I, like many Americans in the Covid crisis, recently learned that I am essential.
An essential employee of the Jewish Community Center of Dallas, that is. This came as somewhat of a surprise to me. It’s not generally something a person considers, I suppose, and the grim reality of our current situation has put into ink something that previously had been, at most, a figment of a thought experiment.
There were a few days of pretend normalcy last week, where a skeleton staff of employees still roamed the suddenly much emptier halls. And then the “shelter in place” directive came, and now all that’s left in the building is my assisstant chef, our mashgicha (kashrut supervisor) and I, the JCC senior leadership, and a maintenance person or two.
I guess it should feel good, being essential. It means job security, and it means that I have something to do to feel useful and get out of the house, and thankfully my coworkers stuck at home are still employed by the J, which is more than many can say.
But something has felt off about it, which I hadn’t been able to put into words until my dad found this while on a quarantine-motivated cleaning spree:
It’s impossible to overstate how deeply impactful the JCC was to my childhood.
I did Pre-K there. I went to JCC day camp for 4 summers, and JCC sleep-away camp for a decade after that. After school care, musical theater productions, sports leagues. Book fest, Movie Fest, Macabia. Our synagogue needed a larger venue for high holiday services? We moved to the J and never looked back. Before I knew what the term “lay leadership” meant, a camp counselor had talked me into joining the “JCC Teen Leadership Council.” Heck, I’m pretty sure I had a birthday party or two at the J.
As I looked at this picture, and contemplated the lasting influence of my experiences, I couldn’t help but think of the hundreds of JCC employees who spent thousands of hours planning and running all of those programs. I’ve long thought about “The JCC” being an outsize influence on my life, but of course I am using “the JCC” as a stand-in for the incredible collection of people employed by the J who cared deeply about my community and worked hard every day to find ways to build and improve it.
And like that, my discomfort with the “essential” tag was crystallized: every single person I work with at the JCC is doing the deeply essential work of building and supporting our community, every single day. We had a staff meeting over video call this week, and it was spectacularly profound to hear the joy in each person’s voice as every department checked-in with the various ways they were supporting the community from afar. The only difference between what I do and what they are doing is that I can’t do my job from home. That’s different from being essential.
Sometimes, this week, I felt a bit overcome by the enormity of what is in front of us; the weeks on end of isolation, the pieces that will need to get picked up when we come to the end of this. The halls of the J are empty and dark and the world can feel just the same. And then, through the silence, I hear our J Camp Director, down the hall, singing “hineh mah tov” into a webcam, getting the families of our early childhood program ready for shabbat.
“Behold how good and how pleasing it is for a community to sit together in unity.”
It would be easy to let fear win, in a situation like this. To turn inwards, to shun community, to view others with suspicion and anger. Every day my colleagues do the essential work of finding ways to bring people together in this new reality. For that, I am eternally grateful, and more than willing to share my “essential” tag.