Here we go again....

It seems that at this time of the year, everything seems to move a little bit faster than normal. This has been the shortest, longest year ever, if you know what I mean. Now with the Jewish holidays behind us, we seem to move towards Thanksgiving and New Year’s at record speeds. It’s October 1st already, how did that happen? It seems like most of us have been “on hold” since the middle of March. Six months have passed. It has taken forever and it seems like yesterday.

There are three months left in this crazy year. In those three months, we are going to get a tremendous amount accomplished. We may not realize it yet, but we are already living in “the new normal”. Most of us have figured out when and how to get our groceries in the safest manner, how to go to the doctor without going into the waiting room, how to eat out…..in, and how to manage in these unprecedented times. I hope, many of you even learned to pray this High Holiday season by finding your Jewish Community with your congregations online.

At the Jewish Pavilion, we are learning so much. We are learning how much hugs means to a resident in an elder-care facility and how much we, and they miss them. We are learning that a phone call just to say “hi” can change a person’s whole day. We are learning that time with our family and friends is priceless, and we are zooming, just to keep things going. We are learning that religion, faith and tradition are all tools to keeping us sane during this insanity.

We tend to laugh during Jewish holidays, and we often joke, “they tried to beat us, we won, let’s eat”. We relish the fact that we, often the underdogs, have survived for so many centuries. We have been enslaved, repressed, attacked, provoked, incarcerated, and bullied. We have withstood it all. We look back on those times during the holidays, and remember not only that we prevailed and survived, but that we came together as a Jewish, spiritual community to do so.

I think we are doing that again now. I think that although this pandemic is not in any way limited to or directed at Jewish people, we are coming together to fight it. I think that the events that are occurring now make us want to reach out to a community and not feel so separated.

We are finding all kinds of ways to do that. Many have found ways to use the internet to be with our families, friends and synagogues. We at the Jewish Pavilion have revised our fundraising efforts to be remote instead of live. We have set up Pavilion Pathways to replace our “gala ad book”. We are having an amazing online auction from October 18-23 to replace our “gala silent auction”. Our INCREDIBLE donors reached way down deep and made generous pledges during our Rosh Hashanah appeal which replaced our “gala appeal”. We are working as a community to stay strong. Our donor support allows us to enrich the lives of residents in elder-care communities and we have found new ways to do that as well. We have delivered thousands of cards, letters and gift bags. We have made phone calls and offered remote services. Even in the hardest times, we find a way to come together.

Even apart, we are together. Thank you. Thank you for reading this. Thank you for hanging in there with us. Thank you for continuing to support our and other’s Jewish programming. Thank you for being with us for another New Year. Happy and healthy and may you be inscribed in the Book of Life. As we make another new start, we hope that the next will be better than the last. Here we go again….