(1) A song of ascents. Out of the depths I call You, O LORD. (2) O Lord, listen to my cry; let Your ears be attentive to my plea for mercy. (3) If You keep account of sins, O LORD, Lord, who will survive? (4) Yours is the power to forgive so that You may be held in awe. (5) I look to the LORD; I look to Him; I await His word. (6) I am more eager for the Lord than watchmen for the morning, watchmen for the morning. (7) O Israel, wait for the LORD; for with the LORD is steadfast love and great power to redeem. (8) It is He who will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.
From Josef Zelkowicz: Days of Nightmare - 9/4/42:
Quoted by Lucy Davidowicz, The Holocaust Reader, pg. 299: "To say that today the ghetto is swimming in tears would not be mere rhetoric. It would be simply a gross understatement...All hearts are icy, all hands are wrung, all eyes filled with despair. All faces are twisted, all heads bowed to the ground, all blood weeps. Tears flow by themselves. They can't be held back. People know these tears are useless...Our hearts writhe and struggle in these tears like fish in poisoned waters. Our hearts drown in their own tears."
Rabbi Jacob Staub, Ph.D. (Reconstructionist):
"The question is an old and venerable one: If God is good, and God is all-knowing, and God is all-powerful, then why is there so much pain and suffering in the world?
If you believe (I don’t) that God knows about and causes everything that happens in the universe, then you have several options when confronted with apparently senseless suffering. You can blame the victim and assume that the suffering is a punishment for something she or he did in this life or in a past life. You can affirm the mysterious inscrutability of God’s ways, so that we cannot fathom divine wisdom and cannot view events from the larger, cosmic perspective. Or you can maintain that since everything happens is by the will of God, it must by definition be good.
When I tell people that the God I believe in does not cause everything that happens, so that I do not look for the hidden divine meaning of things that happen to me, they respond that I don’t really believe in God. They assume that only a God who knows all, causes all, and rewards and punishes us for our deeds is worthy of the name God.
The God I believe in permeates the universe as the ground of all being. God is beyond human conception, so all our images and metaphors for God are a reflection of our human glimpses of that which is unfathomable. Unfathomable, but not undetectable, and definitely not irrelevant. How do I know that there is a God? I don’t. I can’t know what is beyond my ability to conceive. It’s a matter of faith. I have faith that there is more to reality than can be measured in a laboratory."
From NY Times, 4/5/20 -"Amid Sadness, Stories That Warm the Heart"
"I'm a 74-year old woman hunkered down in a NYC apartment. I was venturing out almost daily in search groceries, wipes, paper towels and my prescription meds until my daughter, who lives in Brooklyn, read me the riot act. She found a group of young volunteers, called Invisible Hands Deliver, who are helping geezers like me. I found their website, filled out an online questionnaire and a grocery list and promptly got a call from Sophia, a young woman who would be my "invisible hands". Within an hour, Sophia was downstairs with a delivery. Having slipped $30 into a ziploc bag, I went to the lobby, passed my money to the doorman, who passed it to Sophia, her face shrouded in a mask. She brimful turned and shouted "be well," and was off on her next mission, a Lone Ranger of the coronavirus lockdown Invisible Hands, founded by three young people, now has thousands of volunteers in NY and NJ. Sophia is not along and neither am I". Jane Friedman, NYC
"A couple of days after I started a Covid-19 texting support group for the few hardy souls who live far apart on our dirt road in rural Maine, I found a four-pack of toilet paper on our mudroom doormat. My husband and I wondered, Who was the TP fairy? We didn't need the TP, but in this time of foreboding, the send of human solidarity was invaluable."
Ulrike Guthrie, Orland, Maine
"It was no longer a surprise by the time we rolled in front of the birthday boy's house. Anyone could hear the honking from blocks away. We were a line of minivans and SUV's with kids' heads hanging out the windows, colored-marker posters blowing from car windows and shouts of 'Happy Birthday!' as w passé day Jack's house on his 10th birthday. In Kansas City, MO, we are under a "stay at home" order, so that means no birthday parties or big celebrations. But for 10 minutes in the middle of the day we created a cv caravan to bring joy to a classmate. We even smiled and laughed a lot ourselves." Traci Angel, Kansas City, Missouri
"Many restaurant owners have been offering pickup and delivery meals during this crisis, but Michael Psilakis, owner of the MP Taverna in Irvington, NY has gone one gracious, uplifting, community-building step farther. His handwritten doorway menu has two price lists: one for customers who are working and another (1/2 price) for those who are not."
Ruth Cowan, Irvington, New York