I’ve got a feeling twenty-one is going to be a good year
Especially if you and me, see it in together…

The Who, “1921.” from Tommy (released in 1969).

In a speech on November 24 1992, Queen Elizabeth remarked: “1992…has turned out to be an annus horribilis.” With all due respect to the unpleasant events to which the Queen was alluding, including separations/divorces within the monarch’s family, and the predictable media breeches of royal privacy, including the publication of topless photos of the Duchess of York (Sarah Ferguson), one has to think these relatively minor blows when it comes to life on earth.

If these occurrences earned the Queen’s scholarly epiphet for a “horrible year,” then what might be the appropriate Latin phrase for 2020, 12 months that approached epic proportions of suffering, with words of ancient and Biblical resonance: plague, contagion, disease, suffering, death?

The year of isolation and numbness leave us with other questions, easier asked than answered: How do human communities rally after such blows to our vision of ourselves and our destinies? What does the prospect look like for most people in 2021 and beyond? Is it just a matter of getting vaccinated and then returning to “normal”? Or are there further implications with which we need to contend?

A page out of Jewish history might help frame where we need to go and how to think, as Jews and as human beings. In the year 70, the Temple in Jerusalem was razed to the ground and Jews were scattered to the winds. As bad as death and suffering are, what the Jewish community faced at that time might even be considered a worse fate – the end of Jewish civilization in its entirety. No more Judaism, just an aimless collection of Jews.

As Rabbi Yitz Greenberg points out in the wake of the Temple’s destruction: “To many Jews, it appeared that Judaism itself was shattered beyond repair. Over a million Jews died in that abortive war for independence. Many died of starvation, others by fire and crucifixion. So many Jews were sold into slavery and given over to the gladiatorial arenas. The destruction was preceded by events so devastating that they read like scenes out of the Holocaust.”

And yet, Jews in the first century endured and invested in themselves and in the future. To move forward after calamity entails risk, the gamble of trusting in life again after disappointment, heartbreak and loss. And more than anything else, it involves hope, the cultivation of which requires us to think forward, to a world not yet seen, to a reality that can only be envisioned, not yet confirmed.

In the midst of another global pandemic in the first half of the twentieth century. Jonas Salk, who was instrumental in developing the polio vaccine, spoke movingly of hope, which he said, “lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.” Dr. Salk’s sentiment is echoed by a leader who suffered from polio but did not let it interfere with his duties: “We have always held to the hope,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the belief, the conviction, that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.”

So, it begins with hope, but it does not end there. For hope to be meaningful, dynamic and not passive, it must result in determined actions, something emphasized by another American president who suffered from an extended and debilitating illness, and yet was able to articulate an inspiring message (remember when presidents could be inspirational?). For Woodrow Wilson, it was crucial to see life not as simply an orgy of consumption, but as a mission of service: “You are not here merely to make a living, you are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”

The coronavirus has been a tragedy, but tragedy is not foreign to the Jewish people throughout our history. But in both happy times and ones of great misfortune, Jews have always responded through mitzvah. As I recently told two wonderful thirteen year-olds who were celebrating a Zoom bar/bat mitzvah:

“A mitzvah is a good action, a way of contributing positively to the world. But just as crucially, it is a good action that you do, not just because you feel like it, or you happen to be in the mood. Each day of our lives, the world depends on us, in very small ways, to do the right thing. Mitzvah is not just one option or choice out of many. It is the only option, the only choice we have.”

In that spirit, here are five mandatory mitzvot for 2021.

1) Do Not Assume. Do not assume that people are doing ok just because you do not hear about them. Quite the reverse – the one you have not heard from in a while is your very first telephone call. Do not assume that we know the private pain others go through. There is so much pressure in our culture to “succeed” (unfortunately this is usually defined financially). Find compassion for those who are struggling.

2) Lend a Helping Hand. Certainly, this involves digging deep for a charitable cause, especially to your local food bank or health initiative, but it goes beyond writing a cheque, to a more universal currency. As Maimonides writes, “If a poor person requests money from you and you have nothing to give, speak to him/her consolingly…because [their] heart is broken.”

3) Love your neighbour as yourself. The other person’s stomach is more important than my soul. The nineteenth-century Mussar movement reemphasized the centrality within Judaism of ethical behaviour. The movement’s founder, Rabbi Israel Salanter, once asserted that “one should be more concerned with spiritual matters than with material matters, but another person’s material welfare is one’s own spiritual concern.”

In the era of Covid-19, shuls have adopted the wise policy of telling people not to enter the premises if they have a fever or feel unwell. Perhaps, in the long run, we should also not enter a shul if we have not helped someone else out first that week, with a smile, with a coin, with a brief conversation, with our patience and encouragement. Otherwise, prayer runs the risk of becoming just a narcissistic act of self-soothing, or a pagan ritual of placating a deity whom, I would imagine, does not truly require our praises at the expense of helping out our fellow creatures.

4) Visit the sick. Over Zoom; at a social distance, in whatever way you can, whenever you can. There is an acute mental health crisis unfolding all over the world as a result of the coronavirus. God knows that many brave souls feel that for months and months they have been enveloped in a fog, a kind of dense emotional fatigue, and have descended into dark places. Illness is therefore not just people who are having respiratory issues in their lungs, but also cannot breathe because of the weight of their own sadness. Everyone needs to know they are not alone.

5) Do not despair. We can change our habitual expectations of life, and begin to see it as neither wholly paradise nor hell on earth. Primo Levi, who experienced much of the latter in his years in a concentration camp, reflects upon this profoundly in his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz: “Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable . . . Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it and this is called in the one instance: hope.”

In the trying days and months ahead, we would be well advised to listen to Levi’s words as well as those of the wonderful Canadian writer Carol Matas. In her book, Daniel’s Story, an historical novel about the Holocaust written for young readers, one of the characters says the following: “We are human, with good and bad in us. We can’t create a new species or a new world. That’s been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries. What are our choices? We can despair and curse, and change nothing. We can choose evil like our enemies have done and create a world based on hate. Or we can try to make things better.”

Our job in 2021 is to make things better. For all of our sakes.