Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[When I listened to this again to transcribe it, it was longer than I'd remembered. But I don't see what I'd want to cut out.]

"A lot of people have been looking to the Passover story to try to figure out where the echoes of the past are very much alive in this moment, and talking about which plague is the plague of coronavirus. Some people are calling it the eleventh plague; other people are trying to find a way to connect it to one of the ten plagues that appear in the story. And it looks a lot like the fifth plague, actually, which was a pandemic -- it was a pestilence that struck the Earth. It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that actually this is not like the fifth plague, this is like the ninth plague, which is the plague of darkness. And the way the Torah describes it [...] it's described as a darkness so thick that you could touch it, descends on the Earth. And darkness doesn't seem like it's so bad, because it's just three days in the dark. And yet it's the ninth plague, which means it's the second most severe plague -- because the only one worse than that is the death of the firstborn, the tenth plague. The rabbis say that what's so bad about it is that when the darkness descends, nobody could see their neighbour, and when you can't see your neighbour, you also feel like you can't be seen, and you feel impotent and invisible, like you've been erased, and that just strips the human spirit of all meaning. And it feels like that's what's happening: we can't touch each other. We have people who are in ICU, who are dying, and their family members can't hold their hands. It's so inhumane, what's happening -- and it's the right thing for us to be kept away from our loved ones, but it feels inhuman actually. Because that's what we do -- that's our super-power, we touch each other, we hold each other, we cry together. And yet we aren't allowed to do that in this moment. The second week, the second shabbat after the isololation, my best friend's father died, and she came and knocked on our gate, and we stood more than six feet apart, and she told me, 'My father just died,' and I couldn't hug her! And that's what we do: we hold people in our grief, we share grief, because we see each other and we let ourselves be seen by each other.

"What I think we have to do is recognize the actual pain of the darkness. Now this is hard sometimes when the sky is blue and the flowers are blooming and it seems weirdly, eerily normal outside -- it's like the most beautiful version of our cities because there's not crazy traffic and all the noise from outside. And yet, the plague of darkness has descended upon us, and I feel that what we have to do is, we have to actively work to find an antidote to the plague of darkness, which is we can't hug each other, and we can't sit at each other's Seder table, and we can't celebrate Easter dinner together, we can't go to mass together, we can't have Ramadan ... break fast together. And yet we have to find ways to be together, and that's where our greatest creativity is called upon. And we also have to remember that shortly after the plague of darkness, the redemption started. And we're also going to have a redemption story that comes out of this, because at some point this plague will be lifted also, and we're going to get the green light that we can go back safely into our public spaces and into each other's homes -- and I think that there's going to be a real trauma that will come at that point, because people are going to have a lot of grieving that we need to do for all that we've lost from all of these months -- or even this year, we don't know how long it will be.

"But after we grieve, we're going to get a chance to rebuild. And that's the moment where all of this creativity and all of the lessons learned about the kind of society that we let ourselves live in over the course of these many years, where people weren't getting paid sick-leave, and where the people that we're now finally calling 'essential workers' were treated -- not only that they weren't essential, but they were treated like criminals in our country. Because the people that are picking our fruit and stocking our grocery shelves ... We're seeing a re-ordering in our society that I think is so critical.

"When the Israelites left Egypt, they had to build a new society that was counter to the society in which the oppression took place. And I think we're going to have not only an opportunity, but an imperative to do the same thing, in America and all throughout the world. What will we do with the lessons that we've learned through this plague of darkness, to actually build a society that's rooted in justice and equity and equality -- and love, which was so absent from the public discourse especially over the last few years, but even longer. How will we take what we've learned, and build something beautiful from all of this?"

-- Rabbi Sharon Brous, on the podcast Six Feet Apart with Alex Wagner, episode 2, "Rituals", 2020-04-09 [Rabbi Brous' segment starts at 18:28, and her initial remarks at 19:04 struck me as important too.]

(I hope Pesach has been going as well as possible for my friends celebrating it.)