Alone We Sit

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or anyone who learned in a yeshivah, this is Rav Chaim’s famous formulation for appropriately approaching Torah. If this is the appropriate approach for halachah, it is certainly the approach for our perspective on Hashem’s hashgachah. 

The problem is that as we try to make some sense of the coronavirus threat, even “what” is confoundingly difficult to evaluate. Are we witnessing a fleeting nightmare, which, while frightening, will soon blow over and fade from memory? Will the virus’s toll on human life be comparable to the typical seasonal flu — or will it chas v’shalom morph into a huge health crisis? 

Will the economic ramifications be limited to a temporary dip in profits, swiftly compensated by a rebounding economy? Or will we witness a cascade of economic dominoes falling down, burying us under another long recession? 

We don’t know, and it will be a while until we really know. But there is a “what” that we must ponder, and that “what” is the emotion that we all have experienced to some degree in the wake of this virus: the emotion of bedidus, solitude.