CHOCHMAS NASHIM: THREE YEARS WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY
By: Suri Davis
This month is the three year mark since a man was taken to St. Joseph hospital in Far Rockaway and brought Covid to our community. We were in a position to deconstruct our shuls and figure out how to serve G-d individually.
Vayakhel means to gather as one community, but in those early days of the pandemic, coming together felt like the kiss of death, and the fear was palpable. We needed leadership to deconstruct the shul, to say to men and women who attended shul their entire lives, you cannot come together to pray, to heal, to comfort to celebrate or mourn.
We spend the next few weeks reading about the minute details of the building of the mishkan/tabernacle. I wonder why so much time is spent on the smallest material details of the tabernacle when the emphasis should be on the spirituality with which G-d imbued the mishkan. As I have written a lot lately, our purpose here on earth is to take all that G-d created and elevate it to the service of G-d, so that each object brings forth the Godly energy which was imbued in that creation.
Perhaps if our edifice was not injected with the correct spirituality, where we took communal prayer and worship for granted, we basically removed the spiritual goal of the edifice so G-d created an illness which took away the edifice and called upon each person who was nadiv lev/generous and chacham lev/wise of heart to search his and her soul to find spirituality inside of each of our internal mishkan’s our hearts, heads and bodies to discovery the spirituality which went missing in our edifices, which we took for granted these decades.
Chacham lev, wise of heart and nadiv lev/generous of heart, where the rachmanus/sympathy lies, where the intuition lies. We had to reach down deep to find in us that spirituality in ourselves which brings out the wisdom and generosity to keep a community motivated to higher spiritual heights.
As time wanes, we should redouble our efforts to ensure we don’t easily resume the automatic responses to our shuls and sit in our pews bereft of spiritual motivation to strive higher individually and as a community. It is not just the men who are mentioned in our Torah portion, the women and their unique contributions of wisdom and generosity were highlighted as well.
As we bless the new month this Shabbos, the month of Nissan and redemption, let us remind ourselves of the time our shuls were bereft of us and of spirituality, and be thankful that G-d has redeemed us from the cruel pandemic to permit us once again to come together to pray and love and support each other. Let us not take this for granted, let us feel the Nissim/miracles of Nissan/the Jewish month of redemption.
Shabbat shalom. Gutten chodesh.
Suri