Pandemic Sabbatical

Friday night, June 26, 2020

Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA

            Way back in the middle of March, at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, a poem started flying around the internet.  It was sent to me by at least a dozen different people, I’m sure that many of you saw it.  It is called “Pandemic,” and it begins like this:

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath  —
the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel.

Cease from buying and selling.

Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.

Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.

Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.

Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

(You could hardly deny it now.)

Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.

(Surely, that has come clear.)

This is the first half of the poem, but it gives you the gist.  The poem is called Pandemic, by Lynn Ungar, who is Jewish, and also a Unitarian Universalist minister.  I poked around a little bit on the internet to find out more about her, and learned that she sat down and wrote it one Wednesday afternoon in March, and posted it on Facebook.  Within hours, it had gone viral.  

For many of us that poem provided a powerful way of accepting the need to confine ourselves to our homes.  The poem offered a beautiful, comforting, helpful reframing of the pandemic from a worldwide healthcare emergency, to a worldwide sabbath. 

Now it has been three strange months since Lynn Ungar wrote her poem.  It has been a long sabbath, during which we have stopped doing so many things.  Stopped going out to parties, to concerts, to movies, to restaurants, to Temple.  We have slowed down our physical pace of life.  But it has not been a sabbath of peace.  All around the world, governmental leaders, and healthcare professionals, and ordinary people, have all been struggling to understand this novel coronavirus, and how it spreads, and whom it kills and who remains asymptomatic.  Every day, there is new data, and new predictions appear. Experts offer conflicting advice.  And infection rates drop and then rise again, all over the world.  The future still is so uncertain.  When can we realistically hope for a vaccine?  And when will our lives return to what they were? 

I don’t know about you, but for me these three months have not been a time of rest.  I need a sabbatical from this sabbatical.  So I feel immensely grateful to this congregation for providing me with just that.  I will be on a two-month mini-sabbatical for the months of July and August.  This was planned several years ago, long before any of us knew what a strange time this would be, but the Temple leadership and I have decided that, Covid-19 pandemic notwithstanding, I should take this sabbatical as planned.

Tonight, I would like to share with you how this sabbatical summer fits into my life.

This is the third sabbatical of my career.  The first was in my mid-30’s, an entire year in the English Lake District, just below the border with Scotland.  Marian and I took Rachel at age 4 and Ari who was only 2, to live with Marian’s parents in their 17th century stone farmhouse, High Greenrigg House, on a windswept and remote hillside, which they ran as a small hotel. That was a magical year in our life and we came close to deciding to move there permanently. 

My second sabbatical was seven years ago, in the summer of 2013, when Marian and I walked the entire 220 miles of the John Muir Trail in the High Sierras. I was 56 at the time and those three weeks in the mountains changed the course of my life.  In three weeks of carrying all our food and equipment on our backs, and sleeping on the ground, and climbing over elven mountain passes, I stopped feeling that I was declining into late middle age.   

I felt young and strong and not even close to getting old.  I returned convinced that our Jewish education program had to incorporate outdoor, hiking experiences into kids’ Jewish learning.  And I began spending almost every day off hiking on our local trails—Gaviota Peak, Tunnel Trail, Rattlesnake Canyon, Cold Spring Trail, San Ysidro, Romero Canyon, and  also the back country….Manzana Creek behind Figueroa Mountain and Blue Canyon behind our Santa Ynez mountains.

 The more I hiked these trails, and got to know them in their seasons, I began to recognize and learn the names of the wildflowers…..shooting stars, and ceanothus and rose snapdragon and wooly blue curls and Indian pinks and paintbrush and climbing penstemon and wood mint.  And I finally got curious about the Chumash, the indigenous people who lived here for thousands of years, some of whose secret sacred places I discovered, and at last, after thirty years of living in Santa Barbara, I began to feel that this is my home.  My place. My land.  My mountains, flowers, birds, lizards, trails, islands, and ocean.  All of that began with my last sabbatical…and specifically our three weeks on the John Muir Trail.

Now I am 63, and looking both into the past and into the future, I am struck with wonder.  It was just over forty years ago that I set out on this path of being a rabbi, and you don’t need to be a rabbi to know that forty years is a very Biblical number.  In fact, in this week’s Torah portion….Chukat….the 40 years in the wilderness goes by, quietly, without any explicit comment.  Just a few chapters earlier we were at the start of the Israelites’ wilderness journey, and now suddenly, without any awareness of the passing of time, we are in the final year.  At age 63, that is actually the way it feels to me.  Just a chapter or two ago, I was in my early twenties!  Now forty years have gone by.  What happened??

Looking back I am struck with wonder and also looking ahead.  I know 60 is the new 50, or is it the new 40?  But nevertheless, I wonder “what’s next?”  More than anything else, I know that this time away will be a time in which my future will rise up into view before me.

I have several projects for this summer about which I am excited.  I have already begun learning Spanish, finally, after 35 years living in California.  And I am revising a book that I wrote years ago and hope to get published.  And Marian and I are returning to the John Muir Trail; this time our plan is to hike the whole thing again, but this time from South to North.  It will take about 21 days.  During that time, we will see no roads, no wires, no emails, no news. 

Here is a quick view of what I will see.

Mountains.  Lakes.  Sky.  Trees.  Marian.  Occasional other hikers.

It takes me about 3 days on the trail to begin stopping to think about work.  After a week, I’m not thinking about work at all.  After three weeks, we will both be physically hardened and worn out but on a deeper level, brand new.  It’s good for our marriage too.

The job of being a rabbi has been the great honor and privilege of my life.  But it’s a job that never ends.  From early in the morning until late at night.  The sadness and the joy, the weight of the past and the questions about the future.  And all of the people! tiny children, hormonal teenagers, stressed out parents, aging seniors.   All with desires, needs and opinions!  There is nothing more exciting, nothing more interesting, nothing more holy than what happens in this community.  But a rabbi needs to rest.

Having opened with the new poem, Pandemic, I’d like to close this evening with an English translation of one of my very favorite modern Hebrew poems, by the great Israeli poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg.  I included this poem in the Friday night prayerbook we used at Hillel, earlier in my career.  In the poem, Greenberg imagines God as a blacksmith, and himself...the poet, the Jew....as the piece of metal on the anvil, which God strikes, bringing forth fire and sparks.

I love to read this poem just before Shabbat, because it ends with the phrase “let us both rest.”  I think it’s a fitting closing word before I leave for sabbatical:

With My God, the Smith

Like chapters of prophecy my days burn, in all the revelations,

And my body between them’s a block of metal for smelting,

And over me stands my God, the Smith, who hits hard:

Each wound that Time has opened in me opens its mouth to him

And pours forth in a shower of sparks the intrinsic fire.

This is my just lot—until dusk on the road.

And when I return to throw my beaten block on a bed,

My mouth is an open wound,

And naked I speak with my God:

You worked hard

Now it is night; come, let us both rest.

Shabbat Shalom