Last week, the New York Times included an insert, admittedly an ad from Google, that forced its readers to think about the last year in certain ways. The advertisement looked at the Google search trends throughout the past year to get a big picture view of what we have been thinking about as a society.
Here were some of the findings, all that relate specifically to searches in 2021, that struck me: “How to comfort someone” had the greatest number of searches in Google search history. “How to heal” was also searched more than ever before. “How to cure burnout” was searched at a rate of 5,000% more in 2021 than in 2020. “How to help the environment” was similarly searched more than ever before. “Vaccination volunteer” was the top volunteer opportunity searched worldwide in 2021. “How to ask for help” was searched, again, more than ever before.
These questions are not just the results of Google analytics, they represent what has been important to us as a society over the last year. It is clear from these questions (as if we needed a reminder) that the past year has been another painful one. There has been so much hurt, so much difficulty and death, and so much anger and frustration. And, these search trends also reveal something else. They reveal a tremendous determination in the human spirit to reach out to others and to our world at large. These search results show that while we were hurting, we were also hoping to bring comfort to others. We, as a collective, were willing to donate our time to be there for others. There was a conscientiousness about our broken world and a desire to extend ourselves to try and make it different.
These results actually give me hope. While I think I can safely say that 2021 was the hardest year, on a global scale, that I’ve experienced in my lifetime, it is clear that the difficulties presented to us didn’t inhibit our humanity. They couldn’t stop us from expressing the most beautiful components of who we are as a society. These results are a profound reminder of how much we need each other in the midst of challenge and how much we are willing to be there for others. We have not just searched on our computers, but we have searched for love, companionship, healing, and comfort. We have searched for others to be in our midst and we have longed to be needed.
As we enter the last week of this calendar year, a year that many of us are eager to put in the past, I’m thinking about what I have searched for this year, and what I found along the way. I pray that in the coming year we find more comfort and healing. I pray that we ask for help and we find ourselves in helping service to others. And most of all, I hope that 2022 proves to be a year of health and happiness for us, for our community and society, and our whole world.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
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