Calamity can lead to clarity. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half of Americans who attend religious services at least once a month report that the coronavirus pandemic has bolstered their faith. In May, President Trump encouraged houses of worship to reopen. (He was miffed that governors seemed to be giving preferential treatment to “liquor stores and abortion clinics.”) But the setting—indoors, lots of singing—presents a challenge. Clergy are left to minimize the risks. At the Village Temple, on Twelfth Street, the doors remain, for the most part, closed. Its new rabbi, Diana Fersko, must lead the congregants, remotely, through catastrophe, and she must also figure out how to meet them. (Like medical residents, new rabbis start work on July 1st.) In her first sermon, delivered over Zoom, Fersko recited some lines from the Torah about God seeing Adam in the Garden of Eden and concluding, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
“An emotional switch went off, and I knew I needed to be aggressive,” Fersko said. She conceived of a neighborhood amble, the Shabbat Walk, with stops on stoops and in lobbies, to get to know her flock. On a recent Saturday, Fersko, wearing a tallis and a leopard-print mask, hit the streets. She squinted at a list of addresses. “There’s a temple member who was actually born during the Spanish flu of 1918. Can you imagine? Kind woman and a great Jew.” On lower Fifth Avenue, Mimi Abrams stepped out from under an awning and waved. “Our first stop,” Fersko said.
“I wish I could give you a hug,” Abrams said. “Your last two sermons have blown us away.”
“It’s tough on Zoom,” Fersko said. “Normally, in a room, you feel the vibe.” Abrams brought her hands up to either side of her mask and mimed a smile. “Can we take a selfie together?” she asked.
A few blocks south, Fersko counselled a congregant who had so far resisted Zoom services. Jerry Arbittier, who had neatly parted gray hair, sat in an armchair in his lobby. His family has belonged to the temple since 1964, but for a brief interlude with a charismatic rabbi uptown. “I go to services to relax, to get away,” he said. “It’s like a meditation. Sitting in front of a computer screen, when I’ve already been in front of one all day, doesn’t really do it.”
Fersko asked whether he’d attend a service en plein air. “Maybe,” he said. She eyed a leafy atrium through the lobby. Later, on the street: “Nice outdoor space. I have to wonder, is that the scene of a future minyan?” As she headed west, a woman with a couple of shopping bags sized her up: “Shabbat shalom!”
“Good Shabbos!” Fersko replied. “It’s so delightful to see people out and about, but it also drives home the sadness.” Many congregants have lost loved ones. “As a rabbi, I’m around a lot of illness and death,” Fersko said.
As she made her way into Chelsea, the tallis came off. “I’m shvitzing,” she said. Across the street, a woman wearing a subway-map-patterned mask beckoned. “O.K., we’re jaywalking.”
Emily Hacker and Anne Keating stood under a tree. They had spent the bulk of lockdown with their daughter, Olivia, who recently returned to her home in Philadelphia. “She took the Amtrak,” Hacker said. “It worried me. She texted, ‘I wiped the seat, I washed my hands.’ But still . . .”
“We’d love for you to meet her on FaceTime,” Keating said. Hacker held up her cell phone to Fersko.
At her last stop, Fersko and a family of five fanned out in a parking space. The kids’ school years had been cut short in the spring. The two eldest, Rachel and Marc, are stage managers in the technical-theatre program at LaGuardia High School. “We were actually in rehearsal when the order came down to close theatres seating more than five hundred,” Rachel said. “So that was super sad.”
It began to rain, and the group shuffled into their building. The kids’ mother gestured at the lobby’s seating area, which had been sealed off with caution tape, like a crime scene. “We have a lot of people who would come down and spend the whole day sitting and socializing,” she said. Fersko nodded. For now, they stood. ♦
