Blessings Over Leavened Bread
Tonight I cried. I cried more than I have for a long time. I cried, not because I am sad, but because I feel so blessed.
Three years ago tonight I was doing bedikat chametz (searching for leavened bread) the night before Passover seder with three kids, alone without my husband and without my son who had to spend the night at the rehab hospital. Today three years ago Roí finished six weeks of radiation, 30 sessions. We left the radiation department of Hadassah, and those beautiful special radiologists, nurses and technicians who had accompanied us every single day. They gave him a “certificate” of bravery. He had done each session wide awake, with no anesthesia – and he was only eight and a half.
With all the annoyances of social isolation, it doesn’t half compare to seeing your son go from being a normal boy, to one that cannot walk or talk or move in less than a week. It doesn’t compare to having to leave this frightened boy, unable to communicate, with a cage over his head and walk out the room.
So now, three years later, even after four weeks of staying home from of quarantine, I look around and understand how much worse it can be. Can it be better? Yes, of course it can. Things could always be better. I could be planning the next campaign to launch for clients at work (who’ve had to put their PR and marketing activities on hold due to the financial crisis). We could be preparing the seder that we had planned with grandparents to enjoy their grandchildren. We could be planning our day trips over the Pesach holiday to the beach or nature trail. And we could be looking forward to a summer planned with visiting cousins and uncles and aunts from overseas.
G-d had other plans for us though and for the whole world. Those plans unfortunately include so far half a million sick people with hundreds and thousands of deaths.
So tonight, in official lockdown under curfew, we went around our house searching for “chametz”, for “bread crumbs” that may have been missed in our cleaning and clearing for Pesach – a tradition that has been set since Moses led the Jews out of Egypt thousands of years ago. An “ordinary” tradition on a somewhat “unordinary” night. We sang while we searched, we recited the blessings, we hugged on the couch – and then I cried.
I learned three years ago, you cannot live in your plans. You have to live in your “today”.
And today, despite it all, I am blessed.
This is dedicated to all those who are suffering from Corona, who are isolated from their families, all those who are dying alone and all those mourning alone. My heart breaks with you and my prayers are for you.
