COVID COVID Rosh Hashana

COVID COVID Rosh Hashana

This Rosh Hashana, praying behind a mask in a tiny, socially-distanced minyan in my daughter’s schoolyard, it was so eminently clear to me. God runs everything! If He so desires, He can bring down human society as we know knew it with a virus so small that 100 million could fit on a single pinhead. It was as though, this Rosh Hashana, I was seeing life from above, like an astronaut looking back at a marble-sized planet Earth. But instead of seeing the Earth from the moon, I saw the Earth and human race from the Keter Malucha, the Crown of Kingship, fixed atop God’s head, as He rules over our COVID-shaken planet.
Fast forward to today, just 48 hours later. My vision has shrunk from infinite to the distance from my living room to my kitchen sink. Our family’s in lockdown and my head is spinning from hours scurrying around providing Zoom/Google Classroom/homework support for my homebound kids.
Trying to figure out why this child’s science zoom class hasn’t started yet (Turned out the teacher sent a worksheet instead. How would I EVER survive without the class whatsapp moms who, unlike me, actually manage to stay on top of their kids’ corona schedules?).
And then spending half an hour trying to print up that science worksheet (it would have taken less time, I suppose, if I hadn’t downloaded the printer driver in Danish.)
And then, in the middle of all this, the phone rang. It was tech support for my internet filter which had stopped working. I’d tried reinstalling the filter several times, but I couldn’t because one of my kids had fiddled with my color settings so I couldn’t read the installation instructions.
The tech guy seemed like an expert, and remotely dove into the guts of my control panel to try and get my color settings fixed so we could read the instructions and resuscitate my filter. The tech guy had been readjusting my colors hither and thither for many minutes when he confessed something that threw me for a loop: “The truth is, I’m not so good at colors; I’m color blind.”
So after that, together, between his technological expertise and my ability to distinguish yellow from red, we somehow got my colors fixed and instructions read and filter working again.
Afterward, it occurred to me that that color-blind tech support guy is a lot like me. When push comes to shove, he can’t see what’s really there. Just like when I descended from Rosh Hashana to my lockdown home-hive.
But the truth is, I’m also different from him. He’s never seen colors in his whole life, what the world really is. And I, at least, did get a brief glimpse this Rosh Hashana from behind my mask in my daughter’s school yard.

6 comments

  1. Thank G-d for those glimpses that lift us higher!

  2. Im not sure you can feel it yet, but there is a fair amount of humour in the situations you described above! Im sure you are feeling overwhelmed.

  3. So beautifully written! Once again you show us how to find the message in the mundane madness!

  4. Fantastic post! That you can even snatch the time to describe the above while juggling all your other roles is impressive. gemar chasima tova!
    As a comment above it is laugh out loud funny if you were not tearing out your hair!

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