“Roll call! Is everybody ready?” One by one, each of the six invited online guests responded with their tinny and delayed FaceTime voices in the affirmative, including the three of us who were actually present. “Action!” I shouted with the authority of a veteran Hollywood director.
We collectively lit the two tapered white Shabbat candles and raised our glasses of red wine to the gallery of miniaturized smiling faces surreally peering out from the iPhone that I had strategically placed on the dining table between the challah and the candles. We then recited the traditional Kiddush blessing – “Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, borei p’ri hagafen” in an overlapping, innovative and cacophonous mash-up of Hebrew and phoneticized English, especially as some of the participants weren’t even Jewish.
What we lacked in orthodoxy we more than made up for in enthusiasm to celebrate with our virtual family and friends the traditional end of one of the most untraditional weeks any of us had ever experienced. While the use of digital devices during any religious ceremony is generally considered a “shanda” – the Yiddish word for public shame or sin, I thought that in this instance God might forgive us.
After blessing the challah, we said a prayer for the many people around the world who were at that moment experiencing incalculable suffering and loss, while also expressing gratitude that we could share this joyous moment of blended familial love, health and happiness. And last of all, we gave a well-deserved communal shout out to Martina in appreciation of her perilous mission that morning, which had made this special evening possible. A miracle from heaven, you say? No, it was Cyber Shabbat during the Coronavirus crisis.
Even though Mayor Garcetti’s “shelter-in-place”/”social distancing” mandate to combat the community spread of the Coronavirus in Los Angeles precluded our customary “IRL” get together around the same table, I was determined that the show must go on. I arranged for all of us to virtually connect from our four respective residences, and simultaneously conduct the ceremony over FaceTime.
Earlier that Friday morning, I was prepared to put my life at risk when Martina, my fearless fiancé and domestic partner, insisted on going to our neighborhood grocery store in my place. Through her official N95 hospital face mask, which she had presciently saved from the 2009 flu pandemic, she grumbled, “because I’m younger than you and the more responsible one in the relationship, I am less likely to risk infection.” Although I agreed with her assessment, I felt a twinge of guilt while she yanked on her medical latex gloves, zipped up her protective plastic rain hoodie, and adjusted her insectoid ski goggles as if preparing for a dangerous extravehicular spacewalk on a forbidden planet. When she had completed this now-familiar sartorial ritual and presented herself to me as if for inspection, I informed her, “If I was a xenomorph in Alien, I would so want to hug your face.” Somehow she didn’t take it as a compliment.
Martina was leaving the self-quarantined safety of our four walls in Mar Vista to pick up a large sesame challah, which is a plaited loaf of leavened bread traditionally served to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath. It was Day Two of Mayor Garcetti’s Coronavirus-inspired order requiring the ten million people of Los Angeles to stay “safer-at-home” except for essential activities such as getting food or taking care of a loved one. In a sense, we were doing both. I was planning to serve the challah during our weekly Shabbat dinner with Martina, her sixteen-year-old son, my three 20-something boys, one of their girlfriends, my ex-wife, Shelli, and her fiancé. The dynamics of our blended family are complicated, but it works. What was even more complicated was wrangling the schedules, locations and contact info of all the participants, which rivaled the logistical challenges of producing a major motion picture.
I’m hardly religious. As a secular or cultural Jew, I read The New York Times and consume bagels and lox more regularly than I attend services at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, where my sons were Bar Mitzvahed. I celebrate my third-generation Eastern European Ashkenazi background and identity mainly to pass that heritage on to my children. While I grew up in the affluent Jewish New York suburb of Great Neck; was also Bar Mitzvahed; toiled as a waiter in a Borscht Belt resort; did the obligatory summer stint picking grapefruit on a Kibbutz in Israel; proudly sported my hippie “Jewfro” at Woodstock, and inherited a fair command of Yiddish from my immigrant grandparents, I now practice the Eastern yoga-inspired values of mindfulness, gratitude, and acceptance more than I do the more traditional moral teachings of the Torah and Talmud.
But my interest in holding a weekly Shabbat dinner came from Dr. Gilberg, my Beverly Hills shrink to the stars, whom I began visiting when I was an anxiety-ridden young executive at Columbia Pictures simultaneously overseeing the development of The Karate Kid, Out of Africa, and Ghostbusters. I was so overworked and stressed I nearly suggested having Mr. Miyagi teach Karen Blixen how to takedown the “Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!” After Shelli and I separated and were going through a mostly amicable divorce, we agreed to a joint custody arrangement for our young children. In hindsight, it was more than prophetic that the dysfunctional marital drama Kramer vs. Kramer opened during my first week at the studio. However, unlike Ted Kramer’s five-year-old son, my boys would shuttle back and forth between the Brentwood house, where we had both previously lived, and my newly purchased condo, in what was known as “Divorce Towers.”
This modernist high-rise in Santa Monica became the first residential stop for many newly separated and mostly depressed West Side fathers who wanted to remain close to their children. I was no exception, and often joined the crew of beleaguered dads anxiously waiting outside the lobby for their exhausted and overwhelmed ex’s to pull up and unload their SUVs full of screaming kids. ‘It’s your turn, sucker!’ However, my turn couldn’t come soon enough. Still feeling the pain of disconnection that comes with moving out of the house where every morning I ate breakfast with them and every night read bedtime stories to them, I was now single, lonely, and craved the company of my boys.
As Friday was the one “swing night” in which the kids could choose which parent they could stay with, I was looking for a way to convince them to spend the evening with me. Dr. Gilberg suggested that I begin the custom of holding a Friday night Shabbat dinner, which would not only feature a delicious home-cooked meal but also a celebration of the weekly “holiday” of Shabbat, including a dessert-worthy challah made with sweet raisins and honey. In other words, total kid bait.
According to Dr, Gilberg, as the boys grew older, became more independent, and began to make their own plans for a Friday night, they would still feel obligated to maintain the long-running tradition of “Shabbat dinner with Dad.” The strategy succeeded beyond my expectations. For the next eighteen years, regardless of wherever I or they lived, or whatever girlfriend I happened to be living with, or whomever one of the boys were dating, we made it a point to come together whenever possible for that hallowed tribal rite. It was this sacred and unbreakable bond that I was celebrating this Friday night more than I was any religious ritual.
As we sliced our respective challahs – one of the boys had to rip apart a piece of buttered whole wheat toast because of an unexpected Coranavirus challah shortage – we exchanged anecdotes about how each of us was coping with our self-imposed quarantine. All three kids talked about the challenges of virtually completing their last week at school before Spring Break; Shelli invited her familial “sister-wife,” Martina, for a virtual “quarantini;” and I performed for everyone “My Carona,” the viral parody of The Knack’s “My Sharona,” which I had begun substituting for the by now tiresome “Happy Birthday” sung during the mandated twenty-second hand-washing procedure.
While we all were thrilled with the novelty of celebrating Shabbat on FaceTime, I must confess that I found it to be one of those “so close, yet so far away” bittersweet experiences, like a long-distance relationship that is special and intimate but also frustrating because you can’t be physically present with the ones you most love. As the ceremony requires everyone present to touch the challah or to touch someone who is touching the challah when the prayer is sung, I felt only the absence of my children’s soft hands on my shoulders. For a dad who believes you can never give too many hugs, this cyber tradeoff was as challenging as a biblical sacrifice.
As I took that first bite into the challah’s warm golden crust, I wondered whether there is evidence that the ancient Hebrews, who had originated the Sabbath ceremony in 630 BCE, had prophesized that this long-lasting spiritual connection between a father and his three sons would prevail over a Biblical-style plague through the magical intervention of an Apple smartphone. If so, theological scholars have yet to reveal it. Namaste and Shabbat Shalom!
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