Marcia Caller Jaffe’s 2021 Rosh Hashanah Message

Déjà vu All Over Again

Yogi Berra said it, and we are living it. I have read and written ad nauseum about how we, as individuals, and as a society will be forever altered by COVID-19 and the events of the past two years. Most of us believed that High Holy Days 2021 would usher in the return to normalcy heading forward, as the streams of Tashlich carry away breadcrumbs to make room for our fresh start. But no so fast in moving forward. I’m now planning to get the third booster shot and sewing pantyhose strips into new masks to be even more impossibly impassable.

Going forward, I have been humbled by this experience in expectations and so many things taken for granted. My car broke down in the rain no less, while I called the first dealership who said, “Don’t come here. We are backed up for weeks.” Another said, “We don’t have any loaner cars.” Has COVID-19 affected our necessity for car repair? There was a sign at Chipotle: “We are out of beans, salad dressing, grilled vegetables.” COVID-19 delays transportation routes? Not a biggie, what’s next?

What the High Holidays do is give us hope in rebooting, counting on the calendar, processing the moon and stars, grateful to wake up vertically aligned to see the sunrise. A broken car, no grilled veggies, don’t amount to a hill of beans. Going forward, from Yogi Berra to Julio Iglesias’ emotive song, “How Fragile We Are,” I will triple-mask, revaccinate, and stand on my head in the canned food aisle at Publix if it will help eradicate these variants or convince “knuckleheads” (as labeled by New Jersey Governor Murphy) to get vaccinated.

Marcia Caller Jaffe is a regular contributor to the AJT.