Growing up in affluent suburban America, I thought that the only person who said blessings on a balcony was the Pope. But the coronavirus has proved me wrong.
Actually, as a fourth-generation American Jew, I manage to develop another major misconception. I always thought we Jews were above that “religion” nonsense. We went to synagogue on “Ruh-shi-shuh-nuh” and “Yum-kipper,” as we called the High Holy Days, to watch the young ladies dressed in their autumn finest, and to connect to our ancient but fuzzy folklore heritage.
Prayer and the Bible – why, they were for the non-Jews! We intellectuals were above that sort of primitive stuff. But then, upon moving to Israel, I discovered that the Hebrew Bible is – surprise – written in our nation’s native language. Although most of the world reads it as a translation of a translation of a translation, anyone who takes the large view of the Torah, Prophets and Writings can see that the whole book is really about us, the Jewish nation and its dramas in and outside of the Land of Israel.
Since the time of Jacob our forefather, Jews have been praying to HaShem (God) religiously, three times a day. Furthermore, the prayers that we say are thousands of years old, and were set into place in part by King David himself nearly 3,000 years ago. Until the age of the coronavirus. (I don’t want to give it too much credence by spelling it with a capital letter.)
Here in Jerusalem, it took only a few days to shut down our synagogues, the locus of these ancient prayer services for millennia. Some fought the decree kicking and screaming. At first, people refused to leave. Then, they congregated for prayer OUTSIDE the synagogues. And finally, a new idea took hold: Blessings from the balconies.
Many apartment buildings in Jerusalem have balconies. Almost all of them have rooms with a window. In our building, the neighbors downstairs, in conjunction and consultation with the rabbi across my hall, set up a minyan (prayer quorum) in the parking lot for collective prayer, three times a day as dictated by ancient Jewish law: after sunrise; at mid-day; and after nightfall.
We even read the weekly portion from a parchment Torah scroll, on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbat – as instituted by Moses himself. People joined in from buildings all around. As long as we could see (and hear) the designated prayer leader, we were fulfilling the precept of praying in a quorum. (I don’t have a true balcony, but standing in front of the window of the boys’ room is good enough.)
But at some point, even this was too much for the government health authorities. One sunny, pastoral morning, we prayed as usual, with a woodpecker knock-knock-knocking on a dead branch overhead and the sound of the doves cooing in the nearby park. Just before one of our neighbors began reading the Torah in a booming voice so that all who wanted to could read along, we saw flashing blue lights approaching. A police cruiser pulled up, and – we were busted.
In Jerusalem, the police are often religiously-observant Jews. So, after pausing to say “Amen” to the last of the 18 benedictions that are at the heart of every prayer session, the policeman walked over to my neighbor, the organizer of the quorum. He made us an offer, since after all, this is indeed the Middle East: if we were to have just one person with a mask positioned at the front of our building – and if other people joined, they had to be more than ten meters away – then maybe we would have a chance. He wasn’t sure if this was “kosher,” but he promised to call his direct superior and get back to us.
He did. And he did. We were back in business. Who could have guessed? This new kind of prayer is like glue holding our neighborhood together and keeping us sane at the same time. These bizarre conditions actually enable us to say our prayers with heightened concentration and intention. Maybe when the virus finally goes away, it will be hard to return to praying indoors.