Purim

[liv]

Purim in the UK in 2020 was a superspreader event. The festival occurred just before official lockdown – remember that weird time in early March when Johnson was trying to face down the pandemic by sheer bluster? More than half the deaths recorded in the Jewish community before Omicron were in that first month, so my best estimate is that the festival killed 500 people, mostly elderly. Yes, the whole country had a lot of deaths in that first wave, but nothing like the majority; most non-Jews didn't have huge cross-generational parties the week that Covid started seriously spreading in the community while the government stalled on protective measures.

I've had to hold that bitter knowledge in my heart ever since, every time I've helped plan community events. We can't cease communal religious life altogether, and broadly I think that we shouldn't now that most are vaccinated. But the consequences of a wrong judgement call are still always looming. Back in 2020, my own community spontaneously cancelled Purim, not waiting for a legal ban on gathering, based on the judgement of the leaders at the time. And indeed, so far we have had the good fortune of not losing one single member of the community to Covid, across the whole pandemic. Some people have got pretty sick, though, and we can't be sure they didn't catch it in shul.

This year the decision was to hold a "normal" Purim celebration. That is, pre-pandemic normal, with no mitigations in place. About a hundred people in a relatively small indoor space together for 4 hours, with food and dancing and singing. Maybe I should have opposed it, but we're generally running all communal events of all sizes and risk profiles without taking Covid levels into account, so I strongly doubt my speaking out would have had any effect. What I did do was insist that we streamed the actual Megillah reading over Zoom, meaning that people who didn't want that level of exposure could at least participate. The notion that it wouldn't really have been possible to have the meal and dancing hybrid is not incorrect, so that was the best compromise I could suggest.

And possibly I should have declined to take part personally. I'm still second-guessing my decision to accept the risk, but I did have a good time and so far I'm still negative. Partly I would have been letting people down if I didn't, we had decided to have Purim run straight on after cheder [Sunday school] to make it easier for children and parents to attend, so I had to be there anyway to teach cheder. Plus I was asked to read Ch 9, generally reckoned to be the most difficult chapter, and I could have said, sorry, too plague, but I didn't. And then partly, my OSOs were all enthusiastic about the event, and I generally respect their risk decisions as well as not wanting to deprive them when it's so lovely for my people to celebrate my festivals with me. The main sanctuary / prayer space is reasonably well ventilated, the community room where we had the food is ok as long as you open the big French windows; I don't know if either of those is enough with such a big crowd, but it's better than nothing.

And then there's the issue of moving the day to the weekend. We generally don't do that, in my Reform denomination, we celebrate festivals on the day they actually occur, so a lot of people were really grumpy about it. OTOH apparently there's Mishnaic precedent for moving Purim to 'gathering days', roughly equivalent to weekends. Anyway. I had my bar mitzvah class act out scenes from the Purim story in very basic Hebrew, and then it turned out that they spent the second lesson making hamentashen and not in my class at all (which is fine but I'd have liked to be told in advance that I wasn't expected to teach the second lesson). Then we read the Megillah. We had a really good crowd, lots of people in costume and not just the children. Because it was a couple of days after (the weird English version of) World Book Day, lots of people had exciting hand-made or otherwise original costumes rather than shop-bought superhero or princess outfits. And most of the cheder kids did in fact stay on, which had been the main aim. Partners' youngest, who is 2 and not Jewish, absolutely loved the reading and wanted more when it was done, which is pretty good going, listening to ten chapters of Hebrew!

We had good food and the children enjoyed the opportunity to slink off to parts of the building away from the adults. The hamentashen contest was won by someone in the conversion class who had never tasted, let alone made, hamentashen before this year. We did a bunch of folk dancing, accompanied by a band that mixed vaguely klezmer-ish with vaguely British music and called dances. Some young adults ran an amazingly well organized ballot for voting for the best costume. hatam_soferet's 5yo won with a just brilliant Rainbow Fish costume that J had made for World Book Day; she even had a bag of shiny scales to distribute. And OSOs' 11yo was commended for his Stormtrooper costume. cjwatson was the Tiger who came to Tea, with G as an absolutely perfect Sophie. 14yo did an amazing handmade cosplay as Himiko Toga from My Hero Academia; I think the main reason she didn't pick up many votes was because not enough people are familiar with the canon. Following ghoti_mhic_uait's very good suggestion, I went as Phantom of the Opera, borrowing jack's purple tailcoat which he got from wildeabandon, and a proper half-mask from the internet. I am never very convincing in masc drag but I did find that the young Queer set gravitated to me a bit.

It was really exactly as Purim should be, except that Purim isn't supposed to put people at risk of infectious disease :-/

In fact I couldn't really have done Purim on its proper day, because I've been helping to run a major, in person course at work all week, basically teaching 8:30 am to 6:30 pm, and coming straight home to grab a very quick dinner and then crash into bed. I did have the option of staying on campus, and work would have provided breakfast and dinner to avoid three hours a day of commuting on top of 10 hours a day of teaching, but I opted against that, on the grounds that I'm trying to avoid large communal meals. Which probably didn't really make sense, as the risk of taking the bus back and forth is pretty similar to the risk of eating in the conference centre restaurant (though I wear a mask on the bus and obviously couldn't do that at dinner), and anyway I was in the course all day so coming home at night likely didn't really help me.

The last iteration of this course was just after the High Holy Days when I caught Covid, but was clear in time for the course. This time it was straight after Purim, so we'll see. We also had a bit of a cold snap (the tail end of the snowpocalypse from north America I think), so I didn't do very well at keeping windows open or taking my food outside.

I did wear a masc outfit for Tuesday, including a really nice suit jacket, but people these days are too polite to comment on a departure from my standard gender presentation, so it went unremarked.

I'm intending to do "normal" Pesach too, a large crowd at my parents', a communal Seder for one of the communities I'm working for, which will involve travel, so the risks of that will presumably outweigh the advantage that the actual gathering is likely to be much smaller than the community Seder my home community is planning. The whole landscape is totally different from 2020 for multiple reasons. And however much I could wish not to be trying to do these big, food-based indoor gatherings with no mitigations as the second wave of the year builds up, that's not really an option. I can either not celebrate festivals with the community in person, or celebrate them during high Covid levels, those are the choices. I can do my job with its attendant Covid risk, or not do it. But it didn't have to be like this, and although I'm enjoying some of the fun faux-normal things I've been doing, I am really angry about it.

Comments

[redbird]

it didn't have to be like this

You're right, it didn't.

[karen2205]

*nods* - by now, with the right political will, every public building could have good enough ventilation / air filtration to prevent most Covid spreading. It didn't have to be like this and it also doesn't have to continue like this.

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, the "it didn't have to be like this" really gets to me. I think it's great that you're advocating for at least some participation options for people who don't want to risk it in person, at least.

[fyreharper]

“I can either not celebrate festivals with the community in person, or celebrate them during high Covid levels, those are the choices.”

I am having this dilemma currently with a dance camp next month that has been a very my-community-annual-celebration for the last nearly-decade (well - that’s when I joined at least, it’s been going on longer). Its covid safety precautions do at least still exist at all, this year! but they’re looser than I’m happy about, and I’m pretty sure I’m going anyway (because the alternative is to Not, probably Ever Again), and I am angry that these are the choices I am left with. It’s hard. Glad you had a good celebration, wishing you (us) all luck with the continued getting-away-with-it, and thanks for pushing to keeping some amount of window open for not-in-person participation for other folks.

[ewt]

I'm sorry, it's really horrible to be in this position. "It didn't have to be like this" is exactly my frustration.

[andrewducker]

I'm sorry. I wish that we'd handled all of this better at the very start.

[ewt]

Even if we had good ventilation and filtration in,say,schools, hospitals, and certain high-density workplaces, community gatherings in buildings (where it's sometimes more difficult to install such measures) would be safer than they are now.

I should probably focus a bit more on advocacy and a bit less on keeping myself and my immediate household safe, but... well, nobody else is going to do the latter for me.

I keep wondering if there are legal repercussions to things like workplace air not being sufficiently safe, and I keep wondering why I don't see anything from unions on making workplaces safer. I suppose it's partly because the narrative was very much "let's all get vaccinated and then get back to normal" and it's been so hard for some people, for so long, that they don't want to think about further mitigations because that means thinking about continued risk.

I am certain that it's possible to make many situations safer, but in terms of political will I really don't know how to get there from here.

[sfred]

*nods*

[silveradept]

That is very much a mood, that it could have been done better, that it doesn't have to be this way, and the choices are now about how much risk you are willing to take to be social, rather than knowing that there's enough mitigation infrastructurally that must people will be okay in most situations.