When I finished high school, 45 years ago, one of the dilemmas our family discussed was whether or not to go to college. While many Orthodox Jews were educated in the best universities and worked as professionals, some more right-wing families were unwilling to risk sending their Bais Yaakov-educated daughters and yeshiva-educated sons, raised in our insular community, to a school where they would study in coed classes and be exposed to alien ideas.

The havoc COVID-19 has wreaked is no laughing matter, yet you can’t help but chuckle at the lifestyle that has become our new global norm. Wearing masks, keeping each other at (triple) arm’s length, and constantly sanitizing our hands are understood, even, to some extent, by two-year-olds. I polled people around the world – and closer to home, in Baltimore – about any new-norm experiences that provided them with the much-needed comic relief we could all use, especially in these times.

I remember when Gila was born. A girl! Mom – Grandma Bourge – was so happy to finally be able to buy another pair of Mary Jane shoes, even if she had to send them to Detroit! And when their family moved back to Cleveland, the bonus was that we got to inherit all the beautiful hand-me-downs. 

That was too many lifetimes ago.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has shaken every facet of community life. As Jews, our lives are especially closely intertwined with our congregational association and with our Torah way of life and its calendar. Tishrei is crammed with many Yomim Tovim, all of which are strongly connected with activities as a kehilla (community). The very term kehilla derives from hakhel, the mitzva of nationwide merging on Sukkos.

Our nation’s teetering economy has prompted many organizations to offer free resources and training to the public. LinkedIn (LI), the leading website devoted to professional development and networking, has initiated some remarkable free job training options. According to LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky, the company’s goal is “to help those who have become unemployed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis get the skills they need to land their next job. By giving free access to these skills and training…we hope to do our part and help connect job seekers around the globe to new opportunities.”

Change is in the air. The temperature has dropped, children grab their school supplies and hurry out the door in the morning, and most people have established routines that work for them. People deal with difficulties in different ways. During the weeks and then months of quarantine, some people baked bread, others did puzzles, and many finally stopped putting off organizing their closets. (Some individuals were happy to discover bread recipes among their papers and puzzles they had forgotten having bought buried in the bottom of their closets. Organizing does have its rewards.) To the animals, the cooler temperature signals that their lives need some serious adjustments as well. When the canopy of leaves changes from green to gold, the animals, birds, and insects know it’s almost time: Winter is coming, and they have to be prepared to survive.

Ethel Fischer had a problem. Her lift had left, and she herself was about to board the plane – on her way fulfilling her lifelong dream of aliyah. But how, during these pandemic times, would she say goodbye to a whole host of friends from many stages of her life? How would she show her gratitude to the wonderful people from diverse segments of the community with whom she had worked? Should she take out an ad? Call for a Zoom meeting? Arrange a drive-by goodbye? I suggested writing this article as an alternative, and Ethel took me up on my offer. I penned this just hours before she left.

Dear Rabbi Hochberg,

My parents never had the greatest marriage, and now that they’re getting older, things are getting progressively worse. I am often at the receiving end of their gripes about each other, and I’m never quite sure how to respond. I tend to sympathize with my father’s complaints about my mother, which are usually well founded (“She yells at me” or “She criticizes me publicly”). I tend to find my mother’s complaints ridiculous (“He always buys the wrong brand of coffee” or “He leaves his newspapers open on the couch all the time”). Both my parents are equally bitter in their complaints, and I don’t know how to answer in a way that is respectful and also helpful.

There is no chance that they would discuss their issues with anyone outside our immediate family, so going to counseling or a Rav is not an option. Should I empathize with the suffering parent? Try to defend the parent being complained about? Change the subject? And should my reaction depend on whether the complaint is valid?

Not Sure

“So what is a shpahtsir?” you may ask. Perhaps you remember the song, “Let’s Take an Old-Fashioned Walk.” In Yiddish it would read, “Let’s Take an Old-Fashioned Shpahtsir.” Nu, maybe it sounds better in English.…

So who wrote such a song? you may again ask. Iz der enfer (the answer is), Irving Berlin, a Yiddel, of course. He composed many other American melodies, including “G-d Bless America.” Surely you have noticed from my articles that many Yidden have written popular tunes. (You also surely know that Yidden have contributed in many fields. Nu, that’s a topic for another article.)

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With the onset of the Corona pandemic, we have been served a bit of history. By now, everyone knows that almost exactly 100 years ago the infamous Spanish flu pandemic swept the globe, killing 50 million people worldwide. Less well known is the fact that outbreaks of disease cropped up in various localities in other years. Around 1915, my Uncle Joe, all alone in Troy, Alabama, came down with typhus.

As many of you know, our family’s American journey began in 1914, when Uncle Joe Weinstock got off the boat at Galveston, Texas. Like thousands of other young, Russian men brought over by the generosity of the financier Jacob Schiff, he was greeted at the port by Reform Rabbi Henry Cohen and taken to a hostel, where he was put up for the night, given a kosher meal, and then sent to a destination chosen by others. Their plan was to distribute the immigrants around the center of the country, away from the teeming slums of New York.