Quarantine and the Things That Can Be Seen in the Rain

 

I spent much of yesterday at Moorefields Eye Hospital waiting while my daughter underwent eye surgery – she’s fine, by the way. But, you know, general anaesthetic and all that. It turns out that an eye hospital is an interesting space in which to think about what it means to see.    

And then there is this mess of Covid complication. Here some of us are, in our masks, and others are locked-down in Denmark and unable to travel to this wonderful Bar Mitzvah celebration. And that makes it an interesting time to think about what we have and what we cannot have in this time of almost-time-to-emerge-but-not-yet.

And in the context of all that there is this week’s Torah reading about a strange infectious disease that contaminates and strikes in all kinds of strange ways. It’s a disease that remarkably demands quarantine.

If this strange disease is detected - וְהִסְגִּ֧יר הַכֹּהֵ֛ן אֶת־הַנֶּ֖גַע שִׁבְעַ֥ת יָמִֽים  - The priest shall quarantine the afflicted person.

And so this is what is in my mind this holy Shabbat – a series of associations about quarantine and lock-down and what it really means to see.

This word – וְהִסְגִּ֧יר - translated as quarantine in its appearance in this week’s reading, comes from the same root as the word used when God closes Noah into the ark, way back in the beginning of the book of Genesis. The animals go in two-by-two and then - וַיִּסְגֹּ֥ר יקוק בַּֽעֲדֽוֹ – God closes Noah in the ark while the destruction rages on the other side of the doors of this first Biblical account of lockdown.

There’s no mystery in understanding why and how the rainbow became such an iconic image this time last year, as the first wave of Covid locked us in. The rainbow is a sign of the end of quarantine. It’s the ultimate celebration of what it means to leave lockdown. And we are all so, so ready to be done with lockdown. So I relooked at the verse when the Bible talks about the rainbow of the end of Noah’s lockdown. Here’s the really interesting thing.

אֶת־קַשְׁתִּ֕י נָתַ֖תִּי בֶּֽעָנָ֑ן וְהָֽיְתָה֙ לְא֣וֹת בְּרִ֔ית בֵּינִ֖י וּבֵ֥ין הָאָֽרֶץ

And I have set My rainbow in the clouds, says God in the aftermath of that lockdown, and when that rainbow is seen, God continues in the next verse - וְנִרְאֲתָ֥ה הַקֶּ֖שֶׁת, I will remember My convenant.

Let me do that again – I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and when the rainbow is seen …

Here’s the thing that struck me this week.

The rainbow is referred to as set in the clouds in one verse. And it is seen in the next.

Go with me here.

The rainbow was there before it was seen. What changes is our ability to see it. Sometimes, we see things. Sometimes we don’t. Whether the thing is there or not is quite a different matter.

Of course, from the point of view of physics – that’s exactly true. A rainbow is nothing more or less than light – which is always there. It’s just that sometimes the angle of the sun refracts through the prism of a billion raindrops in such a way that there appears to be seven bands of colour in the sky. But the light is always there, whether we can see it or not. The red and orange and yellow and green and all the rest of them are always there. But we cannot see the spectacular until there is rain. It’s only in rain that we can see this ethereal beauty.

It’s only in rain that we can see ethereal beauty that is there all along.

It’s only sitting in a hospital ward waiting for your daughter to emerge from eye surgery, that you see things, looking out of the window – the way the light falls across the blinds, the way the cars in the narrow street outside perform a sort of dance as they back and forth their way along, gracefully reversing and pulling in and out and flashing their headlights to let one then the other pass. It’s only when your daughter emerges from surgery blinking and bleary that you realise how much you take this life for granted. At least that is what I found, yesterday, at the very wonderful Moorefield Eye Hospital.

There’s a particular kind of brightness in the air, as we emerge from lockdown in this country – I mean it helps that it's Spring and the blossom and the sky and all that. But also, I wonder, if we are all seeing a little more clearly now. On the back of a year of living in quarantine.

I wonder if, if we can possibly see anything other than opportunities lost, parties lost and lives lost, we might be able to see ethereal beauty more clearly as we emerge from lockdown. I wonder if we might be able to see love more clearly, the value of compassion, the fragility of our existence – these things are, of course, always there. But they are ethereal beauties, easily made invisible to our eyes when the light is bright, only becoming visible when the clouds render our lives overcast. Maybe the task of our time is to imprint these ethereal beauties on our hearts, to swear ourselves to remember even when the light gets brighter and it becomes harder to remember what is truly important and truly beautiful in our lives.

What a paradoxical life this is.

There is a gift in quarantine. There is a blessing in lockdown. There is a rainbow-coloured lining in the clouds. The greatest beauty of this extraordinary universe is there always, but the gift of our enclosure is our ability to see it. We would do well to remember that.

Shabbat Shalom

On Israel’s 73rd Anniversary of Independence

 

Israel’s Basic Law mandates that, after an election, the President meets with representatives of each elected political party to ask who they would back as Prime Minister before inviting one MK to form a ruling coalition. With Israel’s electorate balanced so precariously, last week’s meetings took on an intriguing significance when President Rivlin invited in the cameras. At the age of 82, at the end of his term as Head of State, Rivlin took an opportunity to imprint on the leadership of each of Israel’s political parties a vision of what Israel could and must become. Noah Efron, of The Promised Podcast, shared an extraordinary synopsis of the day. I have drawn heavily on his reporting in this post.   The President asked the Likud representatives whether a President should consider ethical considerations in considering to whom to offer the opportunity to form a coalition. They responded that such matters should be left to the courts – for who is to say that the President’s ethical compass should overwhelm the expressions of the populace at the ballot box? It was an argument Rivlin accepted as serious and ‘probably correct.’   Rivlin, a lifelong Revisionist son of Revisionist parents (political hawk), greeted the Labour representative Omar Bar-Lev – dove and founder of Peace Now - with great warmth. Rivlin served in Israel’s army under Bar Lev’s father. Bar-Lev Senior, Rivlin noted, had danced at Rivlin’s wedding – despite their political difference.   When the Joint List group entered Beit Ha-Nasi – the House of the President, Rivlin commended their the decision, after the last election, to recommend a Prime Minister from the Zionist parties; the first time an Arab-Israeli party had expressed support for any Zionist potential Prime Minister. Party leader, Ayman Oded shared his party had ‘taken up the gauntlet,’ demonstrating a desire to be partners in forging Israel’s narrative as a country of both Jews and Arabs.   Ra’am MK, Mazen Ghnaim, was also warmly greeted. Ghnaim, previously, was Head of the remarkably successful Bnei Sakhnin Football Club – at a time when Rivlin was Head of Beitar Yerushalayim FC. “My friend,” Rivlin greeted the Islamicist, “We knew back then how to work together, and how to win with teams of both Jews and Arabs.” Rivlin went on to say, “Israeli Arabs are the bridge, the possibility of creating some sort of understanding and mutual trust between the sides, because trust is what will bring peace… These things are etched onto the tablet of my heart as an Israeli citizen and as the son of the translator [into Hebrew] of the Koran.”   The headline, the next day, was that, as expected, the President invited Bibi Netanyahu to form a government. But behind the headline – which seemed to reflect only the intractable nature of Israel’s many political conundrums – lay nuance and hope and a willingness to reach out of silos towards a democratic future for a State whose existence and flourishing is so close to my heart. Maybe that is always the case with headlines and the multi-layered reality they both reflect and conceal.   Kol Od BLeivav – still in the heart of this Jew lies that great hope – HaTivkvah Bat Shanot Alpayim, of freedom, empathy, security and peace. The seeds that will, please God, eventually become the great cedars of this vision of hope have been planted, nurtured and tended by so many for so many years. To those who have built, and even died to protect, the State whose 73-year-old existence we celebrate today, we salute you. To those for whom the Declaration of Independence represent a disaster – the Nakba – we seek to empathise and respond bravely to your loss, even as we affirm Israel’s right to exist in security. And to the future – we still hope. We will always hope.   Yom Ha'atzmaut Sameach

 

Building Memory and Yizkor (Oh and Minecraft)

 

I'm just back from the funeral of a member.

The deceased had three sons, now in their 60s and 70s, and one is an architect; an architect who built synagogues. 

It had me thinking about the verse Tasu Li Mikdash v’Shechanti Botocham - Make for Me [God] a Sanctuary and I will amongst you.

The verse contains a disjunct

God wants a building NOT to dwell in the building – for God does not dwell in buildings – but rather so God can dwell in people - us.

People can be dwelling places for that which cannot be seen or directly experienced in a way that buildings cannot. For buildings are ultimately ... just buildings, and humans are refractions of the divine encoded into flesh - we are vessels for experiencing.

But the way humans experience, so often, is by encountering buildings, specifically buildings that are designed to infuse and encode into us the sensibilities woven into them as they were built.

And I was thinking about all this in the context of this bereavement – a matriarch who had passed away whose greatest act of building in life was that of a family, not of a literal building, but a figurative one – a figurative building into which she wove her values, values which infused her sons, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren even as they couldn’t be with her; trapped, as they were on the other side of the world; trapped, as she was on the other side of the veil that separates the living from the dead.

Of course, it’s not only architects who build. It’s not even only the engineers and the plumbers and the plasterers and the painters.

Each of us, in our varied professional encounters, and personal encounters, we are all building as we go. Forgive me, this simile might not work for many of you – but we are all avatars in Minecraft pumping out construction before us at every turn. 

What if we were to accept ourselves as building-creatures, always building everywhere we go, always building spaces which embed within those who encounter them the very fabric of the values and norms with which we erect the buildings that survive our disappeared presence?

The human life as a life of building.

Actually, it’s not a new idea.

The end of the first Masechet of the Talmud Bavli, Brachot ends with a Rabbinic re-reading of a verse from Isiah.

Brachot 64

אָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר אָמַר רַבִּי חֲנִינָא: תַּלְמִידֵי חֲכָמִים מַרְבִּים שָׁלוֹם בָּעוֹלָם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״וְכׇל בָּנַיִךְ לִמּוּדֵי ה׳ וְרַב שְׁלוֹם בָּנָיִךְ״. אַל תִּקְרֵי ״בָּנָיִךְ״ אֶלָּא ״בּוֹנָיִךְ״.

In the original, the prophet suggests that our children, studying about God make for more peace in the world.

In the re-reading Rabbi Chanina is reported to say, don’t say, ‘your children,’ but rather ‘your builders’ – not Banaich, but Bonaich. The Rabbi conflates the human with the builder, for we are, surely, one and the same.

 

I’m reminded too of almost the last reported words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Rabbi of the last century. In an interview just before his death, in 1972, Heschel gave this instruction.

‘Above all,’ he insisted, ‘remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art. You are not a machine. Start working on this great work of art called your own existence.

Build a life as the great work of art of our existence.

Heschel’s nephew is a member here, of course, and an architect. Perhaps that’s not a coincidence. Of course it's not a coincidence, nothing is ever a coincidence. 

So, what if we were, truly, to see our existence as a great work of art, a building, a building that through our actions and our inactions, shapes and structures the way that those who came into contact with it would be lifted, or crushed, by that interaction. Build a life with holiness and dedication, and we’ll successfully code into those we encounter, holiness and dedication. Build a life with love and we code into those we encounter love.

 

This is the end of the Festival of Pesach, we are standing here at a Yizkor service. And I wonder if the reverse is true. When we think of those we have loved and lost, what is the building they have left behind? It’s us, touched, shaped, borne, of our parents’ great acts of creation. But it’s also the other shapes we see around us when we reflect on what our parents, and those we have loved and lost have left as their markers still, on the other side of their passing.

What are the values and the coding of their Mikdashim? How are we to detect their encouragement to us to live up to the standards of holiness that their life built around us?

 

We’ve been in darkness, and now we are emerging.

We’ve been in Egypt and now are in the wilderness.

We’ve been in lockdown and now we are in – whatever it is – Step 2 stage B.

It’s a good time to build with the intent of inspiring in those who will wander into those buildings holiness, love, the values we would wish to survive us.

And it’s a good time to reflect on the buildings that have formed us, left by those who loved us and formed us. What are the markers of these buildings that we wish to allow ourselves to feel are truly of them, and in so doing, we make their memories a blessing.

Chag Sameach

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Photographs are the work of Stanley Saitowitz, http://www.saitowitz.com/

In honour of Zelda Saitowitz of blessed memory