Seder plate
(With all the Passover prep, I didn’t get it together to post this last week. Better late than never!)
Like many Jewish families, last Passover my family and I cheered “next year in person” when we concluded our Zoom Seder. But for my still not yet vaccinated family and so many others, it is not this year in person.
But my spouse and I who both qualified because of our employment are vaccinated, and a couple that are friends of ours are also vaccinated, so at some point one of us floated the idea out there that we could (according to the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and our PCP, the high priests of the pandemic) safely have an in-person Seder together this year.
At first, I was thrilled. Not to mention that I adore these friends and that Passover is my favorite holiday, but I love sharing meals with others, which I’ve sorely missed during the pandemic. I’m grateful that I haven’t had to weather this pandemic alone, that I’ve had a loving partner with me. But I think both of us agree that we need more people in our lives. (Case in point: on a recent lackluster Shabbat morning my spouse said, “Let’s go for a walk and look for new buds on the trees.” I groaned and told him to shut up).
I started fantasizing about cooking for more than just us; actually cleaning the apartment—not just Passover cleaning but the kind of cleaning you do when people are coming over, like moving the stack of papers and books from the dining table into the bedroom temporarily which you will then move back when your guests leave; seeing the inside of someone else’s home beyond the thoughtfully curated zoom background behind them; eating at their dining table while their cat nuzzles your legs.
The problem is, I’m scared. And it’s been hard to parse out exactly what I am scared of. Even now that I’ve been vaccinated, I don’t feel safe. I work in healthcare and I am confident in the effectiveness of the vaccines that are available, so it’s not about that. It’s about the habits my mind has learned during these past twelve months to adapt to this time. For those of us already prone to anxiety, it’s been easy to dig deeper into our already well-worn fear pathways, grooves that are hard to climb out of.
A friend told me about an experience they had at a grocery store the other day. A stranger started talking to them about blueberries. They panicked, said something quickly and bolted. The stranger wasn’t close to them and was masked. But they had learned to listen to their stranger danger alarm bells, and even though there wasn’t anything inherently unsafe about the interaction, they felt afraid.
At this point in the pandemic, over a full year in, our nervous systems are so over-activated by constant chronic stress. Everything has a tinge of threat to it, whether we are conscious of it or not, and the chronic over-activation of our fight-flight-freeze responses has us all very tired. It’s hard to parse out real threats from imagined threats when we are this tired.
After the initial excitement of the idea of an in-person Seder with my friends abated, fear and doubt arose. Being indoors with other people when you didn’t have to be is just something that you didn’t do this past year, and if you did, you could risk dying, or risk killing other people. For almost a year, that is what we adapted to. And with two little jabs to my upper left arm and 48 hours of annoying side effects and a few weeks of waiting, that all changed. Or rather it changed, but my nervous system hasn’t heard the news yet.
In the Passover story, Moses’ first interactions with Pharaoh made the Israelites suffer more. Their enslavers raged against the idea of their freedom. Pharaoh increased their workload, and the Israelites resented Moses. This wasn’t his intention, but it was part of the process of their eventual freedom. And once freed, they had so much anxiety about their freedom, they couldn’t trust it. They built a golden calf, worried about the food and wished they had never left Egypt. It was like they had gotten used to their narrow lives and even though they were suffering they weren’t ready to leave.
I feel like I can relate. My nervous system is raging against the idea of dinner with friends. It responds with stomach tension, jaw clenching, heart beating fast, fatigue. To some extent I’ve adjusted to this narrow life, to our two-bedroom apartment, to the areas within walking distance, to the little boxes of faces on the computer screen, to my two-person bubble and the handful of people we’ve socialized with outdoors, to not making plans further than maybe a week or two into the future because who knows what could change tomorrow? I am not happy with this life, but I am afraid of leaving it. What will the bigness feel like? Will it be overwhelming or awkward? What will it take for me to feel safe around other people again?
I imagine it will take a willingness to sit and breathe with this fear long enough to reteach my nervous system to once again recognize real threats from imagined threats. To recognize whether Pharaoh’s soldiers are actually pursuing me, or whether it’s the somatic memory of their pursuit causing me to feel afraid in this moment. That will take time.
I pray that on Passover, or someday soon, I will arrive at my friends’ apartment and they will open the door, and I will pause at the threshold and take a calming breath. Hopefully the sea of my anxiety will remain parted long enough for me to walk through to the other side, and on that other shore will we embrace, cry, rejoice, and sing. And then we will continue wandering through the wilderness of this time for as long as it takes.