(We’re All Living in Parentheses)

My friend Rabbi Adam Kligfeld recently posted something on Facebook that resonated with me:

“The more I check in with others in my life/community, and with myself, the more this realization becomes clear: even we among the very, very blessed in this world/moment are still struggling in meaningful ways. It is amazing … one can have [a] roof, and health, and funds in the bank, and not just work, but meaningful work … and still feel the confining, reducing, limiting and imprisoning parts of this era/phenomenon.”

I know what you mean, rabbi. We’re living in a confusing and bewildering time. Many of us try to cope by putting up a stoic front, but that can get exhausting. Your post reminded me that it’s OK to ’fess up to reality, even if it means exposing our vulnerabilities.

So, how bewildered are we?

First, there is the guilt factor. When I go on my daily walks under the beautiful California sun, I have moments of pure bliss. But that bliss is tainted by the knowledge that more than 130,000 people already have lost their lives to COVID-19, and millions more have lost their livelihoods. How can I experience happiness when so many others are living in grief and misery? Often, I find myself sinking into melancholy in an awkward attempt to show empathy toward victims I will never meet.

Often, I find myself sinking into melancholy in an awkward attempt to show empathy toward victims I will never meet. 

There is also confusion. While the authorities were imploring us to socially distance, they were effectively silent when millions across the nation marched shoulder to shoulder during the protests. This opened the floodgates — temporarily. A few weeks ago, there was excitement in the air as places started to reopen. After months of quarantining, we could enter, for example, some of our favorite restaurants on Pico Boulevard. I went to Pats one night, and although the masks and social distancing gave it a different look and feel, there was something reassuring about returning to the familiar.

That didn’t last. Apparently, it was too much too soon, and now we’re back to a general lockdown.

Speaking of confusion, I read in the Washington Examiner this week about Stanford University’s disease-prevention chairman, Dr. John Ioannidis, who questioned whether the rate of infection and mortality rate were worth shutting down the U.S. economy for months. “For people younger than 45,” he said, “the infection fatality rate is almost 0%. For 45 to 70, it is probably about 0.05%-0.3%. For those above 70, it escalates substantially.”

Because of the lockdown, Ioannidis said, “Major consequences on the economy, society and mental health have already occurred. I hope they are reversible, and this depends to a large extent on whether we can avoid prolonging the draconian lockdowns and manage to deal with COVID-19 in a smart, precision-risk targeted approach rather than blindly shutting down everything.”

Like I said, confusion − or at least complexity.

There also is fear. I’m constantly on the phone with family members, worried they may not be taking proper precautions. I’m particularly worried about my 87-year-old mother who lives in Montreal. I’m pestering her the way she used to pester me.

I think a lot about loneliness. How many people, especially the elderly, have been plagued by the inability to see and hug their loved ones, outside of Zoom and Facetime? 

Searching for meaning is one of life’s great blessings, because it is deeply rewarding and works under any conditions, however painful, however bewildering.

And did I mention awe? In the news business, we’re constantly measuring the “bigness” of a story. Of course, in the era of the 24-hour-news cycle, big stories come and go. Not COVID-19. This is the story of stories. Even when the protest movement took over the airwaves recently, the coronavirus never left. Now, it’s as dominant and epic as ever, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in an interview on C-net, “I think that mask wearing and some degree of social distancing, we will be living with … for several years.”

The near-biblical scope of COVID-19 also has shaken our rock-solid faith in real estate. Our beloved cathedrals of human connection — synagogues, museums, restaurants, theaters, offices, gyms, etc. — have become venues of potential infection. Our virtual technologies are miraculous, but they’re no substitute for the real thing — for meeting real people in real time. The halting, clumsy efforts to reopen our physical spaces only reinforce the pervasive power of the virus and how it has humbled us.

Novelist Ben Dolnick, in a recent piece in The New York Times, wrote that since March, the human race has been living “inside a set of massive parentheses.” It was his way of describing a life suspended in time. Until God or a vaccine “blesses us with an end-parenthesis,” he wrote, “we are stuck here.”

But while we’re stuck in this state of anxious limbo, we can struggle, as Rabbi Kligfeld says, in meaningful ways. How can we find meaning during the most confusing, confining, isolating and devastating event we have experienced in modern times? The answer may differ for each of us, but the silver lining is the same: Searching for meaning is one of life’s great blessings, because it is deeply rewarding and works under any conditions, however painful, however bewildering.

As Dolnick reminds us in his piece, “Our whole lives are a parentheses!”