Hoffman’s voice carried out into the bright sunshine of Temple Israel’s 28-acre lawn, where congregants were distance-seated in white folding chairs. In Memphis on Saturday morning, Happie Hoffman, a young cantorial soloist, sang her friend Chava Mirel’s rendition of “ Achat Sha’alti” (“All I Ask”)-a verse of Psalm 27 which is recited daily in the 30-day run-up to Rosh Hashanah. But I believe in our capacity to create sacred space between us.” In Seattle, Rabbi Ruth Zlotnick looked out from her podium, where a pump dispenser of hand sanitizer visibly sat, and addressed her flock: “I have to tell you it is awfully weird to be looking out at the sanctuary and not seeing all of you here. In Dallas, Rabbi David Stern reassured us of Jewish resilience: “We do what we have always done. They stood at microphones in casual T-shirts, delivering heartrending harmony. Three of Wolpe’s bar mitzvah alumni, the talented Platt brothers (Jonah, Henry and Ben, of “Dear Evan Hansen”) sang “ Ahavat Olam” (“Eternal Love”) in a taped recording. Her Los Angeles colleague, Rabbi David Wolpe, captured how quarantine has made us notice blessings afresh, quoting naturalist John Burroughs: “If you wish to see something new, take the same walk you took yesterday.” Rabbi Sharon Brous in Los Angeles said this unprecedented time proves Ecclesiastes got it wrong when the book said, “There’s nothing new under the sun”: “With every pandemic and every fire, every hurricane, every earthquake, every death of a great one, there’s something new under the sun,” Brous preached on the roof of her spiritual community, IKAR. If you focus, if you try to go all in, something good and deep can happen in these hours that you set aside.” But you know that these services are only as good and as meaningful as you make them. To distance yourself, to let yourself get distracted, to scroll through your phone. Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Brooklyn’s Beth Elohim, wrapped in a prayer shawl with Friday’s candles lit before her, looked right into the camera and challenged us: “It could be very easy to feel like a spectator on these holidays. But there was rabbi after rabbi on Rosh Hashanah, urging us not to opt out. Pained by the news, the name-calling, the uncertainty after so many lives and jobs lost. “While sheltering at home, we can turn our houses into hiding places,” she warned, “to use the limitations and demands of COVID as excuses for disengagement,what activist Ruth Messinger calls ‘a retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed.’” Just six blocks from Cosgrove, thousands would typically have crowded into the non-denominational service at the 92Y led by Rabbi Elka Abrahamson and song leader Elana Arian, but the two women were instead each in her own broadcast box in separate places (Ohio and Brooklyn, respectively) with a simple blue backdrop and vase of flowers, speaking and singing to worshipers whom they could not see-from Las Vegas to the Philippines.Ībrahamson cautioned us not to abstain from the holiday’s mandate to repair what is broken, despite feeling broken ourselves. It’s been hard not to feel paralyzed, to keep moving forward. This last year has felt, indeed, like a very narrow bridge. It is often said that one of the profound phenomena of Jewish life is its interconnectedness: the same prayers are dependably recited on the same day all over the world. Some clergy stood six feet away or stayed masked (unless they happened to be married to each other). Some were outdoors, some in sanctuaries, some in homes or makeshift studios. Most services were live with taped components. to Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Memphis and Miami-parachuting into other worship spaces and observing other rabbis and cantors as they interpreted the same liturgy in different settings, styles and time zones. That felt like the saddest icing on an already bitter cake.īut I found a kernel of joy in the opportunity to channel-surf Rosh Hashanah (yes, I’m a clergy groupie but that’s for another article, or my therapist), to virtually roam the United States in a way I’d never been able to do before-on Facebook Live, YouTube, or synagogue websites, from New York to L.A. Undoubtedly it was also because the news flashed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death immediately after Friday night’s service-just minutes after we’d recited Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer.
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