When I remember how I longed to be home throughout the February monthlong retreat I attended in California and how since my return, I am almost exclusively at home, it makes me wonder if the universe is trying to poke fun at me. In truth, I know that my homesickness wasn’t some kind of premonition of things to come and that nothing about this pandemic is about me, personally. In fact, when we zoom the lens out and see the biggest picture of all, we realize what a great equalizer the pandemic has proven to be. At what other time in our lifetimes have we been so aware that the whole wide world is in the same boat? That’s not to say the impact of COVID-19 has been equally distributed. Just that it has spared no one. Everyone has endured loss, pain, fear and discomfort in some way or another. Everyone has had to change their plans.Everyone, to a certain extent, has been displaced from their lives before the pandemic. And none of us knows what comes next.
My heart is heavy to be standing in this nearly empty sanctuary, keenly aware of our displacement from Temple on this holiest night of Rosh Hashanah. I long for the times we could sing full throated together in our sanctuary: “Ashrei yoshvei veitecha, Happy are those who dwell in God’s house.” Maybe the liturgists who put together the various Psalms that comprise the Ashrei prayer knew something of this exile from our spiritual home when they followed that verse with the last line of Psalm 144, “Ashrei ha’am she-kacha lo, Happy is the people for whom things are kacha lo – like this.” Perhaps they were instructing us that our happiness shouldn’t depend on place or conditions. As Maya Angelou famously said, “I long…to be at home wherever I am.” Ashrei ha’am she-kacha lo. Even when it is like this, can I feel happy and at home?
As I reflect on my own journey to be at home in our new reality, I remember how being restricted to home used to feel so unnatural. It was jarring at first to shelter in place when I was more accustomed to being out in the world- working, shopping, eating out, visiting with friends, dropping kids at school. Fast forward six months and I must admit, now home feels like a refuge I don’t particularly relish leaving, especially when things do not feel particularly safe out there. I imagine that all of you have similarly been surprised at how your life has metamorphosed.
If before COVID we were like caterpillars on the move, chomping our way through life, our lives now are a lot smaller and stiller locked in our cocoons, until the day we are ready to wriggle our way out, reborn.
The metaphor of a caterpillar in its cocoon is particular apt for us in this precarious moment. How nice would it be if, in some way, this all ends with as much flair and magic as the end that awaits the caterpillar. But let’s start this metaphor at the beginning of his life. Remember the famous children’s book, The Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle? That book begins with the caterpillar tunneling through a piece of food every day, leaving a hole in each one which Carle underscores with a literal hole in the book’s pages. By the end of the week, the caterpillar has binged on every sort of junk food and is downright miserable. Sam Anderson recently wrote in a New York Times Magazine article:
“Carle’s caterpillar is more than just a caterpillar; it is a classic existentialist antihero — a lonely creature of pure need, guided by only its own ravenousness, skirting the knife’s edge between self-destruction and growth…"
Anderson compares his quarantine induced binge-eating, gaming, and tv watching behaviors to be akin to Carle’s gluttonous caterpillar.
Personally, I wonder whether we humans weren’t skirting the knife’s edge between self-destruction and growth, leaving gaping holes in our wake long before we cocooned ourselves in for the pandemic. Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis paints the picture this way for us Americans in a scathing piece that recently appeared in Rolling Stone magazine:
“President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it….‘the most warlike nation in the history of the world.’ Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion dollars on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home…As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. By June of that [same] year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations.”
The upticks in violence both abroad and at home aren’t the only troubling societal trends Davis describes. He continues:
“More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding.
By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce.
Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes. With slogans like ‘24/7’ celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families. The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis. Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.”
According to Davis if there are other strong social structures like religious faith, the thickness of family ties, national loyalty and pride that can bind people together, then negative forces like these tearing a society apart are mitigated or even muted. But over the last two generations in this country, the support systems that once held people together grew thin and tenuous making it nearly impossible for working class families to rebound when corporate leaders close factories growing their own wealth by shipping jobs abroad, rather than fulfill our country’s promise to them of a decent life.
“COVID-19 didn’t lay America low;” Davis observes, “it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the [COVID] crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs…”
Our decline as a nation is not going unnoticed by the world, either:
“As the United States responded to the crisis like a corrupt tin pot dictatorship, in Davis’ words, “the actual tin pot dictators of the world took the opportunity to seize the high ground, relishing a rare sense of moral superiority, especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The autocratic leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, chastised America for ‘maliciously violating ordinary citizens’ rights.’ North Korean newspapers objected to ‘police brutality’ in America. Quoted in the Iranian press, Ayatollah Khamenei gloated, ‘America has begun the process of its own destruction.’ …The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children…The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences…”
Davis concludes with this warning: “The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose…”
It is sad that we so resemble that old New Yorker cartoon with one dog saying to the other: “It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.” And that the only glue holding us together is what Brene Brown calls “common enemy intimacy,” a sense of connection with those who hate all the things we do. So maybe it is a good thing that we are locked out of the world and locked in our cocoons- maybe we do less damage this way.
Like me, perhaps you’ve been startled and moved by reports of once smoggy cities of people who are now able to breathe the cleanest air in a century and of wildlife wandering freely on empty avenues in Chicago or on the Golden Gate Bridge. You may have also been as shocked as I was to learn, the recent earthquake in North Carolina notwithstanding, when we humans stopped commuting in heavy traffic, attending football games, rock concerts, shooting fireworks, riding subways, working mines, and drilling rocks, when we halted factories, paused the jackhammering and industrial blasting of development, the earth quieted in response. “The length and quiescence of this period represents the longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,” the journal Science reported last month. While we feel inconvenienced and frustrated all cooped up in our homes, our planet and all living creatures-especially our dogs- might be the happiest they’ve ever been.
Maybe it’s good that humanity has gone into a cocoon for another reason. After all, what a caterpillar is doing in its self-imposed quarantine, is basically digesting itself. Enzymes reduce the wormy body into a gruesome mush, and its only after this near-total self-annihilation that the new growth can begin. It is a timely thought for Rosh Hashanah. After all, Hebrew word for year, shanah, can be understood in two opposing ways: from the root l’shanot to change and also from the root, l’shanen, to repeat. Every new year, we are faced with the challenge of deciding what needs changing and what bears repeating. Likewise, inside a cocoon, an existential battle is being waged between the gooey soup of ex-caterpillar and hitherto dormant cells called ‘‘imaginal cells.’’ Imaginal cells are the ones that initiate the process of becoming the butterfly. Initially, the immune system of the caterpillar identifies imaginal cells as threats and attacks them. Nevertheless, these cells continue to do their change making work, multiply, connect with one another, and eventually form clusters. Over time, the clusters start to resonate with the same frequency and communicate in the same language, until a tipping point is reached – when they stop acting as individual, separate cells and instead, become a multiple-celled organism. Ultimately, that’s how you get a beautiful butterfly from the horrid meltdown of a modest caterpillar.
For the last six months of being cocooned, we’ve all personally experienced some measure of meltdown: of our patience, our self-discipline, our coping mechanisms. As society dissolved, our lives as we knew them in large measure dissolved, too. We had to rethink how to parent, how to be children, how to be professionals, neighbors, friends, and community members. Our familiar structures became unrecognizable, and we became unrecognizable to ourselves.
We’ve suffered, been confused, terrified and heart-broken. And, in the end, all this change may not add up to progress just like it is impossible to say that a butterfly is an improvement on the caterpillar. But let us not forget, as Anderson reminds us, “that in our horrendous confusion — in spite of it or because of it — we collectively managed to do at least one amazing thing. Unlike the caterpillar who doesn’t have a choice, we chose to go dormant. We changed almost everything in the world, almost overnight. This required a kind of collective action that, frankly, would have struck [most of us] as impossible [six months ago].” Perhaps then, contrary to Mr. Davis’ astute analysis, our social contract may not be irrevocably broken. By keeping ourselves at home, we are indeed acting with purpose for the collective good of all. There are, of course, outliers. And we have to contend with temptation from within and pressure from without not to stay the course. But enough of us recognize that we are in it all together and for the long haul. For better or worse, we are in the middle of creating whatever the new world will be. Enough of us have found enough reasons to change ourselves, and it’s making a difference. Imaginal cells exist in cocoons, and I believe that imaginal tendencies hitherto dormant, are within each one of us, too, to transform whatever comes next for the better.
I want you to know that inspiring metamorphosis is well underway at your temple. It is true that if you were to drive by, you’d see an empty shell of a building, an abandoned playground, a vacant parking lot. But that belies the truth of what has been happening from homes and on computers across town to rise to the challenge of keeping our community together and move us to the next stage of our evolution.
For example, because of variable reliability in our postal system in order to get you the beautiful High Holy Day Guide, which itself was the generous collective conspiracy of a myriad of creative and generous volunteers, our one and only 8 year old honorary assistant administrator, Matilda Skolnick, spent an afternoon after her online classes in the Temple office with her angel of a mom, Buffy, sealing and stamping the envelopes so they’d arrive at your doors in plenty of time. After pulling off an unprecedented, COVID-style Bar Mitzvah for his son, Kevin Ring, our tech genius and the person responsible for bringing our services to screens all over the planet every single Friday night since mid-March, that Kevin Ring, was here the same afternoon as the bar Mitzvah in this sanctuary, setting up his personal camera so video readings for services could resume on schedule the following day. Over seventy of you were greeted at the door on one of five Sundays from morning until night by our ritual chair, Isaac Rockoff, so you could stand on this Bima, dressed in your finest and share those readings from the machzor or the Torah with your congregational family. Kol Simcha put together their personal time and treasure to produce that amazing recording of Heal Us Now. Sam Kaplan spent countless hours combing through years of recordings to choose the very best ones for the stream before services to put you in the right mood to pray and be moved. From scratch, Geri Garfinkel Gershon and Jim Theobald created an inspiring ceremony to accompany the first ever Shofar in your Car around Asheville experience. When it was clear that high holidays as we knew them were a thing of the past, the imaginal cells within so many beautiful souls in our congregation aged an all-out effort to metamorphose the experience into something truly worthwhile.
While nothing can take the place of being together in this house of God,
I am truly heartened by what is going to take its place. As creative and committed as any one individual was, that person could not have done it on their own. These high holidays gave us the opportunity to be connected by mutual love and concern for each other, for our congregation and beyond. The negative forces tearing apart our lives were mitigated and muted by our solidarity of purpose: to make our holy days deeply holy. Our temple gave us a way to take a break from worrying about ourselves and start working on a collective good that served others. We remembered that we owed it to all of you. And that was worth finding the most satisfying and creative solutions to every challenge we faced. Those who were part of these extraordinary efforts, and those who have year after year or because of the unusual circumstances of this year stepped forward with your time and those myriads of you who made a financial covenant to ensure this community can see its way to the other side, I guarantee the sting of being apart right now is lessened. Those of you who are the beneficiaries of other’s kindnesses might well remember that you will feel secure not on the strength of your bank balance but on the thickness and resonance of the bonds that connect to you to others in common purpose.
What kind of new year 5781 will be is in our hands. We cannot be passively changed by this pandemic. Each of us must be intentional about where we go from here, how we grow, what we learn and how we connect or reconnect to our heritage, to our families, to the congregation. I pray we choose to reaffirm that there is a social contract that binds us all together, vote in ways that assure that everyone matters, especially the vulnerable because they are vulnerable and we owe it to them to care.
That is precisely the kind of thinking that will metamorphose us and the world for the better. We are greater than the forces driving us apart when we remember that we are all in this together and when our every effort is toward the welfare of all. May 5781 be a New Year and a Good Year.