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Passover Sermon: COVID-19 as a Spiritual Opportunity

If you can embrace life in the here and now, then you are truly free.
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March 31, 2021
Credit: Natali_Mis/Getty Images

Fourteen months ago, I was privileged to host Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of righteous memory at Sephardic Temple.

The rabbi’s first teaching to the congregation was that “Crisis is also an opportunity.” And what a crisis we have all been going through for more than a year now. It’s as if the world entire has been plagued with utter and ferocious darkness, and in the words of the Torah, “No person could even see his brother [fellow person].”

We have learned yet again that all the incalculable privileges of advanced civilization — which we mistakenly tend to take for granted — are on very thin ice indeed. This includes our ability to defy gravity and catch a flight, go to the cinema, dine at a restaurant, pray in synagogue, hug a friend and kiss a loved one.

In the poignant words of Winston Churchill, it is as if an “iron curtain” descended upon this sublime and tormented world of ours. We have been experiencing the most severe and acute global health crisis in the history of humanity and the greatest challenge to our species since World War Two.

In our own little neck of the woods, here in these United States, one in twelve people was infected with COVID-19, and over half a million souls perished. In other words, the number of fatalities from COVID-19 exceeds the number of Americans who died during World War One and World War Two combined.

Last year, on one beautiful Sunday morning, my wife sent me to stand in line at a local supermarket at 6:30 am, half an hour before opening time, in order to purchase milk and eggs for our family. As I stood in that interminable line — in Beverly Hills of all places — I understood more than ever before what philosopher Hannah Arendt had in mind when she wrote that “normal people don’t know that everything is possible.”

In the sagacious words of Rabbi Sacks himself: “A microscopic virus has brought humanity to its knees.” In the chilling words of Israeli General Shmuel Gonen, about Israel having survived potential annihilation on the threshold of the Six-Day War: “Unto Death we stared in the face eyeball to eyeball — and death lowered its eyes.”

We have been undergoing a sustained tutorial in cosmic humility throughout the last year. We who compose Shakespearean sonnets and launch spaceships to explore the infinite expanses of outer space have learned yet again, in the words of the great Rav Soloveitchik, that “man is finite, and so are his victories.”

We have seen the world’s most gifted scientific minds working in concert day and night to find a remedy for humanity. The Talmud rightly professes that all of Israel are responsible for one another. And during this year, we also learned once more that in a global era imbued with information technology, nuclear warheads and environmental challenges, all humans are responsible for one another. We all inhabit, in utter and complete interdependence, one gigantic Noah’s ark.

To be a Jew is to know that everything can be taken away from you in an instant — be it physically, politically or financially. To be free is also to heed the existential maxim formulated by Bill Keane, namely that “yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery” and now is a present — now is a gift. If you can embrace life in the here and now during Passover and beyond, despite life’s radical uncertainty and tumultuous vicissitudes, then you are truly free.

If you can embrace life in the here and now, then you are truly free.

We who inhabit homes, which often cost over a million dollars, are sometimes more internally subjugated and enslaved to the material dimension of life than people who were incarcerated in concentration camps.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon frequented Auschwitz, the late Elie Wiesel showed him the place where inmates lined up early in the morning to put on the sole pair of arm tefillin available to them in the valley of the shadow of death. These people were freer than many of us who live in America today.

Many years ago, when I first prepared a Rosh Hashanah sermon, I found a Hebrew book in the library entitled: “In Auschwitz We Sounded the Shofar.” Spiritually speaking, those walking skeletons were more internally liberated than many of us.

In the summer of 2009, Elie Wiesel stood in Buchenwald with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama. Wiesel, whose father died in his arms on the threshold of liberation, whose mother and little sister Tzipora were gassed to death, reminded them that “in the final analysis, there is more to celebrate than to denigrate in the human condition.” And then Wiesel asked humanity the following question: “Will we ever learn?”

Will we ever learn as a species to put an end to ethnic and religious enmities and atrocities? And also — I would venture to add — will we ever learn that we have everything we need to truly be happy and internally satiated and fulfilled?

Shimon Peres once observed that many of us live today with superior physical conditions to those enjoyed by monarchs a couple of centuries ago. We have more access to the world’s cuisines in our fridge, more ability in normal times to roam the planet and travel the world, and we also have — literally at our very fingertips — the ability to access the total knowledge accumulated by humankind throughout the millennia.

This Passover, more than ever before, having gone through the trauma of COVID-19, our generation in history is better poised to “emancipate ourselves from mental slavery,” in the astute words of Bob Marley.

In the words of our sages regarding the ancient geopolitical exodus from Egypt millennia ago, it is also high time for our generation to soulfully transition “from subjugation to salvation, and from darkness — to a great and luminous light.”

I leave you today with five words in the Aramaic from the book of Zohar. Words which loom large, and which we articulate in synagogue right before we take our portable home, the holy Torah scroll, from the ark. These holy words in the Aramaic from the Zohar read: “Ana avdah de Kodsha Brich Hoo,which means that we, at our finest and loftiest of moments, are “the servants of the Holy One Blessed Be He.”

Chag Sameach, and Happy Festival of Freedom.


Rabbi Tal Sessler, Ph.D., is the author of four books in philosophy and contemporary Jewish identity. He is the Senior Rabbi of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel, and the incoming Dean of the Rabbinical School at the Academy for Jewish Religion in California, where he also teaches Jewish philosophy.

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