PERSPECTIVE DURING THE PANDEMIC

BY CHANA YAGOD, DAUGHTER OF RABBI YITZCHOK AND REBBETZIN FRIMET SHAYNA YAGOD, CONGREGATION TIFERES ISRAEL, MONCTON, NB

2020 has sure been an interesting, unusual year and it looks like 2021 is going to continue to be yet another unusual year in different ways.

January was still full of so much unknown and global fear, and now so much of the population has been vaccinated and a huge percentage of business have opened back up to the public, with procedures in place, and welcoming the new flow of traffic in our streets. New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio... all these places have brought back a lot of non-home routine and in some cities, you might not even know it’s Corona era anymore because for the signs and masks everywhere, because there is so much opened up and resumed. We have entered a new normal, where the world is reintroducing public routines of work and commute and eating out, overlays with new habits to adjust to, evident in the surplus of locations for hand sanitizing, the sheer variety of face masks to suit every type, the social distancing floor markers. Companies all over have added delivery services and the national ones have regularized their offerings, and there is contactless shopping in abundance too. With all this, we have resumed going into the workplace, the stores, and seeing people in limited ways. There is still so much confusion in the world and dispute across the board on what is the right way to handle any of this, but one thing we can always do is look to the torah: in Mishlei, around Chaoter 2, it says “if you are always happy, you will be saved from Magefah. But if you’re sad, what will save you?” And in the Targum (Aramaic explanation) it says the Magefah is “Koronah,” in Hebrew.

What does this mean? There was a story of a rabbi whose student showed up one day panicky about a plague going around their town and others, and was afraid it would kill off tons of people and couldn’t rest from fear. So his rabbi assured him “don’t worry, only a few thousand will die,” out of the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in the region. He wasn’t making light of the deaths, he considered them very tragic, but he was trying to give his student some perspective on the mortality rate and the level of danger being lower than he feared. Weeks later the plague was over, and it turned out not a few thousand but tens of thousand died. So they returned to their rabbi and asked him “what happened? I thought you said only a few would die.” He explained: “only a few thousand passed on from the plague itself, but the rest of them... died from the fear of it.”

Because chronic paranoia is the biggest destroyer of all. So as we proceed through new unknowns and advanced stages of the world’s adjustment to the situation, let us not be so panicky but keep it all in perspective. Excess fear is the most dramatic peril. Absolutely you should do all you can to keep yourself and your family and community safe, and to practice good hygiene and health habits. But also keep in mind perspective and chill out a bit. Just do your very best, and leave the rest up to Gd, because you are not responsible for what you have no control over. Once we are doing 100% of what we can, we may not have control over the outcome, but we can always control our reaction to the situations going on around us and whatever may come our way.

May Gd help you and all your loved ones stay safe and healthy, and with G’ds Help we will all chart a way through this.