I walked to Beth Sholom Congregation in Potomac, Maryland, with my daughters and son. As we got nearer we put on our surgeon masks. The parking lot was set up with tiny primary color chairs that belong in our nursery school classes and wooden partitions on wheels with a top border of lattice. It is a Modern Orthodox synagogue, so we have mechitzahs between women and men during prayer. During Tisha B’Av, we sit on the floor or on the low chairs until the next day at about 1 pm. It was a fast day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem almost 2,000 years ago that marked the end of a nine-day period of increased restrictions. For nine days we could not do laundry except for underwear if we ran out, take hot showers, eat meat, or swim for pleasure. Since humanity was yanked from center stage as the coronavirus whirled and dipped and swung its microscopic fists, we as a world have already been feeling that we are in a depressing time of mourning for our lost culture and the usual freedoms of being human. First they came for the polar bears, but I wasn’t a polar bear...
I sang the first chapter of Lamentations as loudly as at the co-ed reading I organized in the shul’s parking lot, so those listening--all masked and ten feet away from me and each other--or on zoom could hear. It wasn’t as challenging--as I initially worried--to sing with a mask over my nose and mouth, but the sound was slightly muffled and the inside of my mask became wet. One man and four women chanted and about forty male and female congregants came to our live co-ed reading. Last year was the first year the shul allowed a co-ed public reading of Lamentations and two women and three men read. We already have co-ed readings of Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and I organize a reading for teenage girls to chant the story of Ruth for the congregation. The quarantine hit us right before the Passover holiday and my anxiety level was so high because of the fear of catching Covid, the shock of lost freedoms, starting virtual teaching, and my kids’ schooling coinciding at home. I couldn’t catch my breath to organize a co-ed reading of the Song of Songs, nor did we have any family over for Passover. We did a zoom and did short non-traditional readings and discussions for the seder before sundown with all the family in different cities. By Shavuot at the end of May, my anxiety calmed down enough for me to organize a zoom reading of Megilat Ruth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDohgJ18VkA
Before I started the first words of Lamentations, “Eicha Yashva Vdad…” I looked at the three people who turned on their cameras on the zoom, everyone else was a black box with white writing on it like intertitles in a silent film. It is astonishing that the words I read in Hebrew mean, “...Lonely sits the city once great with people!” (Sefaria, 1.1). I really felt satisfied that I could use this sacred text to express my blues about the losses I had been feeling through the Covid crisis. It was comforting that the words seemed to speak to this moment, when we are isolated from one another and mostly on a quarantine that is starting to lift but in ways that still keep us distant, masked, alone.
In other communities, thankfully not ours, Orthodox Jewish men don’t want to hear a woman sing due to a Talmudic restriction called Kol Ishah Ervah, a woman’s voice is her nakedness. I disagree with this injunction because it dampens women’s singing voices and singing is one of my greatest joys. However, in our synagogue it holds little sway because of rabbinic responsum from one hundred years ago by Talmudic scholar, Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg that stated, and I paraphrase, as long as singing isn’t sexualized, Orthodox Jewish men can listen to women singing publicly. I feel that if I have the opportunity and if I create the opportunity for other women to participate in ritual, especially to sing from the sacred scrolls, then I can thrive as a singer of sacred texts even in this less than ideal world affected by Covid-19.
Finding creative ways to do the things that I would normally take great pride in doing, like chanting the sacred texts, during this Covid pandemic, has made me feel even more grateful for these kinds of occupations. Doing them has given meaning to my life and has staved off what I call the "quarantine depression."
Sarah Antine is a poet and writer who lives in Potomac, Maryland.
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