I Asked A Rabbi How He Survived the Pandemic
We can all learn something from his wisdom.
Two years ago, I would have told you I was allergic to all organized religion — bring-an-EpiPen-to-church allergic. However, I’ve come to believe that religion has more to offer than dogma. It’s the reason why I’m currently doing graduate work at a divinity school. Religion offers something that science cannot: a way to orient oneself towards suffering, uncertainty, and death. In reaching out to a rabbi during the pandemic, I hoped that a religious leader might offer a perspective on how one might navigate the tragedies of the past year, with or without God(s).
Our rabbi, Marc, lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Physically, he resembles a heartier version of Grandpa Joe from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but with the grounding presence that you might seek out in a mentor. But don’t let his appearance fool you. Over the past year, he’s found joy in exploring on his bike. When he’s on his bike, there is no worry. There are only the cars that whoosh past, and his breath.
A widower of three years, Marc lives alone. He has three children, whom he hasn’t seen since before the pandemic began over a year ago. During our conversation, two of them called to check in. It’s easy to gather how much he is loved.
A grandfather clock clangs nine times at the beginning of our interview — “excuse the old-fashioned technology,” he jokes. His boisterous laugh melts my Zoom anxiety. What follows are his words.
I think the hardest times were near the beginning of the pandemic. We lost several congregants to COVID. One in the Southwest, and one in the Twin Cities. We had no idea when the bodies could be brought back to Milwaukee for the burial. There were very few flights, and the only way remains can be carried are on commercial flights or on passenger trains. And since so much had been cut back, these poor families couldn’t even schedule a funeral.
Traditionally, Jews are buried within a relatively short time after death. It used to be 24 hours, now maybe 48, sometimes three days. Two of the funeral directors, one from Connecticut and one from Minnesota, made the determination they couldn’t wait any longer to schedule the transfer of the remains. They took their hearse, and they drove it all the way here. That sometimes took over a week by the time the body came back so that we could place it, the body, in its final resting place in the ground. I have never felt such pain.
After somebody dies in our tradition there’s an expression — we sit shiva. In Judaism there’s kind of a progressive order that brings you back to life. There’s the period of time between the death and the funeral, where you’re one kind of a mourner, if you will. And, once burial takes place, you enter into another stage of mourning where we, your community, are supposed to slowly bring you back to life.
Once burial has taken place, the people who were with you at the cemetery form two lines and you pass between them leaving. In a sense, it forces you to leave the grave where sometimes you wanna be with your loved one. And it forces you to come back and get you back to your home where we gather with you. And the community is supposed to provide for you during all this time. And it’s their presence, sometimes their words, that begin to help that move back to life.
So that expression sitting shiva is for those seven days you sit close to the ground, you really only get up when you have to use the bathroom, or when you’re going to pray. You’re obligated to pray, as a Jew, three times a day, and so the community is there to do that with you too. And so we’ve been doing these kinds of gatherings where we leave the Zoom open. We’ve accommodated now hundreds of people in Zoom if we have to. And people who otherwise could never be with a family can now be there.
But when someone is in mourning, when someone is in tears, sometimes just being able to hug, to hold a hand. . . we can’t do that. There’s an inability to be with people as they are walking through the valley of the shadow. Being able to really be there and to look into somebody else’s eyes. And there’s so many other losses. It’s the loss of the human contact every day. I haven’t seen my kids now or my grandkids in, what is it now, for my grandkids now it’s 15 months. For my kids, the last kid I saw was a year ago December. I’ve been using my landline much more than I ever thought I’d be doing.
One of the hardest things for me has been when we gather — the most important Jewish holiday is the Sabbath. That was, in many ways, Judaism’s gift to the world, or at least to the Western world. And so when we greet the Shabbat on that Friday night, that’s when we should be gathered with other people. Together over the table, which is kind of the closest thing to an altar since we don’t have altars anymore.
I’ve sat with people on the screen in front of me as we’ve all had our separate meals to try to recreate the experience of being together. But it’s a huge loss not to share a meal together. That may be the hardest on Friday evenings and Saturdays at lunch, when we would usually gather after synagogue. There is a profound loneliness through this. And I believe that’s true for all of us.
So, how do you then build a sense of community when everyone is isolated? How do you create it on that day when we want more than anything to be with each other and, through each other, to come closer to God? How do we do it over Zoom? We had to refigure and rethink everything we do. I’m speaking as a congregational rabbi, whose job it is to help my congregants come closer to God, to come closer to each other, to come closer to the selves that they and God wish they were.
The notion of breathing, which carried through much of what I did over Zoom on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, was in part because we were all afflicted with the whole notion of “I can’t breathe,” whether it’s looking at the pandemic, whether it’s looking at so many Americans, particularly black Americans, whose lives have been threatened by a power structure for so long. . .
There’s a book called Breath, and for some reason the author is escaping me. He said about six hundred and seventy million times in our life we go like this [breathes deeply] so what are you gonna do with the remaining number of breaths you have left? One of the most important things I still believe is to say “thank you”. And I think people are more aware of that now. Because we’ve all lived under the possibility of death.
So what are you gonna do with the remaining number of breaths you have left? One of the most important things I still believe is to say “thank you”.
I believe a great miracle happens every morning when you get up and you can breathe. That itself is a miracle. We usually take it, of course, for granted — which is why on old alarm clocks or on my phone I can always push snooze when the alarm goes off. Because I don’t wanna get up in the morning. I wanna sleep in more. But getting up is a miracle. That, to me, is the importance of prayer: recognizing the gift of life every day. And our task is to do everything that we can to preserve it, to praise God with every breath, and to ensure that every one of God’s children has that breath of life.
Breathing also, I believe, is very much how we praise God. It’s our name for God, what you might know as the Tetragrammaton. That’s the technical term for our four-letter name of God. Which, in Hebrew, is spelled yodh he waw he and, in prayer, it’s pronounced a certain way. Often other people have tried to translate it as Jehovah or Yahweh. But, when you look at the letters that form it, yodh he waw he, it basically is the sound of breathing. So every breath you take, that, of course, is the greatest gift we have from God. It’s the gift of breath, of being alive.
