![]() Now that the end is in site, however, I can look back on the pandemic as a sort of sabbatical - “the pause between the notes,” in the musical metaphor used by Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers to describe Shabbat. ![]() Needless to say, for many such pressure is oppressive.” “We should enjoy this extra time we have on our hands, either spending it with our loved ones or taking the chance to improve ourselves. That led the philosopher Patrick Levy to compare the pandemic to the torment of insomnia: “We know we are powerless to hasten the end of our waiting but feel pressure to be productive,” he writes. Unlike with Shabbat, we don’t know when the pandemic will end. on a Saturday afternoon in June, when you’ve read and napped and eaten all you possibly can and can’t believe there are still five hours to go. I wouldn’t want to live forever inside a cathedral, and like many I am relieved when it is over. Inside what Heschel calls the “cathedral” of Shabbat I am forced to find, and appreciate, different ways to use my time. On Friday nights I find myself entering a vestibule into a different dimension, shutting the door on the cares and shmutz of the week before, and hunkering within the day’s limitations until another door opens on Saturday night. ![]() The boundaries in that sense are liberating – I stop wondering what I am missing out on and learn to appreciate what I can actually have. The kosher laws create their own anxiety, but they also limit my choices in a good way. Ten years after first identifying the syndrome, Schwartz suggested things are only getting worse: Social media has increased the average person’s fear that “obody’s good enough and you’re always worried you’re missing out.” We are all Robin Williams in “Moscow on the Hudson,” fainting in the coffee aisle. Keeping kosher tames the “ Paradox of Choice,” psychologist Barry Schwartz’s term for how an overabundance of choice is increasing our levels of anxiety and depression and feelings of social inadequacy. Sohn once put it, “The laws of kashrut offer a Jewish spiritual discipline that is rooted in the concrete choices and details of daily life - to be practiced in an area that seems most ‘mundane.’” Keeping kosher, for example, is a day-long, every day exercise in forced limitations: You can eat this but not that. In that sense, COVID restrictions reminded me of the artificial (and in my case voluntary) limitations that come with Jewish religious observance. Within them I was forced to improvise, adapt, change. The restrictions imposed false boundaries on my choices, social circles, leisure time and activities. In fact, I will miss some of the claustrophobic feeling of the pandemic. For so many people – those raising school-age kids, caring for an elderly or disabled loved one, stuck in dangerous or abusive households – the pandemic was a nightmare.īut I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t learned or grown as the result of it. The death toll was obscene, doubly so when you consider all the ways a competent government could have handled it from the start. I wouldn’t have wished this awful plague on my worst enemy. ![]() And when at times Colbert would look frustrated with the format it was just validation of what we were all feeling in our homes. Like Evie, my wife was my only audience for the last year and a half, and happily we never got sick of each other, and if possible grew even closer. The quarantine version of Colbert’s show felt warm and intimate. Somehow the laughter of just two people feels (to me, anyway, watching on YouTube) more genuine and well-earned than the guffaws and cheers of a live audience. I sort of liked the pandemic version of what he called “ A Late Show,” whose only audience appeared to be his wife Evie and a camera operator. Stephen Colbert’s late-night talk show returned before a live studio audience last week, 15 months after moving first to what looked like his basement and later to a closet-sized studio in Times Square. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |