#897: Remembering the Lockdown
A sermon from my vault for Shabbat HaḤodesh
Gimme Some Torah #866
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Please enjoy this sermon from my vault. I delivered it on March 21, 2020, shortly after the beginning of the COVID lockdowns and stay-at-home orders.
The followers of the Ba’al Shem Tov, who were the first of what we call Hasidim, told this story about rich and very hospitable man who lived in a city close to where the Ba’al Shem held his court.
To every poor wayfarer, he gave food and drink and money to boot. But he felt the urgent need to hear words of praise from everyone he received into his house, and if such words did not come spontaneously, he would go fishing for the compliments, saying things that would elicit the praise he wanted.
Once the Ba’al Shem sent one of his disciples, Rabbi Wolf Kitzes, cross-country, and told him to visit that rich man in the course of his journey. He was lavishly entertained and presented with a generous gift, but he gave the rich man only sparse words of thanks, barely more than a nod. Finally his host said: “Am I the most hopsitable man in the world or what?”
“We shall see,” answered Rabbi Wolf. And not another word could the rich man get out of him. At nightfall, the host lay down among his guests according to his custom, for before falling asleep, he like to chat with them and hear some praise. Just as he was dozing off, Rabbi Wolf touched him on the shoulder with his little finger.
He immediately started to dream. At first, it was a good dream. In his dream the man was called to the king and had tea with him.
But suddenly the king fell and was dead and they accused him of poisoning him and put him in jail. A fire broke out in the jail and he escaped and fled until he was far away. Then he became a water-carrier, but that was hard work and earned him very little money, so he moved ot anothe region where water was scarce.
But there they had a law that you were not paid unless the pail was full to the brim, and to walk with a full pail and never spill a drop was a difficult matter. Once when he was walking carefully, step by step very slowly, he tripped on a rock and broke both his legs. There he lay and thought of his former life as a rich man, and he cried bitterly. Then Rabbi Wolf touched him on the shoulder again with his little finger. The man woke up from his nightmare and said, “Take me to your master.”
The Baal Shem received the rich man with a smile. “Your hospitality was fake because you only practiced hospitality to get praise. And all of that fake hospitality of yours has gone into a dog’s mouth.” The man’s heart awoke and turned to God, and the Bal’al Shem instructed him how to lift up his soul.
I told you a story about hospitality because for the foreseeable future, we are all going to have to be hospitable with ourselves. One day soon I hope, we will be able to do something that we’ve all taken for granted, to have people over for dinner, lunch, or just a conversation.
Sure we can talk over the internet as we are now, but that isn’t even a copy of a face to face meeting. It’s a shadow of a copy of being with a breathing person.
But for now, we are in lockdown.
I think the key to lockdown might be treating yourself and your family members as if they were guests. We all treat our guests better than we treat ourselves and our family, that’s just sort of how it goes. To survive mentally in this quarantine, we will have to avoid the temptation to hibernate.
We’re human beings, not bears. We don’t hibernate, and the winter is over anyway. We need to make the lockdown life as normal as possible by following a schedule. We have to get up in the morning, and not at noon. We have to eat actual meals and not just snack out of a bag. We need to make sure that the quarantine does not become a slog of sleeping, eating, napping, and repeating. We have to get dressed as if we were going out. We must not spend the quarantine in our pajamas.
This week’s special Maftir reading is known as HaḤodesh, which is read on the Shabbat right before Rosh Hodesh Nisan, the month of Passover. The maftir reading describes how our ancestors who left Egypt had to eat the Passover lamb in a hurry because they were fugitives.
And it occurred to me that quarantine is Exodus in reverse. In an exodus, people have to hurry up and leave everything they knew behind and go somewhere better. An exodus is a joyous occasion, a reason to celebrate year after year, generation after generation.
In a quarantine, we have to hurry up and come home. We are not free to roam, we have to just sit and worry whether we’ll have enough toilet paper to get through this. Inactivity does not come naturally to us, and that is why sitting shivah is so hard for some people. Locked in our houses, we begin to realize that the problem in life is not being busy. Being busy is good. The problem is not being busy enough.
So in this lockdown, we have to find ways to keep busy. You have something now that we often feel we don’t have, which is time. Read those books you keep telling yourself you’re going to read. Learn to draw online, there are lots of ways to do it. Get your heart rate up to an exercise level at least once a day, outside if possible, inside if you have to.
Dare I say, try studying some Torah. I teach on Zoom at noon and eight pm on Tuesdays. I am happy to study with anyone privately online, or I can open the Temple so you can borrow real books from our library.
I don’t claim to know how this is coronavirus situation is going to end. It very clearly is a disaster, I hope more of an economic one than a medical one. I hope that will be the case because money can be replaced, lives cannot.
In the meantime, we all know the rules. Wash your hands frequently, and don’t touch your nose, where all coronaviruses prefer to set up shop. Don’t go to the grocery store unless you absolutely have to. Send younger family members to the store, let them do the shopping.
May God bless and protect the medical professionals and scientists and give them the wisdom to stop this plague just as Aaron was able to stop plagues so many years ago.
Shabbat Shalom.
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I am the rabbi of Temple Beth El in Somerset, New Jersey, and the author of The JPS Jewish Heritage Torah Commentary.