Post by Rabbi Neil on Mar 17, 2023 19:41:45 GMT
Three years ago this week, as we started socially distancing, I gave a sermon on shomer negiah, the Orthodox practice of not touching individuals of the other sex unless you are married to them and, even then, only at certain times of the month. I shared how it can be a positive withdrawal that allows moments of physical contact to be unique and special. I said that it can create a unique and powerful connection with one other person, showing how they are reserved for each other even in the realm of touch. I also shared the negative aspect – how shomer negiah can lead to feelings of revulsion, particularly aimed at women. It can lead particularly to men having feelings of horror of being forced to be close to a woman, even though the leading halakhist of the modern age, Moshe Feinstein, clearly stated that there is no problem accidentally brushing up against a woman in a crowded place “because it does not contain any element of lust or desire.” Once you enforce physical distance between people, whether for patriarchal religious reasons or for life-saving medical reasons, it’s easy to go from distancing with love to inadvertent feelings of revulsion for being near to someone.
That was why, from the very beginning of the pandemic three years ago this week, we started focusing on ensuring that people remained connected. In less than two weeks, we…
took the Religious School online for all ages;
we started providing extra live online offerings, from Joy’s weekly sessions for children and for adults to Rabbi Jenny’s creative shacharit and Nefesh Shalom meditation sessions to Rabbi Nahum’s sessions on his book on the prophets;
we moved Shabbat services entirely online, we created innumerable slides so that we could use Zoom to enable people to see each other and chat when they couldn’t be in the same room as each other and could also see the liturgy at the same time, and when Rabbi Jenny was hit by COVID, we had guitar accompaniment pre-recorded by Fred embedded into the slides;
we started sending out a running commentary on Pirke Avot written by Rabbi Jenny and by me;
and we started leading Havdalah online every week from our home.
Within a matter of months, we also created It Takes A Village, an intergenerational support program for the youth in our community who needed increased social contact and replacements for their cancelled summer programs. The program saw older members of the community lead regular online sessions for free for the kids in our community from watercolors to pottery to birdwatching to so much more. We also started the pre-Shabbat messages from me that still have around a hundred people viewing each week. We started Elul Live, an online reflection first thing every morning Sunday to Friday in the run-up to the High Holy Days. We taught members how to write liturgy so that they could contribute to our prayer services and feel connected in a different way, particularly for the High Holy Days which were, especially in 2020, perhaps the loneliest services that I have ever led.
What we did through all of this was create connection at a time when it had been suddenly stripped from us. And we have kept creating connection in the three years since the start of the pandemic. But the threat of biological pollution remains, albeit, thankfully, less than before. That is why we set up the Reopening Committee to work out how to increase connection between our members in a safe way. It is interesting that we named the committee that, as though once we reopened everything would be okay. Now it is called the COVID Response Committee, and it is that committee’s continually adapting recommendations that have kept the number of COVID transmissions between community members onsite to a staggeringly low level. It has allowed us to have in-person services, large communal events, and has allowed the Religious School, now under Cantor Lianna’s leadership, to meet again in person.
In my sermon to an invisible community three years ago this week, I shared the difference between Shomer Negiah and the Social Distancing that we were all starting. I said that a time of potential biological pollution is a time where not touching is appropriate, whereas a time of potential ritual pollution is not. That is because biological pollution is based on actual science and preserving life, whereas ritual pollution is based on domination by men with no self-control or no care for the authentic expression of femininity with the intention of preserving patriarchy. The sermon was critical of intolerant male leadership in this country at the time and in the halachic world. In some sense, I’m still rather proud of that sermon, even though I now also see its naivety. I said that the pandemic that was just starting was “something that should totally unite us all, everyone across the planet.” It should have done, but it didn’t - it divided human society more than ever and exposed how profound the divisions between us already were. In that sermon, I said that “if this virus teaches us anything, surely it should be the realization that the way that we have inequitably structured our society makes some more liable to harm than others for deeply immoral reasons that are usually purely arbitrary and that are based solely on ignorance and prejudice. It should not be that we only realize this during times of crisis, but God help us all if we do not even realize this during this time of crisis.” That was totally correct – the percentage of American deaths from COVID that followed was outrageously high in the African-American, Hispanic and Native American communities compared with white Americans. But that knowledge hasn’t changed our society at all. It didn’t bring us to well-needed social change, to addressing the injustice inherent in American society. We did nothing about it, we do nothing about it other than shake our heads mournfully. What COVID taught us, in fact, is that American society is absolutely happy to leave vast swathes of the population behind. It taught us that the most fortunate, which is us, are happiest when we render the less fortunate invisible to our gaze. It’s not that we see those who are left behind and are potentially repulsed by their possible ritual contagion as in shomer negiah or are scared of their physical contagion as in pandemic social distancing, it’s that we don’t even see them at all. We don’t see them because their illness embarrasses us, it exposes our lack of caring. We don’t see them because if we did we would have to accept that we deserve good health no more than they deserve sickness, and that it could easily have been us in their situation. In the last three years, many of us have witnessed first-hand how quickly our society can render even the most visible people invisible. There’s an interesting connection that we absolutely did not know three years ago – that long-haul COVID and shomer negiah both have a way of rendering women in particular, who are most affected by both, invisible to the rest of society.
Jewish law (Talmud: Bava Kama 60b) is very clear that there must be times when we socially distance, especially during a time of plague. It tells us that in a time of plague, the people should gather their feet, meaning stay at home and socially distance from each other. It tells us that when there is a plague, people should not enter the synagogue alone because the Angel of Death leaves his implements there. It tells us that during a time of plague, people should not walk in the middle of the road because that gives permission for the Angel of Death to do the same. Our tradition clearly understands, then, that there is a time to socially distance for the public good, and not just out of risk of ritual pollution. What Jewish law doesn’t address is invisibility – if anything, it tends to reinforce it. Over the last three years, many of us have learned how quickly individual people, and indeed entire groups of people, can be rendered invisible in the sight of the larger collective.
And in the last three years, we have also had to learn the hard way our intimate and irrevocable connection with nature. Our society is predicated on a division between humanity and nature, specifically on the presumption that we can control nature, but the pandemic has once again exposed that lie. Our society’s need to control and dominate nature leads us to turn entire species invisible from our gaze and, frequently, from existence.
In three years, COVID killed over one million people in this country alone. At least twenty times that number have been rendered invisible due to long-haul complications or due to the essential need to remain socially distanced. I thought that all the activities from the start of the pandemic were to help members remain connected, but now I realize that on a deeper level they were an attempt to ensure that as few people as possible became invisible. Why have so many people flocked to our community during the pandemic? Maybe it’s because one fundamental role of religious community is to see people in a society that regularly renders them invisible. The ultimate act of seeing is in the Divine call in the Bible, and in the response, “Hineini, - Here I am!” But in order to be able to say Hineini, a person first needs a dialogue to have been opened. They need the call that sees them so that they can respond. We as a community have not always succeeded in making that call over the last three years, although we have definitely tried.
Over three years, the restrictions that have kept us safe have been able to slowly decrease, but the social and mental harm of the invisibility created by COVID remains. So, as we move forward into a world hopefully of fewer restrictions, let us simultaneously move into a world of truly seeing each other. Let us look around and see who is no longer here in-person and reach out to them. Let us think about friends with whom we used to interact but have not seen for a long time. Let us think about the times when we feel invisible, share them and work to change them to help ourselves and to help others. Let us work to create Hineini moments for ourselves and for others. And let this Shabbat start that process by being not just a moment of connection, but of being seen in the eyes of God and in the eyes of community, and let us say, Amen.
That was why, from the very beginning of the pandemic three years ago this week, we started focusing on ensuring that people remained connected. In less than two weeks, we…
took the Religious School online for all ages;
we started providing extra live online offerings, from Joy’s weekly sessions for children and for adults to Rabbi Jenny’s creative shacharit and Nefesh Shalom meditation sessions to Rabbi Nahum’s sessions on his book on the prophets;
we moved Shabbat services entirely online, we created innumerable slides so that we could use Zoom to enable people to see each other and chat when they couldn’t be in the same room as each other and could also see the liturgy at the same time, and when Rabbi Jenny was hit by COVID, we had guitar accompaniment pre-recorded by Fred embedded into the slides;
we started sending out a running commentary on Pirke Avot written by Rabbi Jenny and by me;
and we started leading Havdalah online every week from our home.
Within a matter of months, we also created It Takes A Village, an intergenerational support program for the youth in our community who needed increased social contact and replacements for their cancelled summer programs. The program saw older members of the community lead regular online sessions for free for the kids in our community from watercolors to pottery to birdwatching to so much more. We also started the pre-Shabbat messages from me that still have around a hundred people viewing each week. We started Elul Live, an online reflection first thing every morning Sunday to Friday in the run-up to the High Holy Days. We taught members how to write liturgy so that they could contribute to our prayer services and feel connected in a different way, particularly for the High Holy Days which were, especially in 2020, perhaps the loneliest services that I have ever led.
What we did through all of this was create connection at a time when it had been suddenly stripped from us. And we have kept creating connection in the three years since the start of the pandemic. But the threat of biological pollution remains, albeit, thankfully, less than before. That is why we set up the Reopening Committee to work out how to increase connection between our members in a safe way. It is interesting that we named the committee that, as though once we reopened everything would be okay. Now it is called the COVID Response Committee, and it is that committee’s continually adapting recommendations that have kept the number of COVID transmissions between community members onsite to a staggeringly low level. It has allowed us to have in-person services, large communal events, and has allowed the Religious School, now under Cantor Lianna’s leadership, to meet again in person.
In my sermon to an invisible community three years ago this week, I shared the difference between Shomer Negiah and the Social Distancing that we were all starting. I said that a time of potential biological pollution is a time where not touching is appropriate, whereas a time of potential ritual pollution is not. That is because biological pollution is based on actual science and preserving life, whereas ritual pollution is based on domination by men with no self-control or no care for the authentic expression of femininity with the intention of preserving patriarchy. The sermon was critical of intolerant male leadership in this country at the time and in the halachic world. In some sense, I’m still rather proud of that sermon, even though I now also see its naivety. I said that the pandemic that was just starting was “something that should totally unite us all, everyone across the planet.” It should have done, but it didn’t - it divided human society more than ever and exposed how profound the divisions between us already were. In that sermon, I said that “if this virus teaches us anything, surely it should be the realization that the way that we have inequitably structured our society makes some more liable to harm than others for deeply immoral reasons that are usually purely arbitrary and that are based solely on ignorance and prejudice. It should not be that we only realize this during times of crisis, but God help us all if we do not even realize this during this time of crisis.” That was totally correct – the percentage of American deaths from COVID that followed was outrageously high in the African-American, Hispanic and Native American communities compared with white Americans. But that knowledge hasn’t changed our society at all. It didn’t bring us to well-needed social change, to addressing the injustice inherent in American society. We did nothing about it, we do nothing about it other than shake our heads mournfully. What COVID taught us, in fact, is that American society is absolutely happy to leave vast swathes of the population behind. It taught us that the most fortunate, which is us, are happiest when we render the less fortunate invisible to our gaze. It’s not that we see those who are left behind and are potentially repulsed by their possible ritual contagion as in shomer negiah or are scared of their physical contagion as in pandemic social distancing, it’s that we don’t even see them at all. We don’t see them because their illness embarrasses us, it exposes our lack of caring. We don’t see them because if we did we would have to accept that we deserve good health no more than they deserve sickness, and that it could easily have been us in their situation. In the last three years, many of us have witnessed first-hand how quickly our society can render even the most visible people invisible. There’s an interesting connection that we absolutely did not know three years ago – that long-haul COVID and shomer negiah both have a way of rendering women in particular, who are most affected by both, invisible to the rest of society.
Jewish law (Talmud: Bava Kama 60b) is very clear that there must be times when we socially distance, especially during a time of plague. It tells us that in a time of plague, the people should gather their feet, meaning stay at home and socially distance from each other. It tells us that when there is a plague, people should not enter the synagogue alone because the Angel of Death leaves his implements there. It tells us that during a time of plague, people should not walk in the middle of the road because that gives permission for the Angel of Death to do the same. Our tradition clearly understands, then, that there is a time to socially distance for the public good, and not just out of risk of ritual pollution. What Jewish law doesn’t address is invisibility – if anything, it tends to reinforce it. Over the last three years, many of us have learned how quickly individual people, and indeed entire groups of people, can be rendered invisible in the sight of the larger collective.
And in the last three years, we have also had to learn the hard way our intimate and irrevocable connection with nature. Our society is predicated on a division between humanity and nature, specifically on the presumption that we can control nature, but the pandemic has once again exposed that lie. Our society’s need to control and dominate nature leads us to turn entire species invisible from our gaze and, frequently, from existence.
In three years, COVID killed over one million people in this country alone. At least twenty times that number have been rendered invisible due to long-haul complications or due to the essential need to remain socially distanced. I thought that all the activities from the start of the pandemic were to help members remain connected, but now I realize that on a deeper level they were an attempt to ensure that as few people as possible became invisible. Why have so many people flocked to our community during the pandemic? Maybe it’s because one fundamental role of religious community is to see people in a society that regularly renders them invisible. The ultimate act of seeing is in the Divine call in the Bible, and in the response, “Hineini, - Here I am!” But in order to be able to say Hineini, a person first needs a dialogue to have been opened. They need the call that sees them so that they can respond. We as a community have not always succeeded in making that call over the last three years, although we have definitely tried.
Over three years, the restrictions that have kept us safe have been able to slowly decrease, but the social and mental harm of the invisibility created by COVID remains. So, as we move forward into a world hopefully of fewer restrictions, let us simultaneously move into a world of truly seeing each other. Let us look around and see who is no longer here in-person and reach out to them. Let us think about friends with whom we used to interact but have not seen for a long time. Let us think about the times when we feel invisible, share them and work to change them to help ourselves and to help others. Let us work to create Hineini moments for ourselves and for others. And let this Shabbat start that process by being not just a moment of connection, but of being seen in the eyes of God and in the eyes of community, and let us say, Amen.