My Religion Pivoted To Zoom. Will My Faith, Too?

The coronavirus pandemic has been terrible — an overnight realization of the worst-case scenario, truly — for people who hate videoconferencing. People like me.

I’m no misanthrope. On the contrary: I love people. I love listening to people and I love talking to people, if not always in that order. I love seeing their faces. If that doesn’t come through twice a month in this column, I have failed.

But videoconferences always have been a bridge too far. You couldn’t pay me to FaceTime for longer than 10 minutes. Skyping with family has felt like an unbearable chore. Between flimsy reception, rampant distractions on both ends, background noise and the need to keep your eyes trained on a small screen the whole time, video chats are exhausting in a way no other communication format is. Give me texting, phone calls, even thank-you note writing, but don’t email me a 10-digit conference code. I won’t be drawn into your panopticon.

 Much to my chagrin, my religion — in addition to my peer group, my professional network and my podcast — has pivoted to Zoom.

Much to my chagrin, my religion — in addition to my peer group, my professional network and my podcast — has pivoted to Zoom. Three times a day, six times a week, my shul convenes on Zoom for minyan-less minyan. Our social hours and shiurim are on Zoom as well. I’m living by myself away from my apartment and away from my parents (quarantining as a precaution; I’m healthy, as far as I know). That means Shabbat meals, too, have been on Zoom.

Actually, just one Shabbat meal. The first Friday night after I started sheltering in place — three weeks ago? four weeks ago? I’ve lost track — I had my sister over for Shabbat dinner. We Zoomed my parents, who were hosting my other sister, but in the time it took for everyone to get set up, our food got cold. Instead of a pleasant conversation with my sister, the two of us were going back and forth with a screen, repeating ourselves when the connection wavered, letting the other side do the work. I checked out mentally and waited for it all to end. By the time we got to “A Song of Ascents,” I had descended into near-madness.

We didn’t reprise our experiment the following week. Instead, my sister and I walked over to my parents’ after dinner and stood on the sidewalk. We did our catching up in the dark.

I suspect many Jews have been feeling out the new normal, even as they fight it off. I’m now preparing myself mentally for a Zoom Four Cups, a Zoom afikomen hunt, a Zoom “Chad Gadya.” On seder night I’ll be sitting alone at my grandma’s table; it’s a small comfort that I won’t be by myself. Behold the Zoom dichotomy: On one hand, it’s a portal to family on a night when we are all but commanded to celebrate communally; on the other, its limitations as a medium partly reinforce our feeling of isolation.

On one hand, Zoom is a portal to family on a night when we are all but commanded to celebrate communally; on the other, its limitations as a medium partly reinforce our feeling of isolation.

It took a Zoom Shabbat ha-Gadol drasha for me to begin warming to the upsides of the Zoom religious experience. The Shabbat ha-Gadol lecture is one of the highlights of the calendar in Orthodox communities, and at my shul it draws a greater turnout than any other Saturday afternoon event. This year, the talk couldn’t be on Shabbat for obvious reasons, so it was on Zoom on Sunday evening. Within a few minutes, the video conference had filled its 100-person capacity and everyone else spilled over to watch it on Facebook Live.

I have to admit, my attention span was no better for the Zoom drasha than it had been for the Zoom Shabbat dinner. I found myself looking at all the boxes closely to see all the fixtures and fringe-friends of the shul I had grown up in. I had not seen them for a while, and it was moving to reunite with them, even without a formal greeting. Old and young, male and female, seeing the breadth of the community intact was reassuring. But also, below each face was a name, and for the first time, Zoom enabled me to match them — people I never knew I never knew.

How does God want us to cope with COVID-19, to observe religion in the age of Zoom? Maybe God wants us to be struggling with this sudden tumult, wants us to be tortured with halachic issues that cut to our moral and spiritual core. This is how we communicate with God when the reception is fuzzy, when we are facing rampant distractions, when the background noise is deafening — when it feels like our Savior is on the other end of a Zoom. We keep our eyes trained on what matters most, for as long as we can.

Louis Keene is a writer living in Los Angeles. He’s on Twitter at @thislouis.