In thinking of this week’s double Torah Portion, Acherei Mot, the opening paragraph of Dr. Sharon Cramer’s excellent April 16th “My View” column in the Buffalo News immediately comes to mind: “Can life change in an instant? When devastating news comes, its rifts gorge into the bedrock of our lives. The landscape of ‘before’ is completely different from ‘after.’”
Acherei Mot means “after the death,” referring to a tragic incident that befell Aaron’s eldest sons Nadav and Abiyihu, several weeks ago in the Torah. And while the rest of the portion has little to do with that prior event, it colors everything we are reading. As Sharon continued in the article describing her own set of personal tragedies: “On June 7, 1981, my mother died of a heart attack. On October 26, 2008, my husband got the diagnosis of cancer that would kill him six weeks later. After, I looked back at seemingly important difficulties during ‘before’ in amazement. After, everything had changed.”
This Friday marks the fiftieth day of our Coronavirus ordeal. On Friday, March 13, our synagogue shut down all public events, and now more than seven weeks later our social isolation continues. In Judaism, this marks an important unit of time, a complete cycle of seven weeks and seven days that marks a moment of pause. As we think of the domain of “after” where we currently reside, we may be experiencing a similar feeling of dissonance that Sharon describes in the article. Things that once seemed so important no longer matter, and what once was easy now seems impossibly hard. “Now,” Sharon suggests, “we are in a solar eclipse of our spirits.” To forge on, we, like our ancestors in the Torah portion, must first acknowledge that we have entered the realm of “after,” and then find our way back to normal. For Aaron, the solution was a return to the sacrificial rituals that he was so used to. For Sharon, it was in continuing a quest for local adventures she had started right before everything shut down. For you, it will likely be something completely different. Whatever that path is, find it, embrace it, and encourage others to do the same.