Exactly one year ago today, I was in Varanasi, a holy city in India on the banks of the holy Ganges (or Ganga) River. One of the powerful visual and emotional elements of the visit is the many ghats, steps of stone slabs along the riverbank where pilgrims perform ritual ablutions.
Of all the ghats, the one which has been imprinted in my memory is the Manikarnika Ghat, where public cremation ceremonies take place.
So, death was in the air this time a year ago, but it was foreign, exotic, distant, at the other end of a camera lens. It wasn’t part of my daily life, thankfully. And after the one cremation we did observe at the ghat, we could walk into the winding alleyways and have a delicious lassi and move on to the next exotic experience we had come to India for.
How things have changed for all of us, everywhere. The global pandemic, which has my really little grandchildren using words like “corona”, “lockdown”, and “Zoom”, as if these have always been a part of young children’s vocabularies, has changed my life beyond belief over the past 10 months.
I live life on the move, guiding in 2019 in Israel, Morocco, Poland, Germany, France, and South Africa, sleeping away from home about 150 nights of the year, and guiding and teaching and thereby meeting about 400 new people. But 2020 became a year in which, from March until the end of December, I slept at home every night and the only new people I met were on the other end of a Zoom meeting.
I found out a few things in 2020. The positives were how good it was being at home and how after 37 years of marriage, we still were/are able to enjoy each other’s company. I was also reminded just how lucky I am to be living on a kibbutz (Tzora) with all five of my grandchildren (aged one to six). When my grandchildren are old enough, I will tell them that there was once a year, 2020, when they literally saved my life.
All this began to change again three weeks ago. I’m lucky to be living in the only country in the world where there is quality medical services and the outstanding ability to deliver these services logistically. That coupled with great digital infrastructure and huge amounts of data plus the foresight of our leadership, has created our now phenomenal reality, namely that we are leading the field by a very wide margin internationally in the vaccination of our population against COVID-19.
Three weeks ago, being over 60, my wife and I travelled 10 minutes to a local branch of our HMO (Health Maintenance Organisation) and in a totally prosaic moment, got our first vaccination. No, there were no trumpets blaring, no fanfare, and no crowds cheering. In fact, it was the most ordinary extraordinary experience I have ever had.
A little pain in my arm was the only reminder five minutes afterwards that I had taken the first step towards reclaiming my life, the life that was, the pre-coronavirus world. Reclaiming freedom of movement, freedom of association. Reclaiming a world of intimacy where people … hug … kiss … hold each other’s hands. And I’m not talking about lovers. I’m talking about parents, children, grandparents, friends, acquaintances.
Have any of you watched old movies and had the weird feeling I have when people touch each other, wanting to shout out, “Be careful, you need to socially distance! Where is your mask?”
It’s nothing less than that. Today, we had our second vaccination. Once again, no pain, no side effects. Was I at all afraid of having the vaccinations?
I’m terrified that I might be stuck in a world where people don’t get vaccinated. Where intimacy is a thing of the past. Where exploring the world is something we read about in books or see on Netflix. This is the dystopia which terrifies me.
I am what I do. I miss my teaching, my travel, and my guiding terribly. The vaccinations are the only way out of this terrible cage we find ourselves in. I wasn’t afraid, not even for one moment, that having the vaccine might be a mistake.
I now once again look at my future and I see myself guiding in Fes, Berlin, Cape Town (and Joburg), in Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, and Toledo.
I see a sunrise in Merzouga, Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara. I see myself on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. I see myself sharing Shabbat services in Saloniki; in the Old Town in Warsaw; and at the Kotel in Jerusalem.
I hear discussions about meaning, about our place in history, about the future of the Jewish people.
That is what I see just a few hours after my second vaccination.
Take care.
- Julian Resnick grew up in Somerset West and made aliyah with Habonim Dror to Israel in 1976. He lives on Kibbutz Tzora with his little tribe of wife, two of his three children, and his five grandchildren. He guides and teaches in Israel and around the world, wherever there is a Jewish story.
