It’s hard to process any moment while you’re still in it. Throughout this pandemic, I have tried to ask myself questions about what the deep emotional impacts will be, and how I will conceive of this moment in the years to come. It’s obvious to me that our society and all of us will be profoundly shaped and changed by this year, but I don’t really know how. The year 2020 will always be, for decades to come, a year that wreaked havoc on our communities and our loved ones and our schools and our economy. Those things we know. What we don’t know yet is what type of emotional impacts this will continue to have on us. How will we feel it? What will be hard when it’s all over? In what ways will we experience trauma? What I keep coming back to is that it’s nearly impossible to endure sustained trauma and understand it at the same moment.
And so, in some ways, I’ve stopped trying. For a while earlier this year, I had been trying to imagine, 5, 10, 20 years away, how this moment will situate itself in our consciousness. But all of that emotional speculation took me out of this moment. Of course, I still wonder, but I can’t predict what I will feel in the future, I can only honor and acknowledge how I am in this particular moment. And that has actually felt somewhat liberating.
One of the added layers that complicates this dynamic is that the experience has been entirely collective. No sociologist can study these effects on others objectively because they have experienced it themselves, too. I’ve thought about that in the past few weeks as a rabbi and what it means to ritualize this moment, particularly as some in our community have begun to receive the vaccine.
I’ve been thinking about what kind of prayer or ritual I would want for receiving the vaccine. Because that vial, that shot in our arms is what will bring us to a time when we can process, when we can be on the other side. It certainly seems prayer-worthy. I’ve thought about how much gratitude I have to the front-line workers who have endured tremendous pain; to the scientists who developed this vaccine; to the individuals that chose to be a part of trials so that we could all benefit.
Unlike sociology, there’s power in having rituals created by people who need them as much as the people for whom they are creating them. Ritual creation does not actually demand distance. Here is a collection of prayers written by people who are in the thick of it with all of us, people thinking about what it means to get the vaccine themselves. I hope you’ll find one that speaks to you.
I’m looking forward to putting this year behind us, to arriving at a place where soon, please God, we can process this moment and try to heal.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
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