Onward and Upward

Granted, an honest inventory is never simple, because there’s a psychological hurdle people often need to surmount in order to make that personal accounting. There is, of course, the usual lethargy we experience when it comes to doing the right thing, whether we label it inertia, atzlus, or the yetzer hara.

But in this particular context, the challenge is different, stemming from the fact that we’re so focused on getting over this dark, depressing, and for some of us, tragic, period in our lives and leaving it behind. We feel at times like someone fleeing a burning building, G-d forbid, and we don’t want to even glance backward for a moment.

Even for those who emerged personally untouched by the more severe forms of the tzarah so many others experienced, still, we just want to be done with it all: The fear and uncertainty, the isolation, the stifling unbearable burdens of kids out of school and working from home, the masks and the lockdowns, and the dissection of, and dissension over, every aspect of masks and lockdowns and vaccinations and every other social, religious, and political macro- and micro-issue, and on and on.

To introspect, however, about what this unique time has taught us about ourselves and about life, and certainly to engage in the classical Jewish way of responding to travail by asking ourselves mah zos asah Elokim lanu — all of that runs directly counter to the impulse to just run for our lives from that burning building called COVID and never give it another thought.