Parting the Sea of Pandemic Anxiety

(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.

The Hard Work of Looking for Hope

The Hard Work of Looking for Hope, by Emily Herzlin

Inspired by Natalie Diaz’s poem Of Course She Looked Back

Over the past eight months, people have been leaving New York City. People moving upstate or out of state or out of the country, because of the pandemic or out of fear of what life will be like after the election. As if messengers of God had visited and told them to get out while they still can. I get why people are leaving. I’ve had more than my fair share of moments during this time. Especially during the height of the pandemic back in April and May, stuck inside, ordering grocery deliveries, wiping down mail, seeing images in the news of mass graves being dug by inmates and the refrigerator trucks for the dead outside the nearby hospital. I fantasized about a little house in New Brunswick near the sea. I’ve got the area picked out. I know what the garden will look like. My spouse is Canadian, we could do it. We’ve said, “let’s see how the election goes.” 

But even if we left, what then? In this week’s parsha, Vayera, when Lot flees the city of Sodom, he asks the angel not to send him to the hills, it’s too scary. So he goes to a small town, and it’s too scary there, so he goes to live in a cave, which doesn’t work out, either. Where is the place where there is no pain or struggle, where we don’t need to show up bravely and compassionately for ourselves and our neighbors? Where is the place that is immune to the suffering caused by greed, hatred, and delusion, which can travel across all kinds of borders?

Certain people have said that New York is a wasteland. That everyone’s fled, the city’s in shambles. Others call us an anarchist jurisdiction. Here’s what I see:

People in Queens, the borough hit hardest by the pandemic, are staying to take care of their neighbors;

They advocated for city streets to be open for pedestrians to gather safely outdoors while maintaining social distance;

They are organizing coat drives and food drives;

Mutual aid groups are forming and organizing to care for each other’s needs;

Community fridges are being filled, and community gardens popping up;

Neighbors and local groups picked up each other’s compost when the city shut down its composting services;

Protests for racial justice are happening every single day of the week since the spring;

Lines to vote early wrapped around city blocks, in the rain and wind and cold;

Volunteers gave out food and water and masks to voters...

Of course Lot’s wife looked back. Because even in a city where so much suffering was taking place, she knew there was good. There was strength, there was potential, there was hope. 

She looked back because the angels who came to Sodom didn’t look hard enough for the ten good people God required in order to not destroy the city. They were there and she knew it. Did the angels even look, at all, actually? Did they really try to search for the ten people? Or did they base their decision off of how they were treated by the most aggressive people with the loudest megaphones and the biggest flags? Did they look at the sea of red on the map and just feel too tired?

She looked back because she had hope, she saw hope, and that hope could have been put to work, to good trouble.

In the words of Rebecca Solnit this week:

“Not only is Canada not the Motel 6 that left the lights on for you, but we are not guests in the USA, especially those of us with the privilege that also means the power to protect others. We are the cleaning staff, and we are here to clean it up and make it safer for the next people who come along…. 

“This is our country, and this is our work, and we were put here to do it, those of us who are safe enough in this regime and who have the capacity to influence outcomes and protect the more vulnerable. There is meaning in hard work as there is not in disconnected leisure and insularity. 

...So deepen your roots, stretch your branches, and plant yourself like a tree. Here we are, here we will be.”