What is Stronger than Death?

Day 10 in solitary confinement as I wait out my Covid sentence… 

 Every day since before this began I’ve had a ritual of taking a daily inhale of hot paprika, just to confirm I could still whiff its spicy kick.  Last Thursday, day 5, I smelled nothing.  Now that is a weird experience–to know intellectually that something smells while one’s own olfactory sensors suggest otherwise.  It makes me think of all of how fortunate we are to smell, see, hear, touch and taste.  Smell is the most spiritual of senses, the one that taps into memories and moods with a subtle intensity.   I hope it comes back soon. Happily, at least for now I can still taste (and see and hear and touch).

I don’t have any other symptoms anymore–no fever, no cough, no blue fingers and toes, no nausea.  Nothing except a fairy tale-like exhaustion.  It’s not sleepy, exactly, but rather just a sort of bone tiredness that doesn’t go away. So I read and read, novels and nonfiction about foreign affairs and books on how to write fiction.  And then I fall back asleep, sometimes to garish technicolor dreams that stay with me when I wake. 

On Yom Kippur, I tried to get through most of the Yom Kippur prayers from my bed.  It seemed both sacrilegious and the best I could muster.

Who shall live and who shall die?  Who by plague?  Who by fire? Who?

Last Yom Kippur seems so impossibly long ago, as fanciful and far away as one of my fitful dreams.  I think back to the before time, before masks, before fear, before sheltering in place, before the global economic crumbling, as unexpected as a thousand World Trade Centers collapsing inward over, and over again. Before we had days and days and days at home.

Since early March, I’ve spent a lot of time counting days.  First I counted the days in the month from Purim, when Covid was just beginning, to Passover, because surely Passover would bring some respite.  Then I counted the 49 days of the Omer, from Passover to Shavuot, by which time I thought the plague would surely end.  However, that counting culminated not in the end of the plague but in the shooting of George Floyd and the beginning of a much larger movement. 

As June began, we made the decision to move forward with our plans to come to Israel, plague or no plague, and I began counting again, this time up to the date of our departure.  But that counting was tragically interrupted by the shocking passing of Yonim Schweig z’l, as out of the blue as any tragedy could ever be.  And so we counted the 7 days of Shiva, and then the rest of the Three Weeks, the strange period where G-d turns his face the other way.

In early August, we spent two long weeks packing up, and landed in Israel, where we resumed counting again.  Fourteen days in quarantine for me and the children, followed by fourteen days of quarantine for K, followed by a few days “normalcy”, only to be launched back into a counting again, on Rosh Hashanah, this time the three weeks of a national lockdown as well as the dates of my own infection.

The irony is, with all this counting, my calendar has been nearly empty for a long time, save for zoom meetings. The sports practices and doctor’s appointment and orthodontist appointments and meetings with clients have long disappeared. I count the days, but not the hours.  Time no longer moves in the staccato beats of appointments but in the river flow of each day to the next. Seamless, quiet, maybe lethal.  

For the first few days of Covid, I was just so fatigued I could do little but lie in bed. I thought some about the fortitude of my three youngest kids, who have more or less fended for themselves for the past week.  We spend so much time parenting, and then suddenly, with K in Jerusalem to stay safe and me locked in my room, I am mostly hoping that the thousands of hours we’ve invested in parenting them will somehow serve them well as they parent each other and themselves.  (And of course we talk with them over phone and zoom, but there is only so much parenting of teens one can do when mediated by a device).

Thankfully, the kids don’t seem to feel too abandoned. My sister and her family offer unending support from the house next door, including room service delivery three meals a day to the doors of the three of us with Corona.  They have kept my kids entertained and on task on the days when school appears on their screens.  Talia even provided me a lengthy explanation about how she now has two moms, me and Abby Mommy, and she seems almost comically nonplussed about transferring parental responsibility to her aunt and uncle.  

And I, in my white room, with a white mirror, white bed stands, a white bureau, and two large windows that see mostly sky, sometimes wonder how long this disembodied existence will last. I figure, ruefully, that this is about as close to a prison experience as I’ll likely ever have, although my cell is much brighter and the walls more recently painted than a prison cell.  Also at this point our main concern is keeping the 7 year old out, rather than me in.

*****

It’s hard to overstate the ubiquitousness of Corona here right now.  My eldest nephew, who is in the army, just got released from two weeks of isolation because Covid was spreading so rapidly in his unit they sent all the soldiers into isolation.  My second nephew got sent home early from yeshiva because a few of his peers had it. Almost half of Max’s mechina has it.  All of the children’s schools have children who have it.  Talia’s Hebrew teacher just wrote that she has to suspend lessons because she too has it, and my friend’s sister and niece have had it.  

And yet, while over 233,000 Israelis have gotten Covid in 2020, most cases are, like mine, mild. Only 1,500 people have actually died from it.  The fatality rate is still around .6%; even lower than that of the Bay Area, which is the lowest fatality rate in a major city in the United States.   And of those who have died, at least several months ago about half were over 80 years old, in a country where the life expectancy is 82. I say this not to be cruel or hard hearted, but just to acknowledge that most of us, if we are lucky, will die in our 80s. 

Experts have said that the mortality is about .2% for people under 80.  As my sister points out, though,  the key metric is not the people who are going to die, it’s the people who are sick enough to need to go to the hospital.   And as that number rises–right now it’s around 750 across the country; it may double this week–more health care workers get sick, and more sick need treatment, and the number of available beds and ventilators dwindles to zero, and the whole situation is a horrific nightmare.

So I sit here in an all white room, a caged animal, only able to wash, and pace, and rest. 

What is one to do with all this malaise, the day after Yom Kippur?  

I keep thinking about the leitmotif of yesterday’s liturgy, Avinu Makeinu.  Avina Malkeinu–Our Father, our King. This is one of the central tenets of Jewish theology, perhaps of all monotheistic theologies.  It suggests that each and every one of us has the possibility of a parent-child closeness with the Divine, with the King of Kings.  It doesn’t say that we will live in a world of only happiness, where we will only know good.  

It offers no promise that the sky will always be sunny, or that everyone will be well-off, or that tragedies won’t occur. If Jewish history has taught us anything, it is that the road will be flanked with pain and suffering as well as with moments of glory, kindness and beauty. 

The Yom Kippur prayers, filled with allusions to the Temple Service, rife with collective responsibility for our witting and unwitting sins, end on a cleansing note, with the collectively imagined belief that our prayers have been heard and in some fashion answered.  This year, as I whispered the closing prayers to myself, serving as both my own prayer leader and my own congregation, I don’t know what to think.  Or rather, I am aware that prayers may be heard and answered, just not in the way we would like.

I’ve been thinking about a piece of Talmud I recently came across that has been helpful to me, as I adjust to the new reality of these past few months, where fires and plagues have become the norm, where we no longer take for granted food, or jobs, or that our house will be there in the morning and not in a burnt ruble, or that the sun will even rise.

It is taught in a baraita that Rabbi Yehuda….would say: Ten strong entities were created in the world, one stronger than the other. A mountain is strong, but iron, which is stronger, cleaves it. Iron is strong, but fire melts it. Fire is strong, but water extinguishes it. Water is strong, but clouds bear it. Clouds are strong, but wind disperses them. Wind is strong, but the human body withstands it. The human body is strong, but fear breaks it. Fear is strong, but wine dispels it. Wine is strong, but sleep drives it off. And death is stronger than them all, but charity saves a person from death, as it is written: “And charity delivers from death” (Proverbs 10:2). 

(Baba Batra 10A)  

There is a desire to cling, in times like these, to what we own; to cling to our homes and treasured objects, to cling to our habits, whether or not they serve us well.  Most of the time, they give us comfort and calmness and beauty.  But every once in a while, there’s a year like this past one, and the fragility of all of those material things just dissipates.  Then what do we do?

The only thing that stays with us, according to the Talmud, the only thing stronger than fire and water and fear and even death, is that which we give away.  It’s counter-intuitive, really.  How can what endures be only what we give away?  My first thought was that the big kicker at the end of this passage, the thing that saves a person from death, would be love.  Wouldn’t you think that?

But turns out tradition takes a skeptical view of love–not that in its purest form it isn’t the most powerful force in the world, but that it is easily corrupted. In Orchot Tzadikkim, the Path of the Righteous, written in Germany in the 15th century, there’s a powerful exploration of the pitfalls of love. Love for our children can make us blind to the importance of disciplining them; love for money can make us dishonest in business; love for family can lead to nepotism, love for women can lead someone to  ‘gaze at them constantly and speak disgraceful things and come to immoral conduct.’, love for honor can lead us to crave public recognition, and love for long life can turn us into cowards, afraid to defend what is right if it means risking our life or reputation.

So given all these pitfalls, I’m inclined to think more about the Talmudic view; that not only does receiving charity help save the recipient from death, but the act of giving restores a sense of agency to all of us who feel so bereft of agency these days.

At least for now, I can’t leave my room.  I can’t even see my husband or children.  I’m too weak to talk to people over zoom, and I get exhausted with the slightest exertion.

And yet, by opening up my own storehouses to those who have less, I am reminded now just what I have, but how by sharing, I can perhaps lighten the load of others.   I am not worried about paying rent or having shelter, concerns that millions of middle class people now find themselves facing.  I was particularly moved by this video shared by Leket, a food rescue organization here in Israel.  It takes us into the wrenching story of an Israeli opera singer who has recently found herself destitute. 

So as we move into a new season, and new year, I invite all of us to give audaciously, and more importantly, frequently, so that the artists and coaches and nonprofit employees and after-school care providers and restaurant workers and hospitality workers and taxi and uber drivers and all the people around the world whose livelihoods have suddenly dried up can also make it through.

I don’t think tzedakah–charity/justice–is the only thing that helps in times like these.  Prayer, and introspection, and noticing small blessings, and kindness to friends and family are also salves.  But there is something about giving money, not just love, but actual financial support, that tugs the spiritual into the material and creates a connection between us and those less fortunate.  And that sense of connection, of agency, of interdependence, seems more important now than ever before.