January 12, 2022

Every week my daughter welcomes Shabbat with a group of survivors as part of her participation on the Holocaust Museum LA’s teen advisory board. Ten survivors and five high school students gather on Zoom Friday afternoons to talk about their week, share stories of their lives, and light the Shabbat candles. She often joins the Zoom call in our kitchen while I’m braiding the dough for our family challah and so I sometimes get to be part of the conversation.

Throughout the pandemic, the voices of these survivors have given our entire family hope. No matter how dark our situation has been, their stories have provided a much-needed perspective. At the beginning of the pandemic, during the stay-at-home orders, one of the survivors reminded us that it wasn’t nearly as bad as being a hidden child during the war. When there were shortages of toilet paper and flour, we knew from their first-hand experiences that it could be much, much worse.

Throughout the pandemic, the voices of these survivors have given our entire family hope.

It’s hard sometimes to achieve this sense of perspective — and the strength and even gratitude that often comes with it — through the stories of another. Knowing that another person has been through far greater challenges doesn’t always make the one you’re going through any easier. 

Mel Brooks famously taught that tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer. It’s a dark commentary on the challenge of true empathy. I experience the world through the prism of the self. Hearing or reading about the pain of another is never quite the same as cutting my own finger. We cannot ever fully escape our own perspective or fully understand the experience of another. For some, tragedy during the pandemic has meant not finding toilet paper at the market or experiencing the pain and frustration of a canceled prom or family vacation. For others, it has meant serious illness, the loss of income or a business, or even the death of a loved one. Still, knowing that others around the world are experiencing far worse doesn’t always make us feel any better about our own misery. We are, ultimately, incapable of fully transcending the self.

And yet in last week’s Torah portion we’re asked to do just that. We are told that every year in the springtime we are to commemorate our going forth from Egypt by refraining from eating leavened bread for seven days. We are commanded throughout the generations to explain to our children the purpose of this practice: “It is because of what the ETERNAL did for me when I went free from Egypt” (Exodus 13:8). 

But there was only one generation of our ancestors who experienced this going forth from slavery to freedom. All those who came later—including of course our grandparents, parents, and us—are instructed to say those words knowing full well that we ourselves weren’t literally freed from Egyptian bondage.

The rabbis of the Mishnah, writing a thousand years later, take this commandment one step further: 

“In each and every generation a person must view himself as though he personally left Egypt … Therefore we are obligated to thank, praise, glorify, extol, exalt, honor, bless, revere, and laud the One who performed for our ancestors and for us all these miracles: God took us out from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from mourning to a Festival, from darkness to a great light, and from enslavement to redemption” (Mishnah Pesachim 10:5).

Knowing that once, long ago, those who came before us were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and that we today, despite the many very real challenges we face, are relatively free is reason enough to give thanks and praise to God for the many blessings we experience each day. We have collectively if not personally gone from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from darkness to light and therefore day by day we give thanks for the miracle of our very existence.

While it’s not possible to fully know the experience of another, we can gain a sense of perspective and benefit significantly through an awareness of the struggles of others, particularly through stories of their perseverance. Hearing the calm voices of those survivors reminding the teenagers (and each other and me as well) that as bad as this moment is, we’ve been through far worse, gives me hope and strength. 

We have gone from sorrow to joy before and we shall do so again. With grit, determination, and, yes, perspective gained at times through the eyes of another, we will go from mourning all that we have lost to celebration, from darkness to an or gadol: to a very great light.

Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback is the Senior Rabbi of Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles, California.

I am tired of Covid. I know you are too. But here we are, dealing with a fourth wave of coronavirus, and beginning to wonder if we’re going to work our way all the way through the Greek alphabet and ultimately get to an Omega variant sometime this year or next. 

At least for those of us who are vaccinated and boosted, each new outbreak is somewhat less disruptive than the one before. The fact that Omicron is so transmittable has left hospitals, grocery stores and other employers scrambling for workers. But the impact of this newest strain has been much more of an annoying inconvenience than a dangerous threat.

When COVID first hit, and our knowledge of the virus and our protections from it were so limited, the first priority was to preserve public health even at immense economic and societal cost. For two years, the crux of the political debate has been about how best to balance those dueling considerations, although the balance has gradually shifted toward reopening.

We have barely any clue as to the long-term psychological harm these young people suffered from their protracted isolation.

But as the nation’s public schools begin classes again after the holiday break, students and their parents are finding themselves at the center of what may become a brutal political fight over whether and how schools should be operating in this latest iteration of the pandemic. We are just beginning to understand the extent of the learning loss that occurred when students were limited to online classes over the last two years — and the even greater damage suffered by children from minority and lower-income communities. We have barely any clue as to the long-term psychological harm these young people suffered from their protracted isolation and desocialization while their schools were closed.

The Republicans’ upset victory in the Virginia governor’s race last fall demonstrated the parental dissatisfaction toward prolonged school closures, and Democrats from Joe Biden on down have scrambled to encourage their teachers’ union allies to return to the classroom. But the rapid spread of Omicron over winter break has undermined that strategy, and it now appears that growing union resistance to school reopening will have immense educational and political impact.

One New Jersey labor leader recently cast the familiar health versus economy debate in especially stark terms when he said “I’d see the entire city of Newark unemployed before I allowed one single teacher’s aide to die needlessly.”

Any death is a tragedy that we should make great effort to avoid, but such an absolute standard would require the criminalization of cars, airplanes, pharmaceuticals (and possibly electricity, ladders and fatty foods). In reality, we make these tradeoffs every day, balancing what we believe to be some level of acceptable risk in exchange for both necessities and conveniences in our daily lives. It wouldn’t be possible to hold in-person classes under such criteria – ever.

A more measured assessment was offered in the Bay Area, where respected Santa Clara County Public Health Director Sara Cody issued a joint statement with the county’s office of education urging schools to stay open.

“We need to find ways to coexist and live with COVID,” Cody said. “We’ve learned that in-person education is what (students) need and remote learning doesn’t support their mental health, emotional health, and academic well-being nearly the way that in-person learning does.” 

To his credit, Governor Gavin Newsom successfully pressured the powerful California Teachers Association into a commitment last month to keep the state’s public schools open. But such agreements are often tenuous, and there is already evidence of teacher sick-outs and other efforts to temporarily suspend classroom instruction. And testing shortages, rising caseloads and lack of qualified substitute teachers make it likely that these trends will spread quickly just as parents are preparing to send their children back to school.

Newsom, Biden and other Democratic leaders have benefited tremendously from their relationship with teachers’ unions over the years. But while still protecting the health of their constituents, they will need to find a way to prod their labor allies into a more balanced approach. That balancing act won’t be easy — and it carries extremely high stakes for children and politicians alike.

Dan Schnur is a Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. Join Dan for his weekly webinar “Politics in the Time of Coronavirus” (www/lawac.org) on Tuesdays at 5 PM.