Will we actually miss the pandemic? Stephen Colbert’s late-night talk show returned before a live studio audience last week, 15 months after moving first to what looked like his basement and later to a closet-sized studio in Times Square.
I sort of liked the pandemic version of what he called “A Late Show,” whose only audience appeared to be his wife Evie and a camera operator. Somehow the laughter of just two people feels (to me, anyway, watching on YouTube) more genuine and well-earned than the guffaws and cheers of a live audience. The quarantine version of Colbert’s show felt warm and intimate. Like Evie, my wife was my only audience for the last year and a half, and happily we never got sick of each other, and if possible grew even closer. And when at times Colbert would look frustrated with the format it was just validation of what we were all feeling in our homes.
I wouldn’t have wished this awful plague on my worst enemy. The death toll was obscene, doubly so when you consider all the ways a competent government could have handled it from the start. For so many people – those raising school-age kids, caring for an elderly or disabled loved one, stuck in dangerous or abusive households – the pandemic was a nightmare.
But I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t learned or grown as the result of it. I will miss some of the claustrophobic feeling of the pandemic. The restrictions imposed false boundaries on my choices, social circles, leisure time and activities. Within them I was forced to improvise, adapt, change.
COVID restrictions reminded me of the artificial (and in my case voluntary) limitations that come with Jewish religious observance. As Rabbi Ruth H. Sohn once put it, “The laws of kashrut offer a Jewish spiritual discipline that is rooted in the concrete choices and details of daily life — to be practiced in an area that seems most ‘mundane.’” Keeping kosher, for example, is a day-long every day exercise in forced limitations: You can eat this but not that.
In his influential 2007 book “The Paradox of Choice,” psychologist Barry Schwartz described how an overabundance of choice is increasing our levels of anxiety and depression and feelings of social inadequacy. Ten years later, he suggested things are only getting worse: Social media has increased the average person’s fear that “[n]obody’s good enough and you’re always worried you’re missing out.”
The kosher laws create their own anxiety, but they also limit my choices in a good way. The boundaries in that sense are liberating – I stop wondering what I am missing out on and learn to appreciate what I can actually have.
Shabbat does this with time. On Friday nights I find myself entering a vestibule into a different dimension, shutting the door on the cares and shmutz of the week before, and hunkering within the day’s limitations until another door opens on Saturday night. Within what Heschel calls the “cathedral” of Shabbat I am forced to find, and appreciate, different ways to use my time.
Of course, Shabbat only lasts 25 hours. I wouldn’t want to live forever inside a cathedral, and like many I am relieved when it is over. The philosopher Patrick Levy compared the pandemic to insomnia: Like the sleepless, we were never sure when the torment would end. “We know we are powerless to hasten the end of our waiting but feel pressure to be productive,” he writes. “We should enjoy this extra time we have on our hands, either spending it with our loved ones or taking the chance to improve ourselves. Needless to say, for many such pressure is oppressive.”
A common critique of religious rituals of abnegation is that they are a retreat from the cares of the world – that we fetishize our self-denial while turning our backs on the pleasures, and challenges, of being fully human. I get that. In lockdown I was all about my own ego: my space, my time, my anxieties. My home became a fortress and my mask became my armor, not just keeping me inside but keeping the world out. To some degree I’ve lost the habit of going out into the world, and feel I could happily cocoon myself long after the pandemic is a memory.
I assume, however, that I will get used to the world very quickly, and I’ve already started: museum trips, restaurants, in-person Shabbat dinners. But I am willing to bet there will be literature of nostalgia for the lockdown, when the world was cleaved into categories of the sacred (or healthy) and profane (or dangerous). When the things we couldn’t do made us appreciate the things we could. When thrown back on our own devices (sometimes all too literally) we figured out new ways of being ourselves.
Et tu, Jon Stewart?
Speaking of Colbert, his first guest back in the Ed Sullivan Theater was Jon Stewart, who used the occasion to launch a weird and relentless attack on – wait for it – science.
For a few moments it was an inspired comic riff on those who would ignore the obvious – that is, how it remains a distinct possibility that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan, China biological laboratory and not in a local “wet” market. “The disease is the same name as the lab!” he repeatedly said (in fact, the lab is called the Wuhan Institute of Virology, although it does study coronavirus vaccines). He went on to note that scientific hubris leads to unintended consequences, like the atomic bomb.
The last words before the end of the world, said Stewart, will be a scientist saying, “It works!”
Admittedly, the mainstream was slow to accept the possibility that the virus originated in the lab. In large part that was because the theory was championed by Donald Trump and his supporters to deflect attention away from his administration’s response to the actual disease. Others too have noted the perils of ignoring politically inconvenient facts, on all sides.
If that was his point, okay. But facing his first live audience in over a year, Stewart decided that the most important thing he could do was attack science. It was a fully vaccinated audience, mind you, which wouldn’t have been able to fill the theater without amazing work by epidemiologists, virologists, geneticists and even glassmakers. Fox News has spent the better part of the pandemic attacking science and promoting conspiracy theories. Each day brings a new story of public health officials trying desperately to swat down unscientific rumors that are costing lives. Despite an essentially unanimous scientific consensus about global warming, the planet is burning even as we speak.
And now Jon Stewart attacks science?
I understand Stewart’s impulse to be contrarian – and even rile his old colleague Colbert, whose show has been a nightly, and sometimes smug, tirade against Trump for years now. Comedy is built on tension, and not comfortably shared bromides.
Throughout his career Stewart has tried to avoid political labels, saying his job is to expose foibles on all sides of the political debate.
But science? I look forward to his next bit, on how maybe, just maybe, those Jewish space lasers might be a thing.
A gripping read
Last week I wondered in a tweet how Israel’s new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, keeps his tiny kippah in place on his very bald head.
I tweeted, but my colleague Ben Sales actually found out! You must read his amazing story about the Tel Aviv bus driver whose invention helps Bennett keep his yarmulke from blowing off, and how once Bennett used chewing gum to – well, you have to read the story. It’s priceless and becomes a very smart primer on how the what you wear on your head coverings really matter in Israeli society. Photo, top: (Helena Jacoba/Flickr Commons) Thanks for reading. Reach me at editor@jewishweek.org. Follow me on Twitter, and don’t forget to forward this newsletter to your friends. |