One Year's Passing Since "That Day"

.וְכָל הֵיכָא דְּאָמְרִינַן ״בּוֹ בַּיּוֹם״, הַהוּא יוֹמָא הֲוָה
Anywhere in the text where we simply say “That Day”—it’s referring to that day.
(Talmud, Berachot 28a)

March 10 is an auspicious and melancholy anniversary. It’s the date in my mind when everything changed for us.

It was on March 10, 2020—it was the afternoon of Purim in the Jewish calendar—and I was sitting with a group of students, planning an upcoming Holocaust-education program for our community.  It was late afternoon, and of course we were all aware of the encroaching pandemic and the murmuring that college campuses were closing down. And then it happened:  we all received the email simultaneously from the university President that informed us that Babson was shutting down, too.

Remember how young and innocent we all were back then? The initial outreach from the school encouraged students to take all their stuff with them when they left campus in a few days; it was Spring Break. The hope was that we would all be able to return in two or three weeks. Certainly, we figured, we would be back by Passover. Okay, by May 1. Okay… by graduation?  And everything kept getting pushed back by a week, then a month, and so on…

None of us imagined then that we’d be marking the one-year anniversary of staying-at-home, social distancing, and Zoom fatigue. Let alone well over a half-million Americans dead, due in no small part to the incompetent machinations of a self-serving federal government.

But here we are. And while some have told me that it’s “depressing” to mark such an anniversary, it is not my intention to be a downer. While I yearn for the physical presence of my friends and family as much as anyone, I draw inspiration from the remarkable resilience that I’ve seen from many people.

The role of technology in our lives has been incredibly valuable; just imagine the strain of staying at home if it were just a few years ago, before videoconferencing technology was as smooth and effective as it is now. For me, personally, this has been especially true. I had cochlear implant surgery in August 2019, and can actually hear with 90% clarity for the first time in many years. If the pandemic had struck just two years ago, I would have been rather hopeless in all of my Zoom classes, meetings, and interactions. I would have been much more isolated. I would have been in terrible trouble.

The anniversary is a useful time to reflect on “that day” – the moment when everything changed in our lives, and all of our responses and behaviors seem to be re-oriented around those changes.

The Talmud has a “that day”—it was the moment of a political shakeup that occurred among the Tanna’im in the 2nd century, when Rabban Gamliel was deposed (temporarily, it turns out) from community leadership and the entire structure of the Academy was democratized. On “that day,” new books were written, new rules were put into place, and new leadership (Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah) was installed.

But if a moment in Israel 1800 years ago is too esoteric, consider that each of us has a “that day” as well, depending on what generation we belong to:

The JFK assassination, of course. The murder of Yitzhak Rabin. 9/11, G-d knows. A diagnosis, a car accident…

And probably good things as well: weddings; births; b’nai mitzvah, certainly.  New jobs, new loves, moving to a new home…

Days when everything changed, for better or for worse.

Someday soon, G-d willing, these newly acquired Covid-behaviors will recede. We’ll be in the company of friends and even strangers again. The masks will come down, or at least loosen up. We’ll hug our distant family members. We’ll travel without reservation. There will no longer be daily Corona tolls in the media.

And when that happens, I hope we’ll remember the lessons that we’ve learned since “That Day.” Lessons about caring for the most vulnerable among us; about using technology for good; about how precious it is to be in the presence of people we care about. If it’s true that “everything will be different,” let’s pray that those differences will be to make us better, and that they will be for blessings.

Do you have a “That Day” in your life? You’re invited to tell us about it in the comments section below.

On the Death of an Indigent Jew

At first, burying the dead was more difficult for families than the death itself—because of the enormous expense. Family members even abandoned the bodies and ran away.
That changed when Rabban Gamliel adopted a simple style, and the people carried him to his grave in plain linen garments. Subsequently, everyone followed his example.
—Talmud, Ketubot 8b

Today I stood by an open grave as we lay to rest a certain Mr. Cohen, with the honor of Jewish rite and ritual to which every Jew is entitled.

With me at the graveside were the gentile funeral director and four members of the staff of the Jewish Cemetery Association of Massachusetts (JCAM). And that’s it. There were no mourners; no family to say the Kaddish, no friends or acquaintances to pay their respects.

I was invited to be there, because for the past few months I’ve been part of a quiet but important conversation here in Greater Boston: How our community can create a policy for burying indigent Jews—for people who have nothing; no assets, no money to pay for funeral costs or burial plots, and often no family.

You may think that it’s rather astounding that a Jewish community like this one does not have a strategy in place to bury extremely poor Jews. And you’d be right.

For decades, the burden of burying Jews without money here has fallen on the shoulders of whoever happened to be there. Sometimes that’s the funeral homes; other times, it’s the fine people at Jewish Family Services, or Yad Chessed, the important Boston-area Tzedakah collective.

More often than not, the burden of providing a dignified burial falls upon JCAM, a non-profit organization which owns and manages 124 Jewish cemeteries throughout Massachusetts. My friend and colleague Jamie Cotel, the Executive Director of JCAM, estimates that they are called upon to provide approximately thirty to forty burials a year for people who have little or no funds. JCAM’s already thin budget is stretched to provide a free grave, to pay the facilities crew to open and administer the burial plot, to arrange for the ritual, to provide a gravestone, and more. 

That’s thirty-to-forty times a year. And that’s just the cases that come into JCAM’s domain. It doesn’t include those desperate poor who simply disappear beneath the communal radar screen. Our Mr. Cohen’s body, for instance, was alone in a local hospital for a distressingly long time before being turned over to a local Christian funeral home. They were prepared to bury his body in a pauper’s field in a Christian cemetery—until JCAM became aware of the situation, and advocated to bury him in one of their Jewish cemeteries, with full Jewish ritual and honor.

But JCAM has limited funds and staff. This crisis—and it is a crisis, if you believe that Jewish burials aren’t just for the rich—demands a systematic, community-wide effort to share the responsibility and the cost. I’m glad we’re working on it, even while I’m ashamed that it hasn’t happened until now.

We buried Mr. Cohen, but we knew almost nothing about him. The only family Jamie could identify was a distant and estranged cousin in another state, who could provide her with no further family information and certainly wasn’t offering to share the cost of a funeral.

Here’s a part of the eulogy I gave:

Our tradition says that the day of death is like the Day of Atonement, and optimally we go to our Final Reward in the spirit of humility, purity, and atonement for all the sins we committed in our lifetime. I pray today that his passing does indeed bring atonement for his sins, and peace to his soul, and comfort to those whose lives he touched during his years on earth.

….There’s another dimension of atonement that I’m thinking of today as well. We, too, need atonement. We, too, must ask for forgiveness—of Mr. Cohen, for our sins. We have sinned by living in a self-absorbed society where he found himself so alone at the end of his life; where he lingered so long in the hospital morgue.

Chattanu – we have sinned. Please forgive us, sir. You, and all of G-d’s children, deserve better.

I believe that the measure of a community’s integrity is the degree to which it cares for the most desperate, hurting, and defenseless members in it. The enormity of its bank accounts, the hugeness of its homes and synagogue buildings, and the grotesque assemblage of automobiles in its parking lots are not signs of moral grandeur—and they just may indicate the exact opposite.

May Mr. Cohen rest in peace. And may his memory, such as it is, give us no peace, until we are able to do far better for those like him, the living and the dead.