What else is left to say?

What else is left to say.

This is not the way we thought 2020 would pan out. Thousands of words have poured from your keyboard but we are still none the wiser. We are speechless, dumbfounded, mortified, devastated, totally astonished, crestfallen over and over again, convinced that somebody will just nudge us in the ribs and just tell us that it can't continue like this, that this should have been over by now and yet how misjudged were we understandably so.

Last night Jewish families all across Britain and all over the world were reduced to the very topical Zoom party, the very latest in modern technology and what can only be described as a glorified webcam facility where for those who have now been prevented from engaging in verbal interaction, could only communicate with each other via cyberspace. It was an interesting evening if only because this was our first Pesach (Passover) where none of us could sit next to each other at a table and talk to each other in close proximity.

For the first time in the history of Pesach the families of the world had to content with virtual reality seder services where parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, brothers in law and sister in laws, cousins, uncles and aunts would now find themselves in solitary confinement, speaking across the ether and cut off from all contact with their loved ones. At the moment the whole of the world feels so grief stricken that it may seem as though we may never feel like our old selves again. But we will of that you can be sure.

The whole momentum of our daily lives has been punctured and deflated, cut off in its prime, lifestyles and everyday functions completely jolted and switched off by infinitely more important priorities. But last night we had to look at our families in four boxes of high tech internet wizardry. Of course it was good to see familiar faces and, in fact, a positive joy but it simply felt unreal and cosmetic, artificial and contrived. We could hear and see each other but real human relationships had been denied. It was almost as if we were being forced to look at each other through a series of mirrors, kaleidoscopic images if you like. It was, sadly, not the same.

And yet the service was conducted in exemplary style and we were all allowed to indulge in just a couple of innocent hours of fun, family jollity and a multitude of laughs. The prayers, songs and blessings were immaculately observed, wine drunk, Elijah summoned, Miriam summoned, matzos gleefully devoured, soup sipped contentedly and lamb accompanied by potatoes and vegetables. Oh it felt so good and how good it was.

In a sense of course the very concepts of detachment, self isolation, apartness, remoteness may ironically have brought us much closer than we might have thought. Besides, we still have our immediate family to keep us company and we can still read, watch the TV and express our innermost feelings via a computer. The world has not ended and that has to be emphasised repeatedly. Of course solitude and the act of solitariness can be distressingly upsetting but perhaps we'll learn to live our lives in a way that somehow demands improvisation and adaptability.

Still, the fact remains that there are so many jigsaw puzzles you can complete even if there are 5,000 pieces to find. There are of course so many crosswords to mentally occupy our minds, so many pullovers to knit, music to listen to over and over again, miles to run in parks, tables or chairs to repair, decorating, painting and gardening to get round to doing. We are naturally creatures of habit but when that habit begins to run its course we are then left with something else to do which we hadn't quite thought of.

And therein lies in the problem. If we do go out anywhere we are made to feel extremely guilty and if we don't go out we feel as though the world has escaped from us. We are now in a state of captivity, struggling to find things to do on another stunningly warm spring day. But you've got to get out because eventually not only will our souls feel imprisoned but also our minds. We are not being held to hostage as such because that would imply that somebody is holding us to ransom. We are though bound by circumstances that have to be tolerated because this is indeed real life and not some cheap Hollywood movie although nobody would dare think of some sick and tasteless cinematic glorification of this dreadful disease. We love the Americans and besides this is global and we're all in this together.

There is now a very real sense of resignation, a genuine acceptance of the status quo, an almost quiet seclusion from the outside world which can be comforting but ever so slightly unnerving. Of course we can console ourselves with the knowledge that our family will always be there for us, our loving and supportive network, our confidants to talk to at all times. But then a yearning for the familiar and the traditional kicks in, fuelled by the necessity to just to carry out the ordinary tasks that we might have taken for granted.

The ghost town mentality though is still with us, the oasis is still in need of some kind of water and sustenance, refreshment and re- invigoration. But maybe this is the time to take stock of ourselves as human beings, to tweak things, make new re-adjustments, homegrown innovations. Maybe we should all just slow down, take life not quite so seriously as we are sometimes wont to do. Perhaps just perhaps life had become too far hectic, frantic and frenetic, a pressure cooker that needed to let off some steam, fraught with both tension and anxiety, weighed down by intensity and seriousness.

Of course there are the everyday bills that have to be paid, children to be nurtured and brought up, domestic duties that had to be attended to. But hold on when was the last time we thought we just wanted to stand back from the mad maelstrom, the ruinous intrusion of forces that just overwhelmed us when all we just want to do is sit down, think again and then look at our lives with much more objectivity rather than take sides and then be drawn into unnecessary arguments.

In years to come psychologists and anthropologists may come to view 2020 with the same kind of fascination as any other. But this time the year 2020 has challenged us to the utmost extreme, setting down new parameters and boundaries and quite possibly creating pyschological templates that would never have been thought of in any other year. There has been no rationale for the coronavirus because we weren't ready for this. So the uniqueness and bizarreness has hit us between the eyes and some of us can barely compute or register recent events.

Now of course we have become much more community minded, even more charitable than ever before and the human condition is beginning to show a much more favourable side to its personality. We now think nothing of doing the shopping for our elderly neighbours, caring wonderfully for the infirm or sick and then going beyond the call of duty.

The truth though of course is that there are immensely daunting obstacles in front of us that may take an age to overcome. There are different stages and phases in our lives that we never thought would make their presence felt. Still we are told to stay at home which now begins to smack of an imminent nuclear warfare but then we look at the masks outside our local chemists and supermarkets and then rub our eyes once again. Never mind folks Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister is out of intensive care and of course that has to be good news.