Spellcheck didn’t catch the error when I first composed this blog. Instead of it being a New Year’s blog in anticipation of Rosh Hashanah which begins Monday evening, I had mistakenly inputted “New Tears blog.”
A year ago COVID kept Gilda and me from hosting a 35-person dinner on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Instead of delivering a verbal recap of the news of the past year experienced by the 10 extended families sitting around our expanded tables, I sent out an email that included the following:
“Thankfully there are no passings to report this year among our chevra [friends]. But we mourn the more than 196,000 who have succumbed to the coronavirus. We pray the pandemic will be corralled and that an effective, safe vaccine will be formulated that people the world over will enthusiastically and universally take to enable us to return to normal life and experiences in this new year 5781.”
Despite three emergency approved effective and safe vaccinations being available, in the last 12 months we were not so fortunate. The pandemic toll in America is approaching 650,000, with little prospect the misery will diminish because of virus variants and, tragically and implausibly to the intelligent mind, millions upon millions refuse to get vaccinated or wear a protective mask.
Individual deaths also intruded into our bubble. They didn’t die of COVID, but three passings darkened our lives. Our daughter-in-law’s father succumbed to a quick-acting virulent cancer. A mutual friend of many of our guests died from abdominal complications. A stroke claimed the brother-in-law of dear friends.
Births, moves to new homes, beginnings at new jobs and schools temper the sadness. But there is no dismissing the overwhelming sorrow of more than 400,000 deaths in the past year, many of them needless. And those were just the deaths in the United States. Woeldwide, deaths from COVID totalled more than 4.5 million.
As a society, America has permitted partisan politics to cloud our thinking. Too many have retreated into Dark Ages ignorance, often accompanied by vigilante attacks on the educated, on immigrants (especially Asians), on Jews, on Moslems.
The richest, most productive country in the history of mankind is a hollow shell. We have let our infrastructure decay. We have outsourced much of our manufacturing prowess and the solid jobs that underpinned the middle class. Many want to close our doors to immigrants—especially refugees— who, our history has shown, are among the most creative and industrious of our workers. The long march to equality of opportunity to vote, to learn, to work, to enjoy decent housing, to tap into quality healthcare, has been stymied by political and judicial roadblocks.
I have no solution to this sad state of affairs. My fingers will continue to punch out mistakes that only a careful reading of my scribble (is it permissible to categorize typing on a computer or iPhone as scribble?) will detect before I hit the “publish” key.
This New Year, 5782 according to the Jewish calendar, surely will be bathed in tears. It would be dishonest to believe otherwise.
