Response to Rabbi Ain's Pandemic Questions

I recently read an article by Rabbi Dan Ain in Tablet titled "The Four Questions of the Pandemic." I thought the premise had potential and I opened the article expecting a nuanced and thoughtful piece about what it means to lead and make community in these difficult times. As an active member of my Jewish community, a Jewish parent, and a Jewish professional, I knew that Rabbi Ain would be taking on tough issues with no easy answers. To my surprise and frustration, the article I read had neither nuance nor deep thought. Instead, Rabbi Ain took 1000 words to essentially say "I'm done."

So I'd like to take a few moments to unpack some of Rabbi Ain's accusations about the Jewish response to the pandemic and attempt to offer something of the nuance and thought I'd been hoping to find. Let's begin with Rabbi Ain's first accusation.

"If I can place my finger on the pulse of what’s been so dizzying to me—among an array of upside-downness—it is the refusal to ask questions. It is as though Jewish leaders took an oath of silence regarding pandemic measures, when Judaism itself is built on a foundation of inquiry and engagement." 

First, I would suggest that Rabbi Ain needs to reach out to more people in the Jewish community and Jewish communal leadership. Plenty of people are asking questions. I am in three separate Facebook groups specifically dedicated to conversations among Jewish professionals about Covid, in addition to the regular questions about Covid in pre-existing Jewish professional groups. Just within the synagogue world Rabbi Ain and I inhabit (let's leave aside other Jewish organizations like JCCs for now), these groups include rabbis and cantors, religious school educators, executive directors and program directors, and parents, all looking for ways to balance the competing Jewish values of communal gathering and public safety. On a more local level, congregants are definitely asking their synagogues what the health guidance is and when their favorite or most-needed aspects of the community will return in a mode meaningful to them (whether in-person, multi-access/hybrid, or virtual). Most synagogues I know have convened committees and task forces dedicated to asking questions and reevaluating the ever-changing guidance about Covid. Rabbis, directors, educators, and programmers are talking to our counterpoints at other shuls to compare notes. When synagogues make changes to their mask or vaccine policies, they send detailed information about the changes and are often transparent about the source of their policy (whether it is guidance from the CDC, their local health department, doctors within their membership, or a combination). Jewish leaders love to cite our sources, after all. If these are not questions that Rabbi Ain's community is asking him or steps that he and his leadership are taking, perhaps he should be asking himself why that is and how he can encourage that, rather than accusing the Jewish community at large of silence.

Next!

"Our Jewish communities seem to be under a spell where they have adopted the stance of the Child Who Does Not Know Enough to Ask. But they are not children. And while they go on pretending to be, actual children are being harmed—at this very moment—by the refusal of adults to ask questions."

There are unquestionably ways in which Covid has harmed our kids and I don't want to minimize the loss and difficulty Jewish leaders and parents have had creating safe, meaningful Jewish lives for the next generation. The Jewish adults I know are hardly "pretending not to know" that this is an issue.

I'll put on my parenting hat for this one. I have two amazing and wonderful daughters, who will be 4 and 2 this April. My oldest was a regular at shul with us every week from being named before the Torah when she was four days old until March 21, 2020. There is so much to say about the balancing act that working parents went through in that first year of Covid, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today. On Saturday, March 28, 2020, and for months after, my daughter missed our shul, the Torahs, the rabbis, her friends, our ritual director/gabbai (George), the Tot Shabbat songs, the kiddush lunch, and playing on the playground before going home. We found new ways to be together with our community through Zoom Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday afternoons, Zoom Havdalah on Saturday nights, and eventually livestreaming Shabbat morning. Before we knew what our new reality would become and how long it would last, we scrolled through the tiles of people to see our friends, waved and unmuted to say "Shabbat Shalom!" and "Shavua Tov" and logged onto the livestream to see the Torahs and George and anyone else who walked into the camera's view. But those virtual experiences did not stop my oldest from asking on Saturday morning why we weren't at shul. She marched around our living room with her plush Torah singing "Torah Torah!" She, like the rest of us, wanted and valued the community experiences we had lost. We went to Shabbat morning services in-person a few times that first summer and fall, and again in the hopeful early summer of 2021 pre-Delta. It was wonderful to be back in our sacred space seeing the top half of our friends' faces above their masks. But at the same time, I knew that there were faces we wouldn't see there, either because we had lost them, or because their own family circumstances and Covid precautions kept them home. And sitting distanced from the friends who were there was not the same as schmoozing with them between prayers. My oldest wanted to stand high on a ledge to see the Torahs when they opened the ark. She wanted to play hide and seek in her chair with the friend who sat behind us every week. Eventually, we settled into a new Saturday morning routine, which did not always include the livestream, and she stopped asking why we weren't at shul, because she knew the answer now. As much as I hated answering that question every week, I also hated when she stopped asking, when our once-weekly ritual transitioned more into memory.

And then there is my younger daughter, born in April of 2020. She was named on Zoom. She has never known the controlled chaos of Tot Shabbat, has never run semi-rampant in the sanctuary or eaten foods at kiddush lunch that we never keep in our house (maybe she would like olives, who knows?). She has never woken from a nap and cried just as the silent Amidah was starting and has never been passed around to all of our friends during the Torah service. I've mourned that Jewish experience she never had. Before I continue, I have to pause for one of Rabbi Ain's Four Questions:

"How much longer will children be kept from their Jewish communities? What about our children’s mental and spiritual well-being? Are we willing to sacrifice their entire Jewish childhoods?"

I was devastated not to be able to provide the same loving spiritual communal experience for my youngest that my oldest had in her first almost-2 years. But to say that we sacrificed her mental and spiritual well-being and her entire Jewish childhood, is a stretch and also highly offensive. As an active member of my community and a Jewish professional with a Masters degree in Jewish experiential education, I admit that I am not the typical Jewish parent. I had tools and knowledge to help me provide a Jewish life for my children at home. We supplemented our Friday night Shabbat dinner and Saturday night Havdalah with new Shabbat morning activities and added new books about Shabbat and Judaism to our bookshelves. That is no substitute for a room of 250 friends on a Shabbat morning, but it's not the spiritual Jewish void Rabbi Ain envisions. My youngest is almost 2 now. She covers her eyes when we light Shabbat candles and when we say Shema. She insists we all wear kippot on Friday night and loves to read Soosie the Horse that Saved Shabbat from PJ Library. She makes challah with me and her older sister every Friday. We watch the Shabbat morning service via livestream on occasion. She is having a Jewish childhood.

Part of my job and the job of all Jewish communal leaders is to empower Jewish parents to create Jewish moments for their families. Before that first High Holiday season of the pandemic, my synagogue made tools for Jewish engagement a top priority. We held an outdoor challah bake. We organized drive-thru Havdalah candle pickup and kosher grocery deliveries. We handed out High Holiday activity kits for kids, honey stick tastings with discussion questions to engage your whole family, and biodegradable Tashlich papers with prompts to think about as your family performed Tashlich. And that's just some of the things we did just in the month of Elul. I would recommend to Rabbi Ain that he ask the parents in his congregation what they need to help them enhance their Jewish life at home and then work to provide them with the tools and knowledge to do it. And when the pandemic is over, your synagogue should still be providing you with opportunities to learn and grow your own Jewish knowledge, so that you can do Jewish at home. Yes, community is important to Jewish life and coming together to pray, celebrate, and mourn are central to Judaism. But you should also be comfortable owning and growing your Jewish life in your own Jewish home, and you should feel supported by your community as you grow.

I'm not going to quote the next part of Rabbi Ain's diatribe with which I take issue, but I will tell you that he says putting masks on children is like "binding" them and dismisses parental concerns that their children might get Covid by noting that it is like the common cold in children. ...Masks are like binding and Covid is basically just a cold is where I should have stopped reading. But I didn't, so here we are. I honestly don't even know what to say to this. But if my rabbis dismissed the complexities of this virus, the basic and effective step of masking, and the desire of every parent to keep their children healthy with such disdain and indifference, I wouldn't trust them with the spiritual well-being of my family.

"When is it time to say ‘enough’? What ought our feelings be toward people who may be less well than us—maybe who even made decisions not as great as ours—but who nonetheless are in need of our support? Should we abandon them to their isolation? We are a community of people who are encouraged to ask, to debate. We must do that now when so much is on the line—the very future of our community. And what I want to debate is not whether a synagogue can be a place of complete safety, complete sterility, but whether it should be. No new life ever flowered in a germ-free environment."

Did he just insinuate that people more vulnerable to Covid might have brought their isolation on themselves because of their own poor health decisions? It's a convoluted sentence, so I really hope that I'm just not reading it right. I don't think anyone is suggesting that we can create a completely safe and sterile environment, so he's just being purposefully obtuse here. That's not the way to encourage or invite debate.

It's clear that he at least has had "enough" and he is certainly not alone in being over it. To borrow Rabbi Ain's Passover analogy: if he sees the Jewish community as the child who doesn't know how to ask, I see him as the wicked child who says "What does this mean to you?" To you and not to me, because he blames the Jewish community at large for caution in the face of a deadly pandemic and shirks responsibility for his own community. He takes his own leadership as a rabbi out of the picture, as if Covid and the Jewish response to it are things that have been done to him, rather than something he could take an active role in tackling and shaping. I hope that he finds a way through his anger so that he can be a more compassionate leader for his community. 

Finally, I hope that you are finding ways to make meaning in your Jewish life. I would love to hear some of the ways you are connecting with Judaism and your Jewish community. If you are a parent, I'd love to know how you're developing your child's Jewish connections. Please share in the comments below, so that we can learn and grow together.