What does God think of us a year later? Setting aside discussions of God’s omniscience for the moment, I truly wonder what the divine perspective is on the experience of humanity this past year. A year ago yesterday, I announced that my school building would close indefinitely with learning pivoting to online. That makes today the start of a year at home, a year of ceasing to do things as they were done before.
This reflection will not be about silver linings nor about the need to grieve. If I have learned one thing this year, it is that everyone has their own story and experience of this pandemic year. Actually, everyone has their stories. Far be it from me to extrapolate from my experiences or from those of people near me. The beauty and the pain, the adaptations, and the failures, and the lessons and losses are for each of us to know and to honor in our own ways. No, this reflection seeks a wider frame.
Let me be clear, when I ask, “What does God think of us a year later,” not for one moment do I think myself capable of answering. I ask as I said, as “I truly wonder.” The question fills me with awe and reverence. Recognizing my limitations, though, helped me look to God for that wider framing. In doing so, I found something new; I found an imperfection at once devastating and uplifting.
The Jewish conception of Shabbat is that of a taste of the World to Come, a glimpse of life in the Garden of Eden. We are commanded by God to imitate God’s resting on the seventh day and making the day holy. After six days of creation, God ceased (a particularly good translation of the verb form of Shabbat) God’s work, reviewed what God had done, and blessed that seventh day as the Sabbath (Genesis 2:2-3).
The Jews are to observe the Sabbath for generations as a sign of their covenant with God (Exodus 31:16-17). In observing Shabbat by ceasing, we are meant to find all of our needs attended to — all our food ready, all our labor complete, and no need to go anywhere. That experience of being able to cease, full stop, and exist is a kind of re-ensoulment, a version of paradise set in time each week.
What I missed about Shabbat and its ceasing is two-fold: one, what our rest means for God; and two, the ancient rabbis implicit understanding that the boundary of Shabbat would always get broken. Credit goes to Rabbi Avital Hochstein for helping me see these two points. Particularly with the manna in the wilderness, our ceasing on Shabbat seems to give space for God to cease, no new provisioning and no punishing transgressors. Of course, we do transgress.
More subtle is that the entire Talmudic tractate on Shabbat begins and ends with ways in which the need to feed the hungry pokes holes. The tractate opens by asking how one transfers food from within a Shabbat house to the poor person outside or how that person outside can take from inside; the transfer breaks the boundary. What is more, the tractate ends with two stories of feeding the poor as the key to upending astrological fate (the science of the day) of an early death. The greater good breaks the perfection of Shabbat and defies reasonable expectation, and by bookending everything else about Shabbat indicates that the need will always be there.
What then of our pandemic year? We ceased so much of our normal activities. We stayed home, some in quarantine, some in lockdown, but all within new boundaries. It was far from perfect protection. The early science gave way to human imperfection (transmission) and also to human ingenuity (therapies and vaccines). Rather than asking what we learned or was it worth it, I now think about how Jews (and others) still mark Sabbath days, even though they may fall short.
Our job, it seems to me, is to keep trying to find paradise by ceasing, to keep losing perfection to attend to others in need, and to see what never ceases is that it is up to us. We are not God; but, in most instances, we are as close to God’s presence for someone else in this world as might ever get. We have all done our best, though it looks different for each of us. Let us never cease to appreciate the fact that we responded, and may we be blessed with the best of Shabbat when the time is right.
About Rabbi Jeremy Winaker
Rabbi Jeremy Winaker is the executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hillel Network, responsible for West Chester University, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and other area colleges. He is the former head of school at the Albert Einstein Academy in Wilmington and was the senior Jewish educator at the Kristol Hillel Center at the University of Delaware for four years. Rabbi Winaker lives in Delaware with his wife and three children.
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