Thoughts on the Amidah in a Pandemic

by Edward Hamburg

Like so many congregations around the world during the coronavirus pandemic, mine on the Southside of Chicago has maintained the responsibilities, disciplines, and gifts of a daily morning minyan. 

The format is, of course, quite different. Video-conferencing platforms designed for business meetings imperfectly replicate the context of regular minyanim. Parts soulfully sung in unison are rendered painful as software sound delays combine with variations in microphone and voice quality, kavanah is elusive as participants fiddle with their computer cameras, and rhythms are interrupted by barking dogs, crying children, and task-oriented spouses unloading dishwashers.

But the positives clearly outweigh the negatives. These electronic gatherings enabled Hallel to be recited on Rosh Chodesh and Passover, Kaddish to be said by mourners and for yahrzeits, Torah portions to be read each Monday and Thursday, and communities to have a sense of normalcy and solidarity during a time of fear and isolation. 

As I’ve settled in as a regular electronic minyan participant, my reading of the Amidah portion of the daily morning liturgy has changed with each passing week of the pandemic. Not with all of its 19 blessings. I’m still good with recalling our ancestors, anticipating the resuscitation of the dead (although it’s a little creepy), and thanking God for granting us intelligence, welcoming repentance, forgiving our sins, redeeming the people Israel, sustaining righteous scholars, sending (at some point) the Messiah, and bestowing the gift of peace. I still delight in affirming my appreciation of the daily miracles around us and how they attest to God’s goodness. A few years ago, when davening on my own, I started skipping the requests for the restoration of the Temple and the return of God’s presence to Zion. Past, present, and future circumstances in Israel only reenforce my decision to continue these exclusions. 

Since being sequestered, however, my connections to six other Amidah blessings have deepened considerably. These connections have little to do with their underlying rabbinic explanations, but reflect instead how the words of the liturgy resonate with me at this point in my life.  

The first of these six is an obvious one: 

Heal us, God, and we will be healed. Help us and save us, for You are our glory. Grant perfect healing for all our afflictions, for You are the faithful and merciful God of healing. Praised are you God, healer of your people Israel. 

All of the Amidah blessings are expressed in the plural, but in this one for healing we are invited to insert personal entreaties for people we personally hope will benefit from our supportive thoughts. I usually try to remember as many names as I can, and have recently focused on a wonderful cousin going through another round of chemotherapy.  

The pandemic has broadened the scope of this blessing for me. While asking many times for God’s help in healing particular people or groups, I can’t recall ever requesting such assistance for everyone on the entire planet. I do now. Everyday. 

God, make this a blessed year. May its varied produce bring us happiness. Grant dew and rain for blessing upon the earth, satisfy us with its abundance, and bless our year as the best of years. Praised are you, God, who blesses the years.

Every reading of this second blessing makes me think about the terrible imbalance with which the “varied produce that brings happiness” is actually distributed, and that too many persist through years that have never been blessed. The prevailing levels of economic inequality in this country should distress every one of us. That it doesn’t — even when the odds of dying in this pandemic are so much determined by one’s economic status — testifies to how such injustice is tacitly accepted and embedded in our lives.

The pandemic has heightened my already profound appreciation for the share of abundance I’ve received throughout my life. With this Amidah blessing, my appreciation is now expressed with renewed and deeper meaning, along with a renewed and even deeper sorrow for those whose daily struggles have become living nightmares.   

Sound the great shofar to herald our freedom; raise high the banner to gather all exiles. Gather the dispersed from the ends of the earth. Praised are you, God, who gathers the dispersed of the people Israel.

For me, this third blessing has always been about my own Jewish community. Situated on the south side of the city, worlds away from the kosher markets, large synagogues, and gleaming JCC’s to the north, we work very hard to sustain what was, until recently, a very fragile congregational entity. Divine assistance has been required to keep us together over the years, and this blessing enables me to regularly appreciate my community as a gift that should never be taken for granted. 

How we and other Jewish communities have responded to the pandemic is nothing short of remarkable. Extensive efforts providing care, comfort, and support are only matched by innovations in how we worship, celebrate, and educate ourselves and our children. It’s exciting to think about how these experiences might be integrated into our future un-sequestered Jewish lives. This blessing to gather the people Israel now provides regular moments for me to contemplate such opportunities and possibilities.  

Restore our judges as in the days of old; restore our counselors as in former times. Remove sorrow and anguish from our lives. Reign over us, God, You alone, with lovingkindness and mercy; with justice sustain our cause. Praised are You, God, Sovereign who loves justice with compassion.

Even before the pandemic, this fourth Amidah blessing consistently made me think about the dark political times we’ve faced as Americans over the past few years. I can’t recall a time when so many of our judges, counselors, leaders, and advisors were so dedicated to serving the interests of established powers, and doing so in the most efficient, harsh, and destructive ways imaginable. 

What makes their efforts so efficient is a conservative political ideology that minimizes (if not delegitimizes) the role of government, and prioritizes, above all else, the preservation of traditional social hierarchies, the protection of private wealth, and the defense of individual rights to pursue the ends they desire through the means they deem necessary. The harsh destructiveness that results is evident in the racism, misogyny, pollution, education inequality, inadequate heath care, urban and rural blight, and economic despondency that is so prevalent, for so long, in American society.

This pandemic is only further revealing the harsh consequences of the political agenda conservatives have relentlessly worked to establish. With this Amidah blessing, I’m invariably reminded that political conservatives are not just reasonable people with whom I disagree; they are opponents to defeat in a struggle over fundamental values and beliefs. The blessing’s call for the restoration of judges and counselors committed to removing the anguish in our lives will only happen when we elect and appoint leaders guided by the principles of lovingkindness and mercy — and who, like God, love justice with compassion.

Frustrate the hopes of all those who malign us. Let all evil soon disappear; let all your enemies soon be destroyed. May You quickly uproot and crush the arrogant; may You subdue and humble them in our time. Praised are you, God, who humbles the arrogant.

Since November 2016 my thoughts on this fifth blessing have focused on Donald Trump. I’ve confronted arrogance many times in my life in many different contexts, but his election has enabled a powerful critical mass of conceit, hubris, and pomposity to exercise authority in ways I’ve only read about in accounts of bad historical periods. Each pandemic day exposes more of the unbridled arrogance of Trump and the Republicans. This blessing regularly provides me an opportunity to recall how, in other times and circumstances, such evil has indeed disappeared and such enemies have been vanquished. It also encourages me to hope that the arrogant can be subdued and humbled in our time. 

It’s only appropriate that Jews celebrated the Passover holiday in the midst of this pandemic. During our Seder reading about the “wicked” of the famous four sons in the traditional Haggadah, I was reminded of how wickedness can so often be exhibited by people many find attractive, convincing, and charismatic. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel warns us that “evil often thrives in the guise of what is good, that we live in a world where idols may be rich with beauty and the worship of God tinged with wickedness.” This dreadful confusion of good and evil, he maintains, is at the root of the greatest problems in human history.

Trump and the Republicans are, to me, living embodiments of the wicked son. What makes them the consistent focus of this Amidah blessing are their abilities, with the help of manipulative partners, to enlist so many as enthusiastic followers. My response must be to stand as the wise son, joining with others to aggressively confront “this dreadful confusion of good and evil” that envelops us politically. The words of the blessing are an almost daily reminder of how we must continually strengthen our resolve to do so. 

Hear our voice God. Have compassion upon us, pity us. Accept our prayer with loving favor. You listen to entreaty and prayer. Do not turn us away unanswered, our Sovereign, for You mercifully heed Your people’s supplication. Praised are You God, who listens to prayer. 

To this sixth blessing I say, as never before, “Amen.”

Edward Hamburg serves on the boards of directors of high-technology companies as well as such Jewish organizations as Sicha: The Conversation and The Institute for the Next Jewish Future. His other essays, “The Ten Protocols of Electronic Davening,” “Thoughts on Prayer and Liturgy,” and “Thoughts on Saying Amen,” were posted on ejewishphilanthropy. 

I Don’t Know What Comes Next

by Benay Lappe (in chevruta with Laynie Soloman)

My chavruta (study partner) Eddie Harwitz once told me a story that I’ll never forget. It’s a story his father told him. And, now, it’s a story I’d like to tell you. When Eddie’s father Jay was a teenager, he got a job as a camp counselor at a sleepaway camp. He was assigned to a bunk of first-time campers, boys seven and eight years old. On the first day of camp, the young campers were warmly greeted as they got off the bus, led to a welcome-to-camp gathering, met their counselors and bunkmates, and were then shown to their cabins to get settled. After the kids had unpacked, Jay noticed one little boy sitting on his bed, crying. Jay tried to find out what was wrong, but the boy just kept crying and wouldn’t speak. “Did you forget something at home?” He shook his head no. “Do you miss your family?” Again, still crying, he shook his head no. After several more failed guesses, the boy was finally able to eke out a few words through his tears: “I don’t know what comes next.” 

I’ve been thinking about this story a lot lately because it names so viscerally and accurately an emotional state that really doesn’t have an adequate name. “Uncertainty” is probably the best we’ve got, but it hardly gets at the depth of what is actually a very real and profound trauma: not knowing what comes next. 

We’re programmed, I think, to feel more comfortable when we “know the schedule,” when we can anticipate what tomorrow will bring, when we know what we’ll find when we “get there,” and what we’ll then be called upon to do. Not knowing what comes next is deeply distressing, and it’s real. 

Not knowing what comes next. It’s that mixture of fear, anxiety, and disorientation we feel when something is crashing in our lives--when we lose a job, or break up, or lose someone we love. Or when the world around us changes drastically and suddenly and we don’t know when things will get back to normal, or if the old normal will ever exist again. When we don’t know from one day to the next if we will wake up with symptoms that could threaten our lives, or get a call from someone we love telling us that ​they​ have. 

And while this story certainly doesn’t ever help me solve the problem of not knowing what comes next, somehow naming it helps me. And right now, in the presence of this virus, so many of us are feeling a very profound sense of uncertainty, an all-consuming I-don’t-know-what-comes-next. And it’s at times like these that we need our stories. 

The Talmud (Gittin 56a/b) tells a story of the time when life was crashing for the Jews (​all​ of the Talmud’s stories are actually stories of crashes, but I’ll save that for a different essay). It was the first century and the Romans had attacked Jerusalem. It appeared that the entire country would be taken from us and our Temple destroyed. We were about to lose our home and life as we knew it. And the only connection to God that we had, or that most could imagine, was about to be severed. While the priests and the leaders of the community were fighting the Romans to preserve their country, their freedom, and their Temple, a small group of--yup, you guessed it--queer (wink-wink), fringy, radical folk, led by their teacher Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, snuck out of Jerusalem--by carrying their teacher in a coffin! 

They set out to recreate a new Jewish community, a new way of living (a Jewish) life, in a town called Yavneh, where they joined a handful of those for whom the old way of life had long since crashed, folks who had already settled there and who had already begun dreaming up new spiritual practices, new ways to gather, and new ways to connect to God--with learning at its center. They created a Judaism that would have been unrecognizable to their peers who fought, to the death, for Judaism as they knew it. You may know this story. You may have heard it many times before. ​For many of us, this story helps inspire and ground us in the courage, bold-ness, and confidence of our early sages as they set off to build anew amidst destruction. 

But you may not know the ​other​ story that the Talmud tells about Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. It is a deathbed scene. As Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai lay dying, his students are surrounding his bed and he is weeping. Why, they ask, are you crying? And he tells them. He is crying, he says, because he is worried: “What if I was wrong?” That is why he is crying. What if everything he did to radically rework the tradition would actually end up hastening its demise? What if, instead of saving​ the tradition, his efforts would actually end up helping to ​destroy​ it? 

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai would not live to see his radical new Judaism thrive and eventually become the tradition that has lasted these last two millennia. From our vantage point, it’s easy to see that he ​saved​ the tradition. But the tradition preserves that deathbed scene of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai in terrified uncertainty, I think, to remind us that at the core of our tradition is an awareness and acceptance of uncertainty. [And also that, when you’re on your deathbed, if you’re not just a little bit worried that you got it all wrong, then you probably hadn’t been bold enough during your lifetime.] 

Our tradition resists certainty at every turn. Every spiritual technology we have is designed to help us be “crash-flex.” Every story we tell--from Lech Lecha to Exodus to Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai--is a story of uncertainty. To teach us that, even as we move through uncharted territory, to remember that we’ve been here before. To teach us that it’s possible to get through it. Like now. 

As my friend Dan Libenson says, the whole point of mythology and stories and wisdom is so you know what to do when you encounter something for the first time in ​your​ lifetime...but not in our​ lifetime. As Dan says, our ancestors told us what to do: When a plague forces you out of Egypt, you learn to live in the wilderness, you don’t look for how to go back! You listen to the folks who ​already​ live in the wilderness! 

We queer folk--all of us who know the brokenness of our societal systems--poor and working class folks, folks with disabilities, trans folks, People of Color, and so many of us on margins--we all know a lot about uncertainty, about not knowing what comes next. The economic and societal systems that are crashing right now crashed for ​us​ a long time ago. We’ve ​been​ in the wilderness. And that’s not to say that the kind of profound uncertainty we’re all feeling is any less traumatizing for us--if anything, it can be re-traumatizing for us--but we know how to get through it. Because we’ve gotten through it before. As Jews. And as queer folk. 

And we’ve done it in community. We’ve done it by holding each other’s hands. By showing up. By being there for each other. By listening. By telling each other our stories. And learning our peoples’ stories. 

We are all on a journey of uncertainty. We’re taking it day by day. For many of us, it’s an hour-by-hour or even minute-by-minute spiritual practice. But we’re not alone. Every day, when I see so many of your faces ​in chevruta and in our learning spaces (like our daily Mishnah Collective!), ​my heart is filled with joy and hope and the feeling that I am not alone. It reminds me that what is lasting, what will never crash, is the love we have for each other. The love we share when we show up. And open up a sefer, a sacred text, and learn our stories. Together. 

That little boy on his first day of camp had his counselor to listen to him, to hold his hand, to tell him that he would be there with him the whole way. That he would accompany him on his journey of uncertainty. 

Who and what are accompanying you on your journey of uncertainty? 

May we be there for each other along the way, and may we find strength, together, as we live into and write our own stories of uncertainty which will remind those who come after us that they, too, will make it beyond the wilderness of I-don’t-know-what-comes-next. 

Wilderness Guides

by Dan Libenson

This blog is called The Wilderness because the Wilderness (midbar in Hebrew, also translated as desert) is one of the most important places in Jewish mythology, and it maps quite well onto the current situation of American Jews and the institutions of the American Jewish community. (and assumedly everywhere else in the world).

I have heard people say that “we don’t have a playbook” for the current situation—the rather sudden imposition of physical distancing as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. But I don’t agree. I think we do have a playbook—two of them, in fact: the Torah and the Talmud. 

The central story of the Torah is the story of the Hebrews in the aftermath of a plague that results in their rapid expulsion from the life they knew before, and how they navigate the chaos and fear of the Wilderness in which they suddenly find themselves. As my friend Benay Lappe has famously laid out in her “Crash Talk,” the Talmud tells an analogous story, about how the Jews re-built Judaism after the plague of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews from that capital.

On the one hand, the story the Torah tells doesn’t bode well for us. Mistakes are made, and many of them. These mistakes include the majority of the people mis-remembering what it was like before the Exodus and wanting to go back to their familiar life in Egypt, as well as various leadership failures, especially that of a group of scouts to communicate a positive vision for a better future—a failure of vision, which, as is the natural order of such things, results in forty years of aimless wandering, even though the journey to the better future could have taken only a few weeks or months. 

The point of mythology, as I see it, is to pass down through the generations a kind of “secret knowledge” or wisdom that we as a people have learned through the school of hard knocks, but that few people alive today have ever learned in their lifetimes. Or, it’s the kind of knowledge that, by the time you learn it through the school of hard knocks in your own lifetime—as a person or as a people—it is too late. You’ve missed the boat, or been beaten to the punch. If I am remembering Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens correctly, or at least this is my riff on it, this basically describes the evolutionarily competitive advantage of human beings over other animals—our ability to learn from bad experiences and package that learning in the form of stories (the original “memes,” as Richard Dawkins coined the term) to pass down to our descendants so that they can use that knowledge before the hard knocks deal them a death blow. 

If we read the Torah as having nothing to tell us about what to do because the story didn’t go so well, I think we are misreading its style of storytelling, or at least a major component of it, which is teaching by negativeexample. I will have more to say about this in future posts, and I will give many examples (of teaching by both positive and negative example), but it’s something like this: if a story in the Torah results in an obviously bad result, then the wisdom being passed down is probably that we should do the opposite of what the characters did in the story when faced with an analogous situation; at the very least, the story is telling us what not to do. And when something works out well, we should map the story onto our own situation.

I’ll write about some of the negative examples in another post, but here is one example of a story that had a positive result. Early on in the Book of Exodus, Moses’s father-in-law Jethro comes to visit Moses. Seeing that Moses is exhausted and also engaging in certain dysfunctional leadership practices that are not conducive to keeping the people mentally healthy, Jethro gives Moses some leadership advice—not only the famous advice about creating a pyramidal management structure, but also, by modeling it, advice about how to personally project and cultivate among the people a more positive and hopeful attitude. As traditional commentators point out, the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai only happens after Moses takes Jethro’s advice, and indeed the Torah portion in which the Ten Commandments are given is called “Jethro.”

I’m sure I’ll get into the specifics of that advice in a later post, but here I want to focus on the source of the advice that I think most people miss. I have taught this text dozens of times, and I missed it until the other day. Many have remarked on the ideas that Jethro is a non-Israelite, and it’s important to be open to advice and help from outsiders. Agreed. Many have also pointed out that Jethro, who is described as the priest of Midian, is an experienced leader, and it’s important to take advice from those with more experience than you. Also agreed.

But the key point about Jethro, the one that I missed and that most people have missed, is that he is the priest of Midian, and Midian is in the Wilderness. That is, Jethro is a man of the Wilderness, while the Israelites are city-folk, albeit of the lowest social class. The Israelites have no idea how to live in the Wilderness. All they can do is try and map their Egyptian practices, ideas, and organizational structures onto a landscape where those practices, ideas, and structures make no sense and may be—I would say, prove to be—dysfunctional. As a man of the Wilderness, Jethro says to Moses, “Welcome to this world in which I have been living a long time. Let me show you around and help you see what works here.” Any of us who have ever traveled to a wild place know how important it is to have a guide who knows the terrain; it’s the same in the Torah’s story, and it’s the same in our present circumstances.

There are people who have been living in the Wilderness just outside of the “American Jewish community” as defined by its pre-COVID-19 organizational structures, and we would be well advised to seek their counsel. Some of us have been living here in the digital Wilderness where all of a sudden millions of fellow Jews have just arrived. We’re here to help!  

And many of us have been living in the Wilderness for all kinds of other reasons, often because the Jewish community as it has been organized did not accept us fully. In this group we might find Jews of Color, LGBTQ+ Jews, intermarried Jews, Jews whose conversions are not accepted or who are Jews through self-determination, atheist Jews, Jews who are unconcerned with Jewish law, Jews with disabilities, Jews with ideas about Judaism or Israel that are unpopular, and many others, not to mention many Jewish-adjacent fellow travelers, friends and relatives. The Wilderness in which millions of our fellow Jews have now suddenly arrived is not only a digital Wilderness, but also a Wilderness in which many of the old rules, structures, and assumptions just don’t apply; well, the mixed multitude I have just described has been building Jewish life outside of those rules for a long time. While I only fall into some of these categories and cannot speak for everyone, I think that most would also say: We’re here to help.

So, I hope those now streaming into this Wilderness are open to what all the Jethros out here have to say. Our future most likely depends on it.

Introducing The Wilderness Blog

by Dan Libenson

We’re starting a blog here on jewishLIVE, which will soon be cross-posted on two other web sites that the same team operates—Judaism Unbound and The Institute for the Next Jewish Future (INJF). Since we are in a Wilderness period, who knows who of these site will become the one that people look at, today and over time, and who knows what will be where in a year? Perhaps by posting it in three different places, the ideas will get to everyone who might benefit from them, now and in the future.

 I tend to have writer’s block and to be a procrastinatory and overly perfectionistic writer. That’s part of why I do a podcast. So why start a blog? Well, first of all, my head is flooded with ideas right now, during this period of physical distancing caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus, and I want to get them out. I’m sure this is true of others with resonant thoughts and ideas who will be invited to publish here. 

 Obviously, I am getting my ideas out on a wide variety of audio and video platforms, including the Judaism Unbound podcast and the various video shows I am creating on jewishLIVE. But I think writing is still better for “random access”—that is, it’s easier for people to find key ideas when they are searching for written material, and it’s harder to find things buried in minute 38 of a 60-minute video conversation or podcast. As such, what I write in this blog may well be something I just said in a live-streaming discussion of some sort. Apologies to those who read an idea they’ve already heard.

 This blog will also provide a forum for other members of the jewishLIVE/Judaism Unbound/INJF teams to put out their thoughts and ideas in writing, as well as for others who want to write on the topic that this blog is about, which is the things we should be thinking about, or that we are thinking about, during this chaotic period.

 One might reasonably ask whether Judaism is the most important thing to be thinking about during this time, when people are getting sick and dying, when individuals and institutions are facing economic hardship, and when we have legitimate fears about the future of our democracy and our society. 

 I would say two things in response. First of all, I firmly believe that if Judaism has nothing to contribute to a time like this, then it isn’t worth very much; and if it does have something to contribute, then it’s important that at least some of us are focused on its present and its future so that it can remain—or once again become—a force for good in a world that needs forces for good. I recently read a comment somewhere, I think on Twitter, that pointed out the irony that people who have been spending all day watching Netflix over the past two weeks are also wondering aloud why we need emergency funding for the arts during this time. All the more so, and not only in this time, it’s important to invest in a thriving Judaism because a thriving Judaism could and should be an important force for making the world a better place. 

 It parallels the quote: “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.” I’m all in on the idea that most of our resources ought to go to meeting the pressing needs of right now, and I profoundly believe that some resources should be invested in the engines of goodness, like the arts or like religious/wisdom traditions (at their best), which cultivate the human qualities that impel people to “be the helpers” in times of crisis like our time.

And that leads me to my second response. For some of us, thinking about Judaism is what we’re good at and what we know how to do. Part of me wishes that I had finished medical school (I did two-and-a-half years before taking a leave of absence that I am still on more than twenty years later) so that I could be helping heal the sick directly, and the other part of me knows I wouldn’t have been a good doctor or a happy one; if I’m good at thinking about Judaism, and Judaism is potentially a force for good in all this, then that’s probably the best use of me right now. And that’s my working hypothesis, and those who contribute to this blog probably think about it in a similar way. 

A final word of introduction: I think it’s pretty common for a blog to be raw and unedited, and that will probably be true for the entries in this blog, at least the ones that I write. I’m doing live TV these days, so raw and unedited is par for the course. I’m not going to have much time to edit and massage my writing, and the truth is that if I take the time to do that, I will probably procrastinate and never post anything. So, I am just going to try and take some stolen moments here and there, and I’ll write off the top of my head and just post it. I hope you find it interesting and valuable, and if not, you have my “pre-pology.” Also, apologies in advance if I fail to cite sources; I will try, if I remember where I heard something, and I will try not to take credit for the ideas of others even if I can’t remember the specific source; but, again, this is fast and raw and unresearched, and I may not always remember the provenance of an idea. 

Anyone who finds the ideas here resonant is invited to contribute your own thoughts. Please send them to me at dan@judaismunbound.com, and let me know if you want what you write to be published under your own name or anonymously. If the latter, please explain why you wish to be anonymous; we will not post anything if we do not know who the writer is, but we are willing to post good and important writing without the author’s name attached, as we understand that people may well have legitimate professional and other fears related to publishing certain edgy ideas that are nevertheless important for the public to hear. This is not a promise that we will publish everything we receive, and we also don’t have the time to go through an editorial process; we will let you know whether we will publish your piece on the blog or not, but we won’t be able to go through a back-and-forth about why we chose not to, at least not until we have a bigger team.