Mendocino Coast Jewish Community

We don’t know yet how long the changes brought about by COVID will be upon us, nor how lasting will be the social and economic upheaval wrought by this pandemic. But for now, the space that held our Jewish observances, our mikdashm’at (“little temple”), is not available for us to be in together. Nor can our community safely gather in numbers outside to sing and pray and embrace and nosh. We must be Jewish differently.

There is a great sadness in this. For me, not being able to sing together all these months has been a heartfelt loss. Our shared song is like fuel—it propels me through the week. The Shema at Neilah on Yom Kippur with all of you, that alone gets me through to, oh, about July of the following year. To think that we can’t sing Avinu Malkeinu together, oy… But I must confess, I am feeling something else along with the sadness. I find it kind of exciting to deconstruct the High Holy Days as I have always known them, to identify some of the pieces that feel completely essential, or just delightful, and to recompose these pieces into something both old and new.

It has been heartening to me, somehow, to realize that the whole Jewish world faces this challenge at the same time. We’re all in it together. Even the richest, best-educated, most advanced Jewish communities in the world is doing this for the first time. I feel connected to the Jewish people in a different, more practical way than I usually do.

After I talked to my fellow rabbis, I sent around a survey to all of you;thank you to the many who responded! I had long, brainstorming conversations with a number of you. We had a community meeting and shared ideas. After it all shook and rattled,it settled into something like a plan. I reached out to several of you to ask you to take on pieces of the services. Amazingly, almost every person I asked for anything this year has said YES.

I often think these days about Rabbi Benay Lappe and her “crash theory.” Rabbi Lappe is the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva and a lead teacher of “queer Talmud.” I’ve written and talked about Rabbi Lappe before. She teaches that individual people and cultures always have a “master story.” Maybe it’s the Chosen People or the greatest democracy in the world or the class clown, but we live it as long as it works. At some point, however, master stories inevitably crash. When they do, an individual or a group can do one of three things: give up the master story and move on to something new; try desperately to shore up the old story against what made it crash; or invent new forms from the shards of the old.