As We Head Into the New Jewish Year
Seventeen months into dealing with the global pandemic and several other interrelated and overlapping crises - political, economic, environmental - we are likely all at a point of distraction. When will it end? Will we ever get back to “normal”? We approached summer with a sense of hope, with rising vaccination rates and falling rates of infection, looking forward to being together in larger numbers in more kinds of settings. As we approach summer’s end, with the Delta variant fueling a rapid rise in infections and hospitalizations, it is hard to be quite as hopeful. Vaccine hesitation, resistance to masking and other protective measures by some, and way too slow progress with vaccinations in too many places around the world, have magnified our risks.
On the one hand, we live amidst an astonishing bounty of scientific and technological knowledge and resources. This resulted in the first prototypes of the COVID-19 vaccine being created within weeks (most of the time involved in rolling out vaccines was related to testing and efficacy). On the other hand, we live amidst an astonishing degree of ignorance, willfulness, and political opportunism. We face a likely scenario that there will be more variants, and one of them may be far worse, contagious, and lethal than what we have faced to date.
We are now in Elul, the preparatory month in the Jewish calendar at the end of which we celebrate Rosh HaShanah, the beginning of the annual cycle of the Jewish High Holy Days. Most of us look forward to hearing the shofar blown during these services, although more traditional Jews hear the shofar blown daily during morning prayers. That sound - sharp, piercing, primal – is a wakeup call for us individually and collectively. (You can hear it here.)
During the past 17 months Jewish Federations across North America and tens of thousands of Jewish communal organizations have mobilized and pivoted to face the greatest global crisis of our time. I’ve watched with pride as Federations provided leadership and support through this crisis and helped their local institutions and international partners rise to the moment They’ve raised and allocated emergency funds, convened and partnered with institutions across the community, sourced and distributed protective equipment, and lobbied governments for resources. They have been, in short, a tremendous force for collective action in the face of overwhelming challenges. .
When I served as CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, and later during my tenure at Jewish Federations of North America, I led efforts to mobilize our Jewish community for action in the face of crisis or disaster – wars in Israel, hurricanes in North America, terror attacks in France. Responding to a global crisis affecting every single community at once is crisis response on steroids. We are 17 months in and it can be disheartening to recognize we are maybe not near the end. In March 2020, as it began, epidemiologists talked about a likely two-year scenario before the virus was truly under control and life could being to approach “normal”. Most of us could not absorb that message then – it was too hard to think about two years of this.
As we listen to the shofar now, we have a choice, as Jews and as global citizens. As horrifying as the pandemic has been, it is not our most serious crisis. The bitter divisions and polarization that have made it so difficult to overcome the virus – that is our most serious challenge. Every other challenge – economic disparity, racial injustice, the literal burning of our planet – is derivative of our inability to marshal our collective will towards learning, cooperating, and solving problems together.
As we begin the Jewish new year, and as we face the next phase of the pandemic and the many other challenges of our time, may we resolve to look to collective solutions – the things that will strengthen us all.