1022. Covid and chanting

 I finally got it last December, a mild case. It was almost a relief, no more waiting to see where on the Wheel of Ill Fortune I might land. The Pandemic Era for me consisted of three years in a fever dream, time not really time and normal activities, like going to the store, pixelated and in saturated color. 

It was awful, every moment.

My synagogue moved immediately to Zoom for services, now three times a day like the most traditional of congregations. I joined every one (because: what else was there to do?). I grew to love the little community of praying faces in squares, and the unique privilege of seeing, rather than backs of heads, the beauty of faces focused in prayer. (It was almost too intimate to watch; sometimes I turned away from the screen.) For months the only people I saw in actual person were the terrific barista down the block each morning for about a minute, a vital part of maintaining my sanity, and a friend that I walked with on Sundays along with her dog, always keeping a sensible few feet apart.

Since my synagogue straddles the border between progressive and traditional, we refrained on Zoom from the parts of the service that required a minyan. So Torah wasn’t chanted from a scroll during all those awful first months, just read from a chumash. I soon figured out a new Shabbat morning ritual for myself in the courtyard of my building, which is equipped with Adirondack chairs with and occasionally reliable WiFi. I’d get dressed in just a slightly fancier T-shirt than usual to mark the day and head downstairs with my laptop, siddur, and headphones. Through the gap between buildings I’d watch the sun dance around clouds as two rabbis and a hazzan prayed at each other, and the invisible rest of us, from opposite ends of a sanctuary that seats 800.

After nine months of this weirdness, our medical advisory board said it was safe to have a few more people in the sanctuary so that we could make a minyan and read from the actual sefer Torah. I volunteered. I missed chanting, and what else did I have to do, really?

1021. Three MORE years later

 aaaand… it’s been another 3 years.

I barely see the point in noting that the world has changed. It would be like putting up a billboard proclaiming that the sky is blue. I’m still here, healthy, sometimes happy, always grateful, distinctly older, and still often praying.

But not, as of the last two years, like I used to write about in this blog. It’s been a source of sadness for me, and big disappointment in some people I loved—still love—and respect—still do, but with a little less of my heart. But the situation is what it is (how I hate that phrase, but it fits). I want to be happy, not sad, and learn to place this thing in the small box where it belongs, rather than the big dump truck in the middle of the road of my life, cars honking “Get out of the way!” Sometimes the thing is so small that I barely see it. But other times it looms larger than the eyes of my cat when they’re 12 millimeters from mine as he wakes me with a paw on my cheek for food at 5AM.

I’ve been trying to write about what happened to help me understand, and feel better. Now that I’ve finally recovered the login info to this blog, don’t ask, and was also inspired by this beautifully introspective blog, it occurred to me that some kind of audience—probably no one, but even a theoretical audience—might motivate me to craft a few sentences to help me work out my issues. Recommitting here might also jumpstart another writing project that I’m determined to finish before I depart this earth at age 120 (or older).

So, a start. Maybe, maybe I’m occasionally back.

1020. Three years later

To paraphrase Leonard Cohen (I only steal from the best): 

There is a crack in the universe--as there’s supposed to be, on some level. And I will find the light in it. 

It feels like forever since I was here. It seems almost ridiculous to note that the world has changed an awful lot lately. I'm lucky. I'm healthy, loved, safe. My challenge is to remember this.  I continue to navigate the different and attempt to steer clear of the waves up there in my head. I fear (extrapolating from those waves at least) that over the past 19 months we humans became conditioned to expect that change is always bad, Well, it has been. But it isn't always. Maybe the beach were the waves wash up.

Wishing tzom kal (an easy fast) to any human reading this who observes the holiday. This year during the Vidui section I've chosen to gently tap and caress my heart instead of beating (gently, but still) with my fist. It's helped. We've already been beaten, It's time to stop that, even while acknowledging where we all missed the mark. 

1019. #BlogElul 29: Return

I know I'm skipping ahead—I still have to finish 25 through 28 (all begun, or at least considered!). But since I've actually written and posted more of these this year than ever before, I want to officially conclude, for now, with the last one. The other four will appear before Yom Kippur, a fine time to continue to be circumspect. As Pirkei Avot says, starting the task is the most important part.

By #BloggingElul, I've fulfilled my goal of returning to writing after some time away. I stopped blogging because other creative pursuits took up too much of that kind of energy, and they will continue to do so. But I'm glad to have proven to myself that I didn't forget how to string words together, and still have a great deal to say. A metaphor for my life, in general: I need to to not be timid or afraid to use my voice. Oh my goodness, that lesson applies to so many different thing right now.

Whomever may be reading this, I wish you and the entire Internet a good, sweet, happy, and healthy year ahead. May our our country return to some semblance of sanity very soon, and may the world be filled with peace even sooner.

1008. #BlogElul 18: Ask

What dare I ask God for at this time of year? My heart wants so much, so much of which is too petty to voice. I need to remember that God knows this, and so my job is to prioritize and push the really important questions to the fore so that God (meaning, the part of God mirrored in me) can try to make them come true.

1006. #BlogElul 16: Pray

I really do love to pray. As a kid, as I've written somewhere before in this blog, I never understood what the whole business was about. Adults murmured words to themselves in a strange language; then they sat down, mumbled some more, and did it all over again for a few hours. My father (and, I assumed, all men) engaged in this exercise at home before work, a tallit-draped silhouette standing by the window in my parents' Wedgwood-blue bedroom.

Whenever I tried the mumbling, or followed along with the English thees and thous, they were just words. God didn't answer. When I needed to talk to God, I did so in my heart and soul, with no hoary paragraphs getting in the way. I concluded that praying was an ability that people acquired as they became adults, like how to pay taxes or know when the eggs were about to run out.

Then I became an actual adult, and still couldn't do it. Singling in a choir felt like I was getting close, but the God I was addressing in the words of Bach and Brahms was, most of the time, a Christian one, which was very, very confusing.

When I stumbled upon my synagogue, and learned that my own tradition also had music and beautiful poetic translations that made a great deal of sense, prayer began to work. I hope and pray that I never stop learning.