Image: A family huddles together wearing surgical masks, while the coronavirus hovers in the background. (Mohamed Hassan / Pixabay)
What? Are we still slogging through this pandemic? Surely it was going to be over by now!
The bad news about Covid-19 is becoming clearer to more and more of us here in the USA. Yes, we are still slogging through it. And no, it isn’t going to be “over” anytime soon or maybe at all. No amount of wishing or happy talk will change that fact.
What CAN change the evil decree, as it says in the High Holy Days liturgy we’ll be reading (over Zoom, or facebook, or in our homes) in September?
The liturgy tells us that “prayer, repentance, and charity” are the recipe for changing the evil decree. But how can that be so? What about science?
Science has its place. Science can give us the information we need to choose our actions. Science can develop treatments and vaccines. But science alone cannot change our behavior, and science alone will not defeat the coronavirus.
Prayer – The Hebrew word for prayer, tefillah, actually translates in English as “to judge oneself.” If we want to “defeat Covid,” we each need to have some serious conversations with ourselves and with God about our behavior. Am I truly doing all I can to avoid spreading Covid-19 by wearing a mask and staying 6 feet away from anyone who isn’t in my immediate household? Or is life one little exception after another? Is there more I could do? Am I pressuring anyone to “loosen up” a bit because I want something?
This may seem to you to be an odd definition of prayer, but many of our understandings from English words are heavily colored by Christian understandings of the words. In the Jewish understanding, prayer can be talking to God, but one does not need to be “religious” or even “spiritual” to pray. Praying can be putting into words what we need and what we feel, or saying words from the tradition and having our own reactions to them. Either way, we pray best when we are totally honest. That’s when prayer can work on our souls and our lives and produce real change.
Repentance – The Hebrew for repentance is teshuvah. It’s more than being sorry. It’s more than a promise to change. I like to say that teshuvah is the Jewish Cure for Guilt, because it is a very specific process for change, or as the root of the word implies, turning things around. We need to make teshuvah about individual behaviors (see “Prayer” above) and we need to make teshuvah as a country. Covid-19 has laid bare so many of the systemic problems in our society: health care based on employment, racial and economic inequities, the undervaluation of essential workers, and the evils of food and housing insecurity, to name but a few. If we hope to “defeat Covid,” we have to address those issues, make changes, and see the process through. Wishing and polite conversation will not do the job. And no, it will not be cheap — this is going to cost tax dollars. The alternative is to have this monster virus circulating indefinitely, fed by reservoirs of infection in the poorest parts of our society.
Systemic change of this sort has to begin with individuals, but it ultimately must involve speaking truth to power. We need political engagement while insisting that our leaders do what is good for ALL of us, not just for their wealthier constituents. And yes, some of us will feel that as loss: losses in tax bills, losses in power, losses in prestige. It will mean seeing gains for some whom we might judge undeserving, but remember: the virus doesn’t care whether someone is deserving or undeserving. It just sees a vulnerable target and reproduces itself.
Charity – If we are speaking Jewish, that’s tzedakah, which is like the other two a very specific concept, not the English “charity.” It is linked to tzedek, justice. To get through the immediate crisis, we have to be willing, individually, to open our purses and give to the institutions that support the vulnerable. We may need to take care of vulnerable relatives with a check or with housing. We may need to ask for help, either for ourselves or for someone else. None of those things are cheap, but then, neither is human life.
And as I said in the section on repentance, as a society we have to begin caring about justice. Justice is not revenge. We need to care about what’s fair, and “I keep all the marbles, they are mine Mine MINE” is not fair or just. We need to stop teaching the idea that “the one who dies with the most toys, wins.” We need to lose “greed is good.” We need to think more creatively than “lock them up.”
Covid-19 is offering us a lesson: each of us is linked to the other. My fate is inextricably linked to that of every other person on the planet. We breathe the same air, we exchange the same micro-organisms, we drink the same water, and no resource is truly unlimited. Whether I like it or not, we are linked. I can choose to see you with compassion, or I can hate your guts, but the virus does not care. It will make its home in any of us, and some of us will suffer horribly for it — and there’s no real test for who is who. A healthy young Broadway actor died after weeks in the hospital. An elderly person with risk factors survived. So let’s not kid ourselves.
Tefilah, teshuvah, and tzedakah can change the evil decree. It isn’t the easy path. But as far as I see, it is the only path that goes where we want to go.
Thank you Rabbi. Your words are well warranted as always.
well said and always timely, Shabbat Shalom
I am waiting for my test results now. Working in animal health, I have from the beginning been aware of and careful about contagion. I’ve been counting up the contract tracing that can be done if I’m positive: work, easy. The grocery, impossible. The eye doctor? not easy but not impossible.
I’m being grateful that I live alone and don’t need to protect anyone from me. I’m not sick enough to need nursing, but sick enough to find the thought of 14 days in quarantine quite delightful. One thing about fever, it makes you too fuzzy to worry much.
Thank you for your direct and important perspective. Caught up in our individual ‘groundhog days’ we easily forget that even if we cannot go outside of the box, we can think outside of it. The virus may be in the air but maybe our prayers and visions that show us how connected we are, whatever form they are in may be a ‘vaccine’ of whole other order.