Joanne Seiff

Kindness a blessing to share

I was crying in front of the computer screen during a funeral service livestream. Again. It wasn’t my first of this pandemic. Even if the person didn’t ostensibly die of COVID, he’d been ill alone, unable to see family for long stretches because of it. And, because of COVID, I couldn’t be at the funerals in person, which were all in the United States. In normal times, I’d be rushing across the continent to be at these services with my family.

The person being eulogized, Rabbi Laszlo Berkowits, was a family friend, and was close to my parents. I called him “uncle” as a kid. He and his family were always part of our family’s holiday celebrations and gatherings. I played with his kids at his house. Their phone number was my elementary school’s emergency contact for me.

Rabbi Berkowits (Uncle Larry) was my family’s rabbi. He was also a Holocaust survivor. For a person who spent his teenage years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, my Uncle Larry’s positivity, joy and ability to find the good in others were amazing. He had an incredible, long career, supporting and inspiring others to make positive change.

At the funeral, his family and friends (including my pediatrician) talked about how my Uncle Larry felt so grateful for the kindness of others, including the kindness of strangers. Without that help, he wouldn’t have survived the Second World War. Without the assistance and loving kindness of strangers – in Sweden, the United States and beyond – he wouldn’t have regained his health, gone on to serve in the U.S. military or received a full scholarship to become a rabbi. He wouldn’t have had the opportunities that truly enabled him to make such a difference in so many others’ lives.

This pandemic makes me think about how important that effort, to be kind and to reach out to one another, is for all of us right now. A year ago, the CBC Manitoba webpage ran a piece I wrote, “Mom’s emergency granola bar is there when you need it – no matter who you are.”

The article was about how I try to carry around snacks (granola bars) for my kids, just in case they need one, but that, sometimes, the best option for me is to offer that extra snack to someone else on the street, who is hungry, instead.

The thing is, since the pandemic started, like many Manitobans, we haven’t been out and about nearly as often. I don’t carry around snacks now because my kids are remote schooling. We’re working and learning at home, trying, like most of us, to reduce the number of people who might get sick or die from COVID. On a daily basis, I am not physically handing out those granola bars to anybody other than my kids.

A week ago, I got the most amazing email from a single mom friend who is a grocery store cashier in a city more than 200 kilometres away. She works very hard to keep her family afloat. She’d been waiting until her break to write me: “A man came through with 25 boxes of granola bars. No judgment – they were on sale! Then, he tells me he read an article about someone and their child or children who handed a person a granola bar and it stuck with him. So, now he has granola bars in his car and always hands them out to panhandlers and people who need them when he can.”

I could imagine her hearing this at the grocery store, her jaw dropping in surprise. She told the man that we were good friends and that she would tell me about this. The man said to pass along that, she wrote, “he has been doing this since the week he read your article and to thank you! Simple acts of kindness are what is keeping him going these days.”

When I read her email, I cried. It had been “one of those pandemic days” – where the news, the work and learning struggles at home, had all felt so hard. We’re all tired of worrying, so concerned about our loved ones. In fact, I’d been feeling badly that I couldn’t do more for others, write more, donate more, while juggling things on the stay-at-home front.

Another email from my friend arrived. She’d mentioned this man’s purchase to one of the grocery store owners. He’d said, if she sees this man again, the store would give him a discount on these purchases. Then he printed out the story to pass along, too.

I felt so grateful to this anonymous stranger who was carrying around all these granola bars to feed others, and continuing this kindness when I couldn’t. I wanted to thank him, but I also respect just how many anonymous givers might be out there. It takes all of us to beat this pandemic. Next year, I hope to host my amazing essential worker friend and her kids for a big celebratory Chanukah dinner again.

I’m so heartened to hear that the kindness my Uncle Larry encouraged in others is continuing to be passed along. I carry with me his constant reminders to be an upstanding person who does the right thing, who helps others, shines a light for others, even if he himself isn’t here anymore.

My Uncle Larry would say, “Be the best. Be a blessing.” He’d add something like, “We never know how long we’ll be here on earth. It’s our job to do good for others whenever we can – right now.”

At his funeral, another longtime family friend, Sam Simon, spoke, reminding us: “Be that stranger whose kindness is a blessing to someone so that they, too, can become a blessing to the world.” I am sure the biggest blessing of all would be if more people took that to heart.

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

That glitter gets everywhere

I’ve been thinking about Caillou, a TV show for toddlers and preschoolers. It’s been on television since 1997. Caillou is a little bald French-Canadian kid. He’s broadcast in both French and English, and offers gentle lessons to kids everywhere. My twins watched a lot of Caillou.

The episode I’ve been remembering offers something basic that we should all know. The summary: Caillou’s doing art at preschool with glitter. When he finishes, he doesn’t clean up or wash his hands. The rest of the episode shows off exactly where the glitter ends up, from light switches to friends’ bodies to snack and the table and chairs. That’s why it’s so important to wash your hands after playing with glitter.

The glitter message sticks with kids. It’s also a remarkably easy way to explain germ theory – useful during a pandemic. Glitter, like germs, gets everywhere.

As an early glitter fan, I found this lesson powerful. As a kid, I had several surgeries for birth defects by the time I was 5. I was in the hospital a lot. During one recovery period, I was brought to a big sunny room in the pediatrics ward to do arts and crafts, including glitter, which I loved. My mother still jokes about this more than 40 years later – remembering the day the surgeon came to check my incisions. My mom likely hovered, anxious, as he checked my abdomen and sides. He looked up and grinned when she asked how things were healing. He said things were coming along nicely and were “very colourful!”

What does this have to do with Judaism? I’ve been studying Tractate Pesachim as part of my pursuit of Daf Yomi (a page of Talmud a day). Pesachim’s topic is Passover. In Pesachim 15, the issue is how to burn all the chametz (leavened bread) that we get rid of right before the holiday. It’s considered “impure.”

Impurity here is often defined as something “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” There are many reasons why something is considered impure. The questions the rabbis are weighing are interesting. They wonder, “Is it OK to burn two different kinds of impure things together?” They imagine the Temple priests having to get rid of all this and finish cleaning by the start of the holiday.

The other impure things brought up – and this rabbinic impurity topic is complex – are pigul and nottar, two categories of sacrificial meats that have gone wrong. Jane Shapiro, in introducing this issue on the My Jewish Learning website, explains that pigul is something sacrificed “with improper thought.” That is, something sacrificed in error; that is, the priest thought it was to be burnt or eaten at the wrong time. Nottar was an offering made at the right time and not eaten – basically, leftovers, which are then considered impure. There’s common sense in this. Sometimes we cook things incorrectly (pigul) or, lacking refrigeration, we might just have to get rid of leftovers (nottar) to avoid food poisoning. In these cases, the impurity’s a mess-up. It’s not an unclean animal, another source of impurity, but, rather, a human mistake that leads to the disposing of something.

As the rabbis sort through what can be burned together, they examine how one kind of impurity causes a first-degree impurity, which, if it touches something else, becomes a second or a third degree of impurity. Something in this discussion reminded me of glitter and, then, germ theory.

Even the most careful person can be surprised by a sneeze, or get too close to someone when they are supposed to be social distancing. In fact, keeping oneself safe from invisible germs, like the coronavirus, can be difficult. Even healthcare workers, swathed in protective equipment, can slip up. In a sense, this rabbinic concept of impurity is a lot like catching germs. If we accidently mix items or people inappropriately, we pass along impurity, or germs.

If we visualize germs like Caillou’s glitter or my preschooler hospital craft project, we better understand how tricky a time we’re in. We’re still facing a long haul.

Yes, we hear a vaccine is on its way, but we don’t yet know how long it will take for enough Canadians to be vaccinated. We don’t know how effective the vaccine will be, or if enough people will be willing to take it. Meanwhile, COVID-19 is spreading just like that glitter. It’s everywhere that we are, and it’s scary. There’s every chance that we might encounter the virus through an inadvertent slip up (like the rabbinic impurity of pigul or nottar) but, since it’s germs and not glitter, we won’t know until later. We must act as if we are impure because the virus isn’t visible.

The most poignant part of this whole complicated impurity narrative is that the rabbis just can’t figure it all out. They say more than once that we’ll just have to wait for the prophet Elijah to return to give us the right answers. Reading it, you can imagine their shoulders shrugging as they struggle with what they don’t know and can’t figure out.

Scientists and doctors everywhere are also figuring things out as they go. They have to learn to live with the mystery. We don’t know everything – about the pandemic, how it works, when it will end and about those germs that spread like glitter.

For most, 2020 has been a rocky year. As we turn towards the secular year 2021, it’s important to remember that a vaccine might not be an instant fix. We face the future much as the rabbis faced some of these difficult questions about impurity long ago, and the researchers do today. We don’t know all the answers. We must do our best, square our shoulders, and keep on keeping on.

Yet, every week, as we end Shabbat, we sing about Eliyahu (Elijah) and we welcome him to every Passover and every bris. It’s in yearning for Elijah that we find the faith to keep trying.

Wishing you a happy and healthy 2021! I hope your home celebrations are great – and without glitter!

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Gift of doing nothing at all

Recently, one of my twins convinced me we needed to look at an online mindfulness app. It featured ocean beaches, a sunset, a waterfall, a forest, a rainstorm …. you get the picture. The notion was that one could stare at each image, take deep cleansing breaths and feel restored. Except, with the twins crowding my iPad screen, within moments we had hopped from one view to the next. The app kicked us out, as we had “seen” all its tranquil views. What was supposed to be meditative became a crazed, erratic two-minute virtual tour of all the outdoors, at once. Oops. That didn’t work out right.

There’s a lot of discussion online and in the media about how the pandemic has caused mental health issues because people are lonely, restless and bored, and many have a hard time with restrictions and lockdown. This may well be true for many people.

For those of us with kids, it feels more like a Ferris wheel/merry-go-round mash-up, where both rides have the music playing, it’s all set on a fast speed and there’s NO. WAY. TO. GET. OFF. We’re crazy busy staying home. We chose remote schooling for safety. This gives no breaks from parenting, and no way to get all the work done. My house is a mess. The housework and cooking? – seriously out of control.

My parents, living alone in Virginia, have an opposite experience. Due to their age and health, they, too, are staying home to stay safe, with lots of time, not enough socializing in person, feeling adrift without their usual travel plans and volunteer activities.

Our extended family is far away and cannot help us in Winnipeg. We can’t support them in person either, so we’ve had a long stretch of time, including holidays, on our own. Chanukah won’t be different. My parents are sending fun toys in the mail, ordered online, to keep the kids busy during the hours and hours ahead indoors this winter, which we will appreciate, whenever they arrive.

We’ve also been planning way in advance. When you celebrate Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, etc., on your own as a nuclear family, it takes more thought to make it special. Giving ourselves time to prepare has meant we have had some amazing meals and meaningful home-based observances, without going farther than our back deck sukkah.

My husband and I prepared for Chanukah by worrying if we had enough candles or if we had to shop for them – were Chanukah candles considered essential by the Manitoba government? To our relief, unless the kids insist on lighting all the chanukiyot at once, we’re fine. We’ve got plenty left over from last year, no need to go out and buy more. This, and internet ordering for kids, has been the extent of our preparations.

My twins, however, started the Chanukah countdown much earlier than usual. On a quiet Sunday afternoon, I discovered they were making paper chains and complicated construction paper cut-outs of dreidels, jugs of oil, a menorah, and more. The cut-outs were carefully hung up on our living room’s French doors – approximately 17 days before the first candles would be lit. Anticipation makes a holiday special.

However, the gift I love the absolute best these days won’t come on Chanukah. It’s Shabbat, which happens every week. It’s an opportunity to just sit on the couch. We stream services and I cook ahead so there’s nothing to do on Saturday. We sometimes magically find take-out appearing on the table Saturday night, when the leftovers don’t seem appealing. We’re not shomer Shabbat, and I’ve been known to disappear for a cozy chair and some knitting or to spend time with my sewing machine to deepen my relaxation, but Jewish traditional practice was really onto something with Shabbat.

Since having twins – they are now 9 years old – I’ve had people ask what would help, if I could have absolutely anything. I’d say: going to a quiet place in the country, alone, with a big bed with clean white sheets, lots of good food prepared, and time to just sleep, eat, read and hang out by myself. In reality, I felt that leaving my household for any length of time might result in worse chaos when I returned. My husband is well-intended, but an absentminded professor. He often forgets to feed the kids snack or the dog dinner if I don’t remind him over and over.

However, Shabbat at our house has become that oasis, where I get the chance to just be. It’s not the sunset, waterfall, rainfall, forest walk, ocean waves vision that the mindfulness app thinks we need. Not at all. It’s nothing idyllic – or tidy – but it’s a time to step away from social media, the chores, the craziness, and just be. Nowadays, I don’t have to get everyone dressed up for Shabbat services. I can’t invite guests or stress about getting a fancy meal made. I have many fewer work deadlines. And while, yes, there are some negatives in that, there’s a whole lot of positives, too.

We’re facing so many things that aren’t like anything we’ve experienced before. The unexpected can be scary. It can also be an amazing opportunity to let go, embrace and learn something different. Shabbat has long been my favourite holiday, but it took a pandemic for me to settle even more fully into one day a week of rest.

Turns out I don’t need to gaze at a mindfulness app to unwind. I’ll stick with making a huge Shabbat dinner, sleeping (late!) until 8 a.m., and participating in services from the couch, surrounded by the kids’ Lego and Playmobil congregation.

This year might be a chance to discover new gifts within this very challenging experience. Mine might be the best thing I could imagine – doing nothing at all.

Past helps decode present

My husband saw the pair of decoder rings in a catalogue, long before our twins were old enough for them. Still, he ordered them and put them away. At the time, it amused me. How could he predict the future? Would our kids want these someday?

Fast forward to one October 2020 pandemic weekend. I’m not sure how he knew it was the right time. Before I knew it, two 9-year-olds were whizzing around the house, holding onto rings much too large for their fingers, and sending each other secret messages in code.

When they returned to school that Monday, they continued with the crazy codes, trying to teach their classmates about it. Unfortunately, this fun was short-lived. About a week later, we got an email from the school. It said that remote learning “may” be offered, and that we could sign up if we “might” be interested.

The situation was worsening in Manitoba, so we clicked through late on a Saturday night. This seemed wise, if we indeed understood the confusing letter correctly, that this remote learning might be happening. In any case, if some people signed up for the remote learning, it would allow more room in our older, smaller school building for others to social distance. Well, surprise! We were contacted on Monday morning and, by that Wednesday, our kids were at home again, learning with us. In the long run, this is the right choice – Judaism teaches us to value life above all else.

Both my husband and I are already working from home. At the beginning of my career, I used to teach school. Although I’ve never taught Grade 4 before, we’re muddling through. The remote learning we’re offered doesn’t continue the Hebrew curriculum we had before. It started with a single Hebrew packet, but, when it looked like we were nearing the end and I asked the school if it had more to share, I got a stern “no” in response. Remote learning offers only the basics, even if we can see via Instagram that, in class, the kids’ schoolmates are still doing fun projects without us.

It’s hard on children to feel left out. However, since there’s already been a COVID virus exposure at the school, we made the safe choice for us. My kids are lonely for their friends. My husband, a biology professor, thinks that schools should shut down now, until the infection rate lessens and the health system isn’t so overburdened.

Yet, here we are, with an everyday virtual, multi-age “school lesson” that lasts an hour. We do the reading, writing, math and science on our own. We also do something Jewish. One night, it was a discussion about Mezritch, which was a centre of Chassidism. Another day we talked about tefillin. On a third day, we learned about Sigd, the Ethiopian Jewish holiday celebrated 50 days after Yom Kippur, which is now a national holiday in Israel. The kids keep up their Hebrew as best we can, with my support and by using a free language program online.

Today, we hit the very last page of the Hebrew packet sent home by the school a couple weeks ago. There were moans about how hard it was and further cries when they realized there was no more of the “packet Hebrew.” For me, the last page left a special, coded gift.

This page taught about how each letter of the aleph bet, the Hebrew alphabet, also signified a number. Aleph is one, for instance. The numerical values of the letters of chai, the word for life, add up to 18.

My kids struggled with this page for entirely different reasons. But, if we can learn to write the numbers in Arabic numerals (also called the Hindu-Arabic system), we can learn the Hebrew ones. We’ll learn to spell out the number names in Hebrew. Like magic, I’d been given a gift, a secret decoder system to share. We just have to learn all the symbols together!

I won’t lie. I wish my kids’ class had all gone “remote” together, so they could see their classmates for an hour a day. I wish the pandemic hadn’t happened. I wish I’d gone to bed earlier over the weekend, instead of staying up late, reading the huge obituary section – but wait, that’s not right.

My biggest wish that puts all these little ones to shame? I want to honour every life that’s in those obits, every life that has been lost. There’s so much suffering, death and loss right now, and we’re all working our way through it.

I also want to honour the diverse positive ways we’ve innovated and managed during a scary, singular experience. Studying a textual tradition like ours, that’s thousands of years old, means we have deep resources. We can hear about deaths and the first obituaries in the Torah portions this time of year. We imagine similar chaotic experiences like Noah’s ark in the flood, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. There are plenty of opportunities to think through our rich history during remote or home school.

On the plus side? It also means that I have a Hebrew lesson plan for tomorrow and beyond. We have access to an ancient, special Hebrew numerical code, called Gematria, and a mom teacher who now gets to figure out how to use that, along with those fancy decoder rings, for good – for the twins to learn math, puzzles, Hebrew and more … in Grade 4.

Comfort food and COVID

There’s been an uptick in the eating of comfort food in our house since the pandemic began. Cooking and eating are a big deal during stressful times.

Now, we were “into” food pre-pandemic. I cook a lot. However, everything went up a notch when our focus turned inwards, particularly for holidays like Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot and Thanksgiving. When our neighbourhood bakery closed down in the spring, I went from making only challah to making all our bread. My kids, surprised, said, “Mommy, you made this? It’s really good!” – as they gobbled up the crusty spelt bread I turned out. Over these months, it’s gone from bread production to canning. Once the shelves filled up with jams, pickles and applesauce, autumn became baking and roasting season.

We’ve eaten too much: apple pie and crisp, sweet potato pie, cherry pies, and more. I tried for moderation – and then my husband bought Halloween candy. He started doling out two snack-sized chocolates a day. I couldn’t resist.

In the summer, I combated all this “extra” with dog walks and playing outside, but now it’s cold out again. It’s harder to take long walks. Fall virus numbers have soared, so swim lessons, gym visits and other kinds of exercise are off the table for now.

Imagine my surprise when Daf Yomi, the practice of reading a page of Talmud a day, came to the rescue! I found good advice while reading Eruvin 82b and 83b. After all, it’s not the first time in Jewish history that we’ve gone through periods of stress. When feeling out of control, it might only be natural to struggle with basics like “how much is enough to eat?”

In Eruvin 82b, a discussion emerges. To extend the eruv, the boundary of how far you can go on Shabbat, you can place food in a location, usually cooperatively, with your neighbours, so that you all “share” the space. When you establish this with your neighbours, it’s communal space, like in your house. You can carry things within a larger area. Imagine a block party potluck, and you’re understanding this.

How much food is enough? It’s supposed to be enough when each neighbour puts in enough for two meals. However, that amount must be defined. Is that food enough for two “work day” meals, when people might be doing hard labour? On Shabbat, we eat more, so do we put more out to designate the eruv? How much should it weigh? Does it need to be expensive or fancy food?

The rabbis then do math, which is always a bit dodgy, to be honest. Why? Measurements in the ancient world varied from one geographic location to another. Food staples varied, too – for instance, some places had better access to one kind of grain as compared to others. Rice bread is acceptable, for example, but millet bread can’t be used, because the rabbis say it’s hard to make edible millet bread.

Different communities couldn’t afford the same things and, even if they could afford them, in some cases, the bread they produced was simply not edible. In Eruvin 81a, there’s a discussion about a kind of mixed grain lentil bread, a concoction of wheat, barley, beans, lentil, millet and spelt as spelled out in Ezekiel 4:9. “Rav Hiyya bar Avin said that Rav said: One may establish an eruv with lentil bread.” The Gemara determines that there was a bread made like this in the days of Mar Shmuel, and even his dog wouldn’t eat it. So, the food put out for the eruv must be edible to humans (and dogs) and taste good!

The rabbis refer to the Torah and decide that the manna the Jewish people received while wandering in the desert was about an omer (two litres) each. There’s some dubious calculating to determine how much food is “enough.” The most helpful information I found was repeated by multiple sages over more than a thousand years.

In Sue Parker Gerson’s introduction of Eruvin 83 on myjewishlearning.com, she offers some context for understanding the talmudic text. The sages say, “One who eats roughly this amount [an omer] each day is healthy, as he is able to eat a proper meal; and he is also blessed, as he is not a glutton who requires more. One who eats more than this is a glutton, while one who eats less than this has damaged bowels and must see to his health.”

Maimonides, a physician and a Torah scholar more than 800 years ago, wrote a lot on healthful eating. In Gerson’s article, she includes eating tips from him, as well as from Rashi and Adin Steinsaltz. Regarding Maimonides, he said, “One should not eat until his stomach is full. Rather, he should stop eating when he has eaten close to three-quarters of his full satisfaction.… Overeating is like poison to anyone’s body.”

It’s only natural to use food to celebrate, to comfort and to cope during this crazy time of upheaval. How can we combat this temptation? The rabbis advise: remember not to overeat, eat only what is edible and healthy, and practise moderation.

This is hard. We live in a world of plenty, possibly even including leftover Halloween chocolates. But there are Jewish teachings, over generations, about avoiding overeating. Weight gain could make us more susceptible to complications from COVID-19, and so many other illnesses. It’s not good for us, but, knowing how much food is “enough” isn’t a new issue and, like everything else, it’s a Jewish one. The rabbis probably didn’t have leftover candy or sweet potato pie, but they knew the temptations we might feel to make, or eat, too much of them.

Consider soul maintenance

In a recent article, I learned that Gal Gadot, the famous Israeli actor, says the prayer Modeh Ani (“I give thanks”) when she wakes up. Even famous people can be grateful for “getting their souls back” each morning.

In ancient times, sleep was considered analogous to death in some ways. As a study in contrast, the Christian response for children was: “If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” The Jewish response is “Hey! Thanks so much for keeping me alive each morning!”

I have always been a morning person (annoying, I know). Although my household is busy every day, we always manage an unconventional communal Modeh Ani as we go out the door. Maybe it was before catching the school bus in those pre-COVID days or, now, just before we take a walk with the dog. In any case, by the time my kids are lining up for their pandemic screening checks and hand sanitizer, we’ve sung this happy and grateful prayer.

Once something is a part of our routine, Jewish or not, we often don’t reflect on it again – but it’s worth remembering. Reading that Gadot, also a mom, embraced a similar routine was sort of heartening. Then, I happened to be studying Daf Yomi, a page a day of Talmud, and an interesting question arose in Eruvin 70a. What if one made an arrangement with someone so that there would be an eruv, a symbolic communal space, that allowed for carrying on Shabbat, and that person died? What happens then?

Almost immediately, the Talmud discusses the person’s heir. There’s no elaboration on the details, the heir was apparently known to everyone. There’s no mention of the executor or the lawyer the family must hire. There’s none of that. I imagined what it would be like if somebody near to me died suddenly on Friday afternoon, and what might happen next.

Thousands of years ago, people didn’t live as long. They lacked the kind of warnings we usually have now, through medical diagnoses and tests and surgeries. Mortality in general was higher, although everyone still dies. Rather, without modern medication and medical interventions, one expected a fair number of infants, children and adults to die before their time.

The recent rise in COVID cases in my home province of Manitoba and the rising mortality numbers have brought all this back into focus. In the last little while, two men in their 40s have died here. My husband and I are in our 40s. We have kids in grade school. We have a dog. And a house. And….

Based on recent experiences with the deaths of relatives and friends, we often had an idea ahead of time that the person was ill or that things weren’t looking good. Yet it isn’t unusual to hear of family members still tying up the deceased person’s affairs for many months (or years) later.

This pandemic is a sobering wake-up call. A hundred years ago, during the flu pandemic, young parents died very suddenly and left orphans. There were children, spouses, siblings and parents who remained. We’re facing something similar in 2020.

On the one hand, we’re lucky because Judaism offers us very sturdy mourning practices. We’ve continued to innovate, too, relying on technology to mourn together. The last few days, I have joined a rabbi online as she says Kaddish. She waits, patiently, until she sees 10 people pop up, viewing her Twitter or Instagram live feed, thanks everyone for helping her, announces her mother’s name, and begins Kaddish. Given the pandemic’s enormous effects, this has been an intimate and surprisingly moving way to support someone in need, virtually.

On the other hand, we’re out of practise with the notion that somebody can just “up and die.” Most of us don’t have immediate plans in place, but we should. Parents all over the world are scared by the notion that they might fall ill, die and leave their kids and spouse alone. This goes way beyond how one will have an eruv on Shabbat if someone dies on a Friday afternoon or on Shabbat.

Do we have up-to-date wills in place? Emergency plans for our immediate families and long-term ideas of how to get support for those left behind? There are a lot of questions and they are scary. What’s worse, though, is that the panic caused by thinking about this can cause us to turn irrational and erratic. Fear can make us hard to be around. We become the people who can’t manage basic, polite social encounters, such as social distancing at the grocery store.

What’s the antidote? Well, while careful estate planning helps, nothing really prepares us for sudden illness. No amount of religious rituals can make us immortal. However, many circle back to countering the fear. Some of us say Modeh Ani, to be grateful – for each morning, a ray of sunshine, a toddler learning to count or an older kid triumphant after a hard test at school. It’s a taste of really good sweet potato pie or an unexpected hug.

In other words, take the win when you can get it, wherever you find it. Sometimes, it’s whimsy, like knitting a pair of mittens with lots of colours, polka dots and a thumb ring. It’s remembering why we say a prayer, even if we rush it or say it at the wrong time.

We can wears masks and social distance and wash our hands, but, right now, our souls also need positive, meaningful time and spiritual support. The next time your car needs an oil change? Consider routine soul maintenance, too.

Fences and walls can be good

My household is facing a lot of upheaval. The 100-year-old house next door was recently demolished, as the new owners wanted to live in an “old house neighbourhood” but in a new house. Their choice has been hard for us. It doesn’t preserve history and it’s not environmentally sustainable. The demolition and excavation are loud, and the shaking and vibrating has damaged our house and the neighbours’ homes, too. It’s a hard situation and we’ve got nowhere else to go, especially during a pandemic.

Years ago, when our twins were toddlers, we built a sturdy wooden fence around our front yard, to match the taller fence in the backyard. This fence has been a blessing. It’s kept kids and dogs safe, not to mention balls, badminton shuttlecocks, and more. Anything that strayed over the fence in any way – like, say, squash and cucumber vines – were completely trashed during this construction, which left a bare, muddy cavern on the other side. It’s been unsettling.

This physical boundary reminds me of other ones with which we’re all reckoning. As the pandemic continues, mask wearing and physically distancing from others has to be absolutely ingrained in us. Yet, articles online mention parents who hate having to enforce mask wearing with their kids, or how friends must make difficult decisions about whether to hang out with others who won’t wear masks. Our public health officials warn against mask shaming but these boundaries, these masks, are part of what keeps us safer.

This goes further, when considering how people manage remote school, work and public interactions where, frankly, all the rules have changed. Every family home, workplace and even transportation has changed. We set up boundaries – we build both physical and imaginary fences, through Plexiglass partitions and dots on the ground, to keep ourselves safe.

As Jews, none of this should be new to us, because the rabbis loved a good boundary! Whether it’s deciding what can or can’t be done on Shabbat, or how to manage keeping kosher, there are rules everywhere in Torah and rabbinic teachings. The rules, however, aren’t always clear or easy to follow. It requires both study and thought to decide what will work – and it isn’t always obvious how a Jewish person should interpret those rules or what’s important to follow.

Lately, I’ve been reading about how an eruv can work, because I’m studying Daf Yomi (a page of Talmud a day) and have been working through tractate Eruvin. What’s an eruv? Well, a simple definition (straight from the internet) is: “An urban area enclosed by a wire boundary which symbolically extends the private domain of Jewish households into public areas, permitting activities within it that are normally forbidden in public on the Sabbath.”

If you’ve wondered why it’s OK, in some traditional Jewish neighbourhoods, for people to push strollers or carry food over to a friend’s house on Shabbat, well, it’s because they’ve created this special ritual space. This creates a single “private space” that connects a whole community of homes. The eruv is so important in some places that it causes housing prices to go up within its borders.

Many times, I’ve heard complaints from people about how “there are too many rules” in some context or other. Whether it’s “fences cut up the landscape in our neighbourhood,” “Why can’t we eat in this room in the community centre?” or, from parents, “It’s so hard to make kids wear masks or stick to this rigid schedule.” However, for many, creating routine, structure and boundaries, physical or psychological, helps us in so many ways.

The example of the Shabbat and festival eruv is a way to see rules in a positive light. If the “rules” state that we cannot do something in the public sphere on Shabbat, look at how we can get around this by using an eruv, the rabbis say – we create a huge private “home” out of all of our homes. What a rich way to build community, belonging and togetherness!

Even if we’re not Shabbat observant or using an eruv, this is a reminder of why fences and boundaries can be used for good. Without our sturdy wooden fence, I suspect our kids and dog might fall into the enormous excavation hole and construction site next door. Without those masks or social distancing rules, we’d have to stay home completely during the pandemic.

It takes all of us to make boundaries work effectively. As Robert Frost writes in “Mending Walls,” there is a lot of resistance to walls. From hunters to animals to elves – “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

However, Frost’s neighbour reminds us, “Good fences make good neighbours.” A boundary can keep us inside a rich and loving community. It can also keep us physically safe from harm or psychologically safe, by creating structure and limits to our days.

For now, we all need to embrace these boundaries. We must use these fences and walls to bolster us onwards, as we shelter through the winter and pandemic, even beyond the temporary walls of Sukkot.

Need to value what we have

Every fall, we go apple picking. For my husband and me, it was one of our first dates, apple picking together in upstate New York. Over time, it has become a family outing, with each kid eating lots of fresh apples with the promise of applesauce and pie on the horizon. The timing is often perfect for the fall holidays, too.

This year, though, the pandemic has drastically increased unemployment. Many people are hungry. All around our (relatively well-off) neighbourhood, there are apple trees heavy with fruit. Here in Manitoba, frost is on the horizon. I have felt a huge pressure to put up food to share, and to pick more apples. This could be a long winter.

The first apple tree we helped pick was that of an elderly neighbour. She just lost her adult son, who was disabled. She was in mourning, terribly sad and frail looking, but also isolated by the pandemic. We all masked up immediately as she came out to greet us. Her smile was meaningful. Watching my kids cleaning up the fallen apples was important. She told us a visiting relative had made her pie. I got the sense she enjoyed that, as she is overwhelmed by the quantity of apples on the tree and the effort required to make anything from them for herself, these days.

A couple days later, I dropped off four 125-millilitre (four-ounce) canning jars of applesauce and a takeout container with two generous slices of apple pie. We canned pints of applesauce, made pie and apple chips for lunches. We still had way too many apples. We took a trip to the food bank and my husband donated 100 pounds (45 kilograms) of apples, more or less, at the self-serve donation bin. He also saw squash and other large amounts of produce from Winnipeg’s gardeners and I was relieved. It sounds like our mayor’s encouragement to citizens to grow more vegetables might have worked.

A couple weeks passed. We didn’t think we had more apple tree picking on our schedule as school approached. I continued studying Talmud as I had time. In Eruvin 29, there is a section that discusses what kinds of food should be given to the poor. The list is specific, including nuts, peaches, pomegranates and a citron. It stipulates that support for the poor should offer them dignity. In essence, poor people should have access to the same kinds of good foods as everyone else. Also, the food should be luxurious enough so that, if they were to sell it, it might be equivalent to two meals of something else. The food support should be dignified. It should offer poor people the same autonomy to choose, as anyone else might.

We received an email from another neighbour. Her apple tree had grown a lot of fruit this year. She still had a lot of apples left. Did we want to come?

We began to pick what looked like an untouched, heavily laden tree. It had so many low-hanging apples that my 9-year-old twins and I easily reached up to pick many with our hands. Again, we picked far more than we could use. The apples were so ripe though, that we had a lot of “drops.” These are the apples that fall when you jostle a branch even slightly – you just can’t catch them all.

We make the drops into applesauce or apple chips, but bruised apples have to be processed quickly. You don’t want to donate them to the food bank. I remembered this part of Eruvin, which reminds us that the best produce, not the bruised ones, should go to the hungry. Meanwhile, I tired of pleading with my boys to be careful, that they were wasting food. To them, it was just a bruised apple.

I tried to help them see it differently – to imagine it as the apple in a kid’s lunch. You’d be hungry without it. Days later, we are still processing bruised apples, but donated at least 100 more pounds of nice apples to the food bank. The tree’s owner asked us to come back again if we could manage it before the first frost.

At the end of Eruvin 29 and the beginning of the next page, Eruvin 30, there’s a reminder that we can’t allow the customary practices of the wealthy to be the ruling for everyone, including the poor. The way it’s explained is through the roasted meat that Persians eat (the wealthy are extravagant) and the fact that even a small scrap of fabric is valuable to the poor, so it matters if it should become impure or soiled.

During the pandemic, we’re all now wearing masks – small amounts of fabric that were previously considered waste. I made many kids’ masks from cotton shirting fabric I’d bought long ago, sold in small rectangles as discount samples. This experience is a reminder that is reinforced at this time of year – although we often live in a “land of plenty,” Yom Kippur helps us remember what it is to be hungry. Sukkot reminds us to value harvest. Scraps of fabric and apples make a difference. We can pick the apples before they fall, and offer others the same gorgeous produce that we take for granted.

In some ways, the Talmud seems ancient, but, thousands of years later, issues around disease, hunger and waste are still relevant. It’s great to have “roasted meat,” but even fabric scraps and bruised apples are important. It’s a Jewish thing to try to be grateful and value small things, even though we might have been tempted to waste them. We can use every fabric scrap and apple – and we should, because, as Rav Abaye notes, not everyone can afford lush roasted meat meals.

More positives than expected

We often use the High Holidays for self-reflection. Consider, we’re urged, the year that has passed and the future. For me, the pandemic and its uncertainty has made me less focused on the year to come. Instead, I’ve been taking a positive accounting of things I’ve experienced this year – and it’s actually quite a lot.

First, there’s been more time for our family to do Jewish learning and “attend” synagogue at home. It’s been easy to turn on Saturday morning services or a special lecture or a concert and expose the family to more Jewish content. The internet has made us feel welcome everywhere. This a huge leap ahead of what we often got out of “business as usual,” pre-pandemic.

Learning in general has changed. As someone who used to teach, I was wary of homeschooling. To be fair, I’ve met some very bright kids who’ve been homeschooled. I’ve also met some odd folks, so focused on their (often evangelical) religious views that it got in the way of making other connections. As but one example, once, I drove with my husband to visit a local farm that advertised sheep fleeces for sale. I’m a hand spinner, and we thought the drive would be fun. I met a large family living in a series of rundown buildings and trailers, wearing an interesting assortment of “traditional” clothing. These isolated, homeschooled evangelical kids led me into a trailer full of both wool and wasps, all eagerly telling me about their visions of the end-times. I left with some wool, but only because my husband and I couldn’t find any other way to politely extricate ourselves.

I’d been scared that, if I ever homeschooled my kids, it would become claustrophobic, bad for the kids and hard for me to catch a break. This was the case when remote schooling started in March. Getting the kids onto the online school meetings and keeping things afloat with a poor internet connection and somewhat spotty assignments from teachers was awful.

When school ended, we were relieved. I kept doing some learning with them each morning, though. Reading, math, cursive, Duolingo (online language learning for Hebrew), art, architecture and design, music and science/STEM learning have kept us busy, along with long walks, playing outside, swimming and more. Sure, I don’t have much alone time. Time for work (or even work to do!) has been limited, but that’s OK, in the circumstances.

Our kids are supposed to go back to school in person this fall, and we’ll see how long that lasts. I don’t dread homeschooling as much now. Setting our own agenda resulted in kids who may be more socially isolated, but they’ve learned a lot. They read better now in two languages, and their math has improved.

Disconnecting from the school-extracurricular activities-synagogue cycle hasn’t been bad either. Those demands came with a lot of pressure. The need to keep up, fit in, afford it and get there on time is stressful. It is easier to practise piano, play soccer in the yard or turn on the services via Zoom than to get to everything in person. Further, there’s no weird social interaction with other families about what we’re wearing, or just how hip we are. (We’re so not hip.)

Making things ourselves has been a mostly good, too – lots of cooking and other activities. Last fall, I started using my sewing machine, after years off. I took sewing lessons as a kid but never gained confidence. Pre-pandemic, I’d sewn myself a few things and remembered how to do this. Returning to it has been a great gift. I’ve figured out making masks, fixing and making clothing. Better still, because of the pandemic, I’ve been able to shop for supplies online and support small businesses selling sustainable or deadstock fabrics. I didn’t have time to go shopping for this stuff in person before the pandemic. Now, most everything is online. I can make plans for kid pajama pants, and dresses and pants for myself, in the future.

We’ve enjoyed some amazing concerts, held outdoors on our block. A talented musician/producer neighbour with a big front porch invites guests to come set up chairs and blankets, social distance and enjoy. Musicians perform for donations, and we all benefit. We’ve heard baroque, classical, flamenco, jazz, old-time and folk. If we sometimes can’t get outside as a family to hear it, the music floats up into our second-storey windows when the wind blows the right way.

Art has blossomed, not only in our family’s projects, but at the “little free art box,” which is run by an artist in the area. Much like a Little Free Library, one can open the box, take art or put art inside for others. We’ve shared kid watercolours and my handspun yarn, and received gorgeous charcoal sketches, pen and ink, and other delights. We’ve traded and celebrated the skills of others nearby. Our diverse community is rich with talent.

None of these small positive things can compensate for the many deaths and illnesses of COVID-19, nor the economic devastation to so many businesses and workers. The downsides this year have been huge. However, last night, I watched as my kids created a caravan on the blanket spread on the grass. We were listening to live music, as my mind leapt to the text I’d been learning from Daf Yomi (a page of Talmud a day). The rabbis are trying to explain how to make a temporary boundary around a caravan as one traveled and camped on Shabbat. They mentioned using saddles and camels, and debated how much space each person might need.

The blanket caravan consisted of several toy trains and hard plastic rhinos and elephants, lined up nose to tail in a circle. The tractate Eruvin is about boundaries – what boundaries make it safe to carry on Shabbat? In the time of coronavirus, I was transported to a different kind of caravan and boundary. Our families have “circled the wagons.” We’ve been forced to stay put and look inwards – but also to be outdoors. What value can be found in these new enforced boundaries? What positive things can come from those necessary restrictions? In our house, we can say that art, music, handmade creations and learning can be celebrated as we finish 5780 and begin 5781. It’s been a valuable time, even as illness, hardship, fear and sadness danced at the edges of every day’s newscast.

From my (socially distanced) house to yours – may we all have a happy and sweet new year, full of creation, positivity and, most importantly, good health.

New measures for milestones

This summer, we passed signs along the Trans-Canada Highway. These are the ones that mark 10 kilometres, one kilometre at a time, allowing drivers to see if their vehicle’s odometer is properly calibrated. My kids haven’t done much in the way of long-distance car trips, and this was a novelty for them, like seeing horses, cows and fields of canola and flax flowers.

I was driving my kids out of town to social distance and pick berries at a farm on the prairies. In the middle of the day, we took a dip in Lake Manitoba at Delta Beach before driving home. The water was shallow and tepid, the sand dark-looking and the humidex 40. I sat huddled under a towel, trying to keep from roasting in the sun. My kids had a blast. I think this kind of outing will be something they’ll remember for a long time, even as I think of nicer beaches we should have tried, perhaps on a cooler or breezier day.

I was considering this afterwards, “in the rear-view mirror,” as I continued to read my page of Talmud each day. Part of doing Daf Yomi, for me, is seeing how the rabbis compare and discuss things. For instance, one rabbi might indicate the custom or halachah (Jewish law) in his town, while another says, no, that’s not how it’s done … someplace else. Even when the rabbis are living right in the same place, their perception differs in terms of how things go and what is acceptable. It’s all relative. Their efforts to define and shape Jewish law in a new age, after the loss of the Temple, required all kinds of careful legal arguments, and much of it is illustrated with anecdotes and backed up by quotes from Torah.

However, in Eruvin 6b, it’s made clear that one can’t just decide to follow “all the stringent rules” or all the lenient ones. Instead, we must choose one or the other, and demonstrate internal consistency and intellectual integrity. You can’t just follow parts of Beit Hillel or parts of Beit Shammai. A person who just does the strict things laid out by both Hillel and Shammai, who is he? “The fool walks in darkness.” (Ecclesiastes 2:14) The person who always chooses the easy, most lenient path is flat-out “a wicked person.”

Much of daily life revolves around these comparisons and measurements we make. As a parent, I’m often striving for internal consistency, while knowing all the time that much of what is going on in the world doesn’t make sense to me. It certainly isn’t consistent! How do we find helpful rules and guidelines as everything changes around us?

For one thing, we can look back through literature (Talmud) and (Jewish) history to find comparisons and role models, and this helps me at times. I know that, while this particular virus, COVID-19, may be new, many of the challenges we’re facing aren’t. Just as the rabbis used their experiences to compare and measure and create talmudic Jewish guidelines, we must rely on our education and experiences to navigate this time.

When I thought about it, I realized how many of my usual kilometre markers had changed. A “normal” summer for me as a kid involved summer camp and a family vacation, neither of which happened this year for my kids. A “normal” school year, beginning in September, might revolve around school bus rides, tests, grades, holiday gatherings and aiming towards things like bar mitzvah or graduation or other life events.

However, thinking critically doesn’t always mean that we must compare something to a fixed standard, or the way things ought to be or used to be. It might mean that we’re able to take the available evidence, compare things, and make meaning about what’s happening, instead. It may mean drawing conclusions from the available evidence.

Our evidence? This summer, my household has had far more family time. There’s been time for free play and day trips, spontaneous water play in the yard, long dog walks, ice creams, gardening, and even time for reading in the cool basement on very hot days. Despite some car repairs and the loss of much of my freelance work, our finances have actually been OK – because we have nowhere to go! (We haven’t spent money on a big trip to visit our relatives in the United States, for one thing.)

Like nearly everybody else, we’ve skipped big gatherings for school, holidays and birthdays. We’ve charted a different course. And, when I thought back to the markers on our day trip, I realized something. My car, purchased in the United States, measures distance in miles, so I can’t check my odometer on the Trans-Canada! Comparing kilometre markers in a car odometer that works in miles? That’s an apples to oranges comparison. It doesn’t work.

So, the introverts in our house didn’t have camp or anything “normal,” but also didn’t really mind missing the annual big events – no weddings, bar mitzvahs or graduation parties this year. Instead, my kids grew big cucumbers, learned to swim better, dug sandcastles, read many mystery stories out loud during our family “reading group” and practised cursive. Small markers, but still important ones.

Like the rabbis, we parsed out what made the experience meaningful during a difficult time. In the end, miles or kilometres, we made the same trip. Comparisons bring us understanding, order and sometimes even enjoyment, no matter how far we drive or how we measure it. If you’re sad about missing major milestones, it might be time to change the measurements you’re using. No matter what markers you use, you’ll find you still traveled a long ways this summer, metaphorically or literally. It’s all in how you use and view the comparisons.