious of Jonah sinking down, down, down. I’m not interested in the drowning part, God forbid, but instead the feeling of release from a ship being tossed and turned in the storm, having lost all direction, from the tumult, the uncertainty. For while these COVID months have been inspiring in some ways, and we’ll get to that, they’ve also been profoundly discomposing, a series of Macgyvered “just good enough to get through this year” events. I love, for instance, the whole “You in a Pew” fundraising idea, and I’m grateful to the hundreds of people who donated, but you don’t need me to tell you it’s not the same as having 800 actual human beings packed into this space. So much of what we knew to be true has just fallen apart. The ways that we used to gather; gone. That we used to kiss and hug when we saw each other; gone. Handshakes, gone. That we separated work from home; also gone. That we traveled; gone. That we dated, that we taught or learned, gone, gone, gone.
When will it end? I want to say the following out loud, and clearly, because it’s true: there is no end in sight, if by “end” we mean a time when we go back to life as we lived it in February, 2020. That will never happen. To wait for it would be similar to being in the bowels of a ship as it gets tossed, turned, and flipped, and doing nothing. It’s ignoring reality. Even going back to a time akin to pre-COVID will take quite a long period of time. It will probably be Purim again before we can even have the conversation.
Shana Tova.
But new experiences, even the most terrible ones, perhaps especially the most terrible ones, can change us, if we let them. And that’s what I want to discuss this morning: what do we do in this new now? Forget “when everything goes back to normal.” This is our normal. There is only today.
As you probably know, after being thrown into the water, Jonah didn’t drown; he was swallowed by a big fish. And typically, I would think, three days inside a fish would be quite tedious. But the rabbis imagine that Jonah was quite busy, in fact. Apparently once inside, the fish told Jonah that it was not a great day for Jonah to have been swallowed; that in fact the fish was about to be eaten by a bigger fish, namely the Leviathan. So first Jonah saves the fish from the Leviathan (by showing the sign of his circumcision, no less), and then the fish and Jonah go on a world tour. They saw “the great river of the waters of the ocean...the paths of the Red Sea through which Israel...the pillars of the earth on its base...the lowest part of the netherworld...the palace of the Lord…” This odd couple had quite the joyous adventure, at the end of which Jonah finally was able to sit in quiet, talk to God, and do teshuva for abandoning Nineveh.
Like Jonah, many people with whom I’ve spoken these past few months have noted that in spite of the terror and decimation caused by COVID, in spite of the fact that we all would have preferred for this never to happen in the first place, there have been sparks of of discovery, of joy, of growth. There has been a shifting of priorities, time to build new hobbies and read long-awaited books, an ability to sit in our homes, look outward to the world and see it anew. “I’ve had regular zoom get-togethers with friends I haven’t spoken to for some time.” or, “I spend more time with my family!” “I don’t travel anymore, and I don’t miss it.” “I got a dog/cat/ferret!” “I work fewer hours.” “I’ve been wanting to move, and this moment seems like a perfect off-ramp.” Some have been working towards goals for when we “get up” from COVID, whatever that means--how lives will be different, how we won’t be as...whatever...as we were before.
And for some of us, our biggest accomplishment has been finishing every episode of every location of Real Housewives. We have been thwarted by the changes in how we live, the people we no longer see, the metro we no longer take. Everything feels newly dangerous - leaving the house, passing another person on the sidewalk, bringing groceries home. Why do we even need any “get-up-and-go” if there’s nowhere to go? We are like the former Israelite slaves in the desert, so fearful and unsettled by the new reality that we are willing to go back to Egypt, even if that life wasn’t a great one to begin with, just to be able to escape the uncertainty of this moment. Mired in loss, anxiety, ennui, and unlike Jonah, we can’t even see “outside” the belly of fish. All the articles in the world--and we’ve read all the articles--won’t give us the answer we want, which is “give me a date when this will be done.” This evening, I want to make room for us to be with the grief of what this pandemic has taken from our lives, with awareness of all the brokenness manifesting in the world right now, and how it might be affecting us.
Menachem Nochum Twersky of Chernobyl offers a teaching to help us in the moment when we feel inclined to tune out, to stay immersed in the waters and tune out. At our darkest and most difficult moments, he teaches, we should remind ourselves that God’s life-giving presence is absolutely everywhere. Even in a pandemic. All you need to do is be able to say--here is the kicker--Halo chai ani--am I not alive? U’mihu hachai’yut sheli, haloh ha-boreh yitbarach--and where can I find this aliveness that I am, this essence of me? Is it not in God’s presence? וזהו עיקר ההילוך וההנהגה הישראלית Zehu ikar hahiluch v’hahanhagat hayisraeli--The real truth of the Jewish people: no matter what happens to us, we know that we take pleasure and gratitude in being alive in this world. Aliveness is right where you are, even in the fallen or the hidden place. Even in the belly of the fish. (Source:
"Rabbi David Zeller - “Ha’Lo Chai Ani!”")
You are just as alive today as you were a year ago today. You may be limited geographically, relationally, professionally, but you are alive. The seeds of something new are in you today, as they were last year. When it is it's hardest, when we would rather give up, jump overboard, go to sleep, consider instead: am I not alive? Is this moment too not my life? Yes, yes it is.
We choose how to be in the now, however different and difficult it may be; we will choose how to prepare for whatever “after” may arrive. What will we carry out of the fish, if anything? What are the muscles/awareness that need to do our work? What do we need to put in place so that we can grow ourselves into whatever reality we have set? Whatever we choose, we’re the ones who will make it manifest.
If the process of teshuva teaches us anything, it’s that change and growth are always possible--and that they can happen anywhere. Jonah did teshuva in the belly of a fish; you can do it in your apartment. Human beings have the ongoing capability to repair, release and start again. Even in quarantine.
In just a few days, on Shabbat morning of Sukkot, Jews all over the world will read the book of Ecclesiastes, made famous by the Byrds in the 1960s with their song “To Everything, turn turn turn, there is a season, turn turn turn, and a time for every purpose under heaven....A time to be born, a time to die. A time to laugh, a time to weep.” But to be honest I’m more of a fan of the poet Yehuda Amichai’s take on the text, when he writes that:
A person doesn't have time in their life/to have time for everything. They don’t have seasons enough to have/a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes/Was wrong about that./A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment,/to laugh and cry with the same eyes,/with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,/to make love in war and war in love. And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,/to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest/what history/takes years and years to do.
In quarantine, we’re not dating in the same way, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t date at all. We’re not learning in person--but there are many ways to learn. We may feel anxiety about the unknown, but remember that anxiety is just a feeling, and like many feelings, it will pass. The secret to pulling ourselves out of the depths is not to stop to remember that we are alive. With all the feelings and all the potential, the good and the difficult. That this is our life, the only one we’ll get. What are we going to do about it?
One of the big questions over the last months has been asked by people who had been planning life-cycle events during the pandemic. Do I go ahead with my wedding, baby-naming, bar mitzvah, shiva even on Zoom? At first, I have to admit, I was on the side of “push it off.” You’re already living together; wait to get married. Your baby doesn’t officially need a naming in order to be considered Jewish; just do a naming ceremony later on. And let’s be honest, a Zoom wedding just isn’t the same. And with so many people suffering; what right do we have to joy?
I realize now that I got it all wrong. I treated these first weeks and months as if they somehow were not part of the space-time continuum, as if this time in the metaphorical belly of the fish was nothing more than something to get through, rather than an integral part of life’s adventure.
Today I respond differently to the emails when they come in. Celebrate your graduation now, hang out with that friend now. It’s not a zero-sum-game; allowing yourself a little joy doesn’t mean that you’re somehow taking it from someone else who needs it more than you. Marking an occasion now doesn’t mean that you forgo any right to celebrate in the future. Yes, Zoom is flat and yes, I know it would be better if you could be in the same room. Yes, it would be better if there wasn’t suffering in the world. But there is. And we have work to do. But we. Are. Alive.
This past August, I walked the grounds of the National Arboretum, searching for Danny and Emily’s wedding location. It was difficult to find, because it was only them, and me, and a videographer. I found Danny, in the middle of a DC summer, in his undershirt, putting up his own huppah only minutes before the ceremony was to begin.
At first, I was so sad for this couple, who was supposed to be married in October, and had to reschedule their wedding twice--and their location three times!--in order just to be married, with their parents on Zoom along with all the other guests. And then, like an MC Escher drawing, the same scene flipped on its head. “Halo chai ani!” Here was a human being building his own chuppah--is there any more beautiful representation of the home that he and his now-wife had already started to build? Take this, COVID. Here I am, American society teetering on the edge of fascism. Hineini. I am going to build--we are going to build--this huppah and this world. We will get knocked down, but we’ll get up again. Zehu ikar hahiluch v’hahanhagat hayisraeli. This is the ikar--the essence of what it means to walk with this people. This is the essence of what it means not just to get through life, but to be alive each and every day.