Shalom y'all,
It feels like a million years since the last time I wrote a Schrift article. I was writing about Purim and the value of bringing people together to strengthen our community. The kids were making hamentaschen and packing shalach manot for members of our community. The Purim party was close behind and while we were planning for a full house, we were talking about what might happen if COVID-19 crossed into our space. Jewish life is full of opportunities and obligations to be present with one another. Now that Purim has passed and COVID-19 has, in fact, become part of all our lives, bringing people physically together is fraught with danger and everything we know about doing the most basic things is being questioned and reconsidered. How do we pray together? Study together? We have even been asked to consider how we wash our hands.
Cancelling everything was unsettling. It created a huge gap in our lives that we weren't really sure how to fill. There is a real advantage to trying to keep a schedule as close to the previous schedule as possible. After all, won't we more easily fall back into it when this is all over? But that gap also opened up an exciting opportunity. We now have the advantage of stopping to reconsider what is meaningful. How many times in life have you been given an opportunity to hit a pause button on your life, knowing everyone else is doing the same thing? I never have. Even the times when things changed so drastically that I was reeling from it, life went on for others around me and eventually I had to run to catch up. This time, we're all hitting pause together. Yes, it's scary. Yes, it is creating challenges for people. But we're all in it together. Whether it is the neighbor you walk your dog by each day or the Facebook friend you rarely see anymore, we are all affected by the same pandemic. We all have something in common.
This pandemic has given us each a chance to define our community and the things in which we choose to participate as broadly or as narrowly as we want. To this end, I am working towards giving the Beit Sefer families as many opportunities as possible to connect their lives in Jewish ways. The virus has revealed a collective hope and interconnectedness that has always been the source of our strength. All Jews are beholden to one another and as our physical separation grows, we are throwing out lifelines to maintain the connections. Some organizations we work with to create Jewish educational programming for families have opened up and shared content in a multitude of ways. Jewish families suddenly have daily opportunities to connect to story times, song circles, craft ideas and virtual moments in Jewish time. In addition, we have more local connections, like opportunities to do mitzvot for families here and virtual connections with friends. Like many other things in life right now, we have the opportunity to choose what lines to grab, when and where to connect, to try some things on for size and discard what doesn't fit us personally. Hopefully, as we will walk out of this challenging time, we will do so stronger and more connected to the values and traditions that define not only us as a people, but our individual Jewish lives.
L'shalom,
