Eikev (+ Haftarah!)

My rabbi led us in a Torah study this morning around the Birkat HaMazon, the blessing after a meal when bread is eaten. Something she pointed out early is that this is a call and response prayer, said in a group of 3 or more people. This began a spirited discussion around the benefits of eating alone versus eating in community.

It was a wonderful discussion that had me ruminating on my community and my role in it. I’ve been sick this week with COVID and I’ve been open and honest with my people about it. That’s a more generous way of me saying “I get super scared and lonely when I’m sick so I tell all of my friends and family so they can check on me.“

My friends and family really rise to the occasion. When I posted on social media an image of my positive COVID test and my dog on my legs, I was surprised to have so many of my friends check on me, offer to send me food, actually send me food, send me flowers, and more. Knowing the farmers market is my favorite start to Saturday mornings, a friend went to pick me up some fresh produce for the week.

I posted (in response) a thank you story with a picture of all of my beautiful flowers.

The thing is, it seems like I’m going to be just fine, Baruch HaShem. This was essentially a normal bout of illness that humans experience throughout their lifetime. However, I feel like I got a high amount of care and attention by posting these social media stories. Apparently my posts were alarming enough that two people reached out to me to see if something bigger was going on with me health wise. I felt self conscious for my thank you post. I felt like I didn’t deserve this level of care and tending.

I think this reaction is because I happen to have many people in my life with chronic conditions that cause them tremendous pain, illness, fatigue, and fear every single day. They do not post every time they have a bad COVID day. They do not post every time their PCOS leaves them paralyzed in pain. They do not post every time their mental health crumbles. Suffering is a more routine part of their lives, and so they are less likely to reach out for support. An optimistic way of looking at this is that folks in chronic illness have developed a surplus of coping mechanisms that don’t involve social media posts…

I think a more realistic take is that people in chronic illness are often ill, and continually recalculate what constitutes illness. If you collapse in pain from PCOS for two weeks of every month, do you notify the world every single time? There’s a young woman I follow on TikTok with chronic illness name Tricia who has been suffering from multi system organ failure for years. She has close to 325,000 followers on the platform and consistently updates showing her routines and her daily life. It’s her way of connecting. It reminds those of us who are living within the conventional norms of day-to-day life that she isn’t. She is ventilated 24 hours a day. She cannot eat food and receives all nutrition from an IV. She cannot go out to eat with you or go dancing at a club, but she can talk with you over TikTok live while she mixes up her medications (which she self administers). She has (willingly or not) centered her greater social self around her illness. She cannot pretend it is not there, we can all “see” it, so she addresses it and uses her platform to educate. She shares her joys and her trials (she’s currently hospitalized with a resistant pneumonia). Tricia has taught me a lot about how to love someone with chronic illness. You have to both remember it’s there every time you talk with them, but also remember who they are beyond their disease. With her outrageously candid and kind presence on social media, she has inspired me to be a bit braver in reaching out to people with chronic illness about their illness.

I am working to overcome my shame for receiving love and support from my people over a COVID infection. A dear friend of mine texted me “who gets COVID anymore? haha” and it’s true! We have tired and acculturated to having COVID around in the same way we have acculturated to having the influenza virus around. Most people who get it now seem to be OK. Get the vaccine for better odds of being OK. Right?

Except that isn’t always the truth. Some people still are suffering from COVID from last year or 2021 or 2020. I don’t think that we can go around holding everyone’s tragedies at all time. I’m not arguing that. But I think we might all show up better for one another if we remember that a passing week of illness and fatigue for me was the start of continual illness for someone else. I hope we can make the world more hospitable to people asking for help or sharing that they’re suffering.

I found some inspiration in the Haftarah this week, where by an anthropomorphized Zion is suffering and feeling conquered and forsaken. God responds

As for your ruins and desolate places and your land laid waste– You shall soon be crowded with settlers, while destroyers stay from from you//

…Those who trust in Me shall not be shamedIsiah 49: 19 and 23

As a reform Jew, my sense of who/what/where God is actively shifts. Most days I feel like I believe a great deal in divinity and very little in a conventional God. I believe that divinity lives within all of us and functions as the God of the Bible when that divinity is harnessed as one. So when I read “those who trust in Me shall not be shamed” I read it as a harkening to trust in our fellow humans to tend to one another when we are ruined and desolate. We should not feel shamed when asking for help. In fact, the only way to receive that help is to ask and be vulnerable.

I think asking is exhausting. I think that it’s unfair that we have to ask for help when we are feeling our most depleted. However, I think the truth is that community shows up when called upon. Whether it be for the Birkat HaMazon or for soup and cough medicine. I think the only way to strengthen our community is to ask for help and (when we are able) to offer it. Whether it be a ride to the hospital, an Amazon delivery of a jar opener, sending a silly meme, or setting an alarm on your phone once a week to check on that friend who is going through a hard time. I think it’s what we’re supposed to do. I think it’s the natural ebb and flow of our lives to help and be helpers.

One last thought around this topic. My grandmother was a nurse for something like 40 years. She worked as an LPN, an RN, and eventually a nurse anesthetist, even running the nurse anesthesia program at a hospital. She volunteered and helped raise her grandchildren. She was an avid pet lover and had fish, birds, cats, dogs, and even a monkey at some point. She now has advanced dementia. She cannot drive you to the dentist or cook you dinner any more. But she has taught me so much about service in an entirely different way. I value my grandmother’s hugs the same way I used to value her sage advice. I am served by my grandmother’s warm smile in the same way that I was once served by her hilarious stories that would have me crying in laughter. Our ability to serve does not evaporate one day. It shifts. When I’m working with a very sick patient in the hospital with one of my students, I am struck by how much of a gift this patient is to the learning and development of my student. We are valuable, even when we are like Zion, feeling defeated and forlorn.

When we see someone in need, perhaps we bake them a casserole. One day we will need the casserole. One day, we will all struggle to assemble the casserole. So maybe we will simply smile, and that will feel like a casserole in and of itself.

I can’t solve the great societal injustices that make life so painful and isolating for people in chronic illness. Not in one blog post. But I think it’s worth sharing what a week with COVID and two social media posts taught me:

• Asking for help is weird (especially when you don’t know if you really need it)
• There’s no magic threshold for needing help (this is made up)
• You are not more or less deserving of care. It’s not a competetion
• Providing help and care is a privilege, do it often
• Just because someone isn’t posting on social media, doesn’t mean they aren’t in need