Choice: How to benefit from the crisis

I now spend more time working from home and teaching online. The Internet has become the way to connect with the outside world. This week, as every week, I received the online newsletter of Chabad of Athens, written by my dear friend Rabbi Mendel Hendel and his wife, Nehama. The Chabad Center located in downtown Athens is a place where locals and tourists can find more choices for their Jewish needs. Today, having no other choice, they also do most of their work from a distance. 

Choice, by the way, was the central point of this week’s newsletter. It wrote: “Freedom? How can we speak about and celebrate freedom when we are confined in our houses due to the pandemic of COVID-19?… We can always learn from history. In the ghettos and the concentration camps, there were still people who stayed human, helped each other, shared a small piece of bread with someone else.

“‘How is it possible for people to retain their humanity under such horrifying circumstances?’ wondered Dr. Victor Frankel [a psychiatrist who grew up in Vienna and was deported to concentration camps]. There, he witnessed something which amazed him: how people under such inhumane conditions, were able to keep their humanity. It brought him to the following conclusion: ‘Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.’ We don’t always choose the circumstances and many times we wish things would be different, but we can always choose how to react.”

It is too early to evaluate the current crisis. Yet, it may be a good opportunity to review our choices up till now and even to consider the day after the crisis. 

Prior to the pandemic, in our regular routine, there was no threat upon us. With the exception, perhaps, of the frightening scenarios that scientists published every so often based on their observations and predictions on climate change. 

Despite the fact that this threat was real, back then, we chose as a global community, to ignore it. Instead we chose a path of excessive leisure, purposeless travel and consumption, a lifestyle beyond our limits and the limits of the Earth, and a constantly growing greed for more, faster and bigger. 

All this caused great distress to people and communities, and death and destruction to many living organisms. Entire ecosystems were endangered with extinction, as our habits polluted their habitats with chemicals, plastics, medicine and waste at unprecedented quantities.

We caused the change of their natural metabolism, we caused them to be born deformed, or caused their death as they ate our plastics and were exposed to our chemicals. We caused their suffocation as our pollution created conditions that consumed or blocked their oxygen. They lived under constant threat from our pesticides, our air, water and soil pollution, our sprinkling with aluminum particles and ever increasing creation of electromagnetic fields throughout their natural environment.

They were limited in their mobility, as our urban sprawl, our increasing construction, our roads and infrastructure projects, and even our private estates, encroached their living habitats. They were devastated by fires, as climate change changed rain patterns and higher temperatures made forests, their habitats, more vulnerable.

It was our choice to do so, because we felt that this improved our living standard and gave us a better lifestyle to share with others or continuously post online. We also forgot that by purchasing products and services from those who based their business on processes that caused discomfort, pollution or destruction, in effect we encouraged them to keep acting irresponsibly.

We chose to hang on to a fashion-fabricated and advertisement-promoted lifestyle, regardless of the harm it caused to other organisms. Some may claim they didn’t know.

It is very unlikely. The information was everywhere. Even by looking outside our window, we could recognize the changing weather patterns, the rising temperatures, the extreme weather phenomena, the air pollution and particles, the overflowing waste bins with single-use products or burning plastics.

A quick look inside our homes could also give us a clue: stuffed closets and basements, and overcrowded driveways or garages. Even at work we submitted to annual targets of overgrowing, overriding, overreaching, over-exploiting, or dominating, sometimes regardless of our values and beliefs.

Even in our personal lives, with so much advertisement and overstimulation, we lost control of our personal choices, our respect for our own living habitat, and sometimes even neglected ourselves. It has been taking place for quite a while, to the point that we forgot how it was supposed to be. Even worse, we also lacked the time on a daily basis to stop and reflect and make necessary adjustments.

This is where the COVID-19 crisis finds us as a global community. Without frequent travel, and confined indoors, we have more time to reflect. The situation, despite its negative effects on the economy, opens for us a window of opportunity to choose how to react.

I experience, for example, the social net that is being spread out in Jerusalem, to take care of elders, newcomers or people living alone. People volunteer to help others. I hear from friends and relatives, that despite the change of routine, the confinement, the financial distress and the fear for one’s health, there is a certain degree of appreciation for the free time offered to us.

The pace is slower, there is quality time with family and friends – mostly through online platforms, and time to communicate with our children, otherwise, busy with school, friends, extracurricular activity and their mobile phone. I hear people expressing a hope that going through this difficult situation, at least to learn something, and to come out better than where we started. A hope not to go back to business-as-usual, but to grasp the chance to change course, change habits, and professional choices. Perhaps stop serving a system that is outdated or unhealthy or unethical or harmful or unsustainable, and adopt a new course that aims for a more meaningful, more equitable, more renewable and more sustainable world.

The break that the pandemic has offered us, is an opportunity to read, to educate ourselves, to enrich our interest and widen our horizons. To make adjustments, and even to reinvent ourselves and our business. To attend online classes to serve our mind, or online meditation, exercising and yoga, to serve our body and spirit, and enrich ourselves from within. To look for peace inside instead of outside stimulation. This repose is a rare gift to choose to reflect on our past choices and make new choices for a better future.

I am closing with a blessing to all the sick for a full and speedy recovery. Also with gratitude for the medical teams who are dealing with the crisis on the front lines and for the many volunteers who are helping people in need.

I also close with a wish that this opportunity, disguised as a crisis, will make us stronger, wiser and more compassionate, to continue, after the crisis, to care for our own, while equally caring for all living creatures on the Earth – to whom we owe our well-being and survival as a species.