Pandemic Passover, Year Two

My interfaith family had a hybrid seder this year. We had screens connecting us across five states. My adult children, in masks, sat distanced from us at a long table on our front porch. My audio jack failed. Everyone was zooming in and out trying to read the text in screenshare. People kibbitzed about what I cut from the powerpoint Haggadah. It was imperfect in almost every way.

But also satisfying, and beautiful.

And I fervently hope we never have to do it this way again.

A year ago, when we were all just beginning to grapple with how to live in a pandemic, I wrote an essay about Passover in the form of a song from the Haggadah, the Dayenu. In Hebrew, Dayenu means “it would have been enough.” This central reading lists many of the elements in the Exodus story–fleeing slavery, wandering the desert, receiving the Torah–for which we are thankful. After each line, we say a hearty “Dayenu!” in unison.

Dayenu cultivates gratitude, reminding us of all we have to be thankful for, even after ten plagues, or a pandemic. So here we are, a year later, after so much loss, grief, illness, isolation, depression, stress, and anxiety. And yet, we are thankful. So, to mark this second pandemic Passover, I updated my personal Dayenu, my song of gratitude in this season:

For zooming in with Jewish and Muslim women in the UK planning to make charoset online together. Dayenu!

For zooming into a DC interfaith freedom seder with a rabbi, a priest, a minister, and gospel singers. Dayenu!

For the chocolate almond that appeared when I did not have an olive for the seder plate to symbolize peace in the Middle East. Dayenu!

For the apple that appeared when I did not have an orange for the seder plate to symbolize people of all genders and orientations. Dayenu!

For my vegan daughter who inspired me to replace the shank bone with a beet. Dayenu!

For the ability to facetime with my teenage niece while she made the toffee matzoh we make every year together. Dayenu!

For my network of neighborhood friends, delivering each other dill and horseradish to make sure everyone had what they needed for the seder. Dayenu!

For my family who zoomed in to our seder from three time zones, from Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California. Dayenu!

For the vaccination of both my adult children as essential workers. Dayenu!

For those who have worked this year to feed our community, teach our children, and keep us safe and healthy, in spite of great personal risk. Dayenu!

For Dr. Tony Fauci and all the scientists who have brought us to this season of vaccination. Dayenu!

For the election of a better President. Dayenu!

For reaching the point in history when we have a White House seder with a Vice President who has a Jewish and Christian and Hindu extended multiracial interfaith family. Dayenu!

For the giant pandemic puppy who provides great comfort in our isolation. Dayenu!

For our proximity to beaches, forests, creeks, and bays, providing a balm for our eyes and lungs and souls. Dayenu!

For our heightened awareness this year of the flowering quince, forsythia, daffodils, crocuses, and cherry blossoms in our yard. Dayenu!

For my husband, who still makes me laugh after a year of constant togetherness, and more than 40 years of partnership. Dayenu!

For reaching this season of hope, after surviving a pandemic year. Dayenu!

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). Follow her on twitter @susankatzmiller.

Marking One Year in the Pandemic

Hope Springs, 2021. Photo, Susan Katz Miller

In the last moment I remember from the beforetimes, I was sitting in our beautiful local art deco movie palace, one year ago this week. I was attending a fundraiser for the radio station that hosts a show I helped to create, Interfaith-Ish. The event featured a screening of a film about Fela, the iconic Nigerian musician, followed by cocktails and a DJ playing African music. I was anxious in the crowd, scanning my phone for covid-19 news updates. I knew this was a liminal moment. Everyone was on edge, whispering. No one was dancing, despite the great music.

I went home, and considered the emerging virus from the point of view of my understanding based on years as a science reporter for Newsweek and New Scientist. In those years, I interviewed Dr. Tony Fauci on a regular basis on the search for an HIV/AIDS vaccine, before he was a household name. In the intervening decades, I had often given a comic spin to the story of Dr. Fauci returning my call one night, after work hours, and how I had to interview him while simultaneously breastfeeding a fussy baby.

So exactly one year ago today, drawing on that background knowledge, I created a protocol for my household that included no visitors in my house, no restaurant meals, no eating or drinking in groups, no movies or concerts or weddings or funerals. Friends mocked me at first, but then, in time, most of them followed suit. The world closed in on us that week, and we have not yet emerged. My protocol remains in place.

Interfaith family communities, of course, like all communities in the US, have suffered this year. We have suffered deaths from covid, deaths without proper ritual and the ability to grieve together, disability from long-haul covid, widespread and deepening depression, the suicides of young people, the brutal isolation of the elderly, job loss, hunger, the collapse of businesses, and the exacerbation of systemic inequality in a time of resource shortage.

I have felt privileged this year, relatively safe in my lockdown, since I can write from home. The truth is that my most persistent suffering has been from boredom and frustration. But isolation takes a toll on everyone. For the first time in my life, I went through a year without seeing any of my three siblings. There was no Thanksgiving, Christmas, Passover, or Easter with any of my nieces or nephews. I did not get to attend my uncle’s funeral. I’m approaching my second covid birthday, a big one, and it will be restrained and constrained.

Yes, there have been silver linings, very pale silver linings, without much sparkle or shine. Interfaith families have found each other online, have been able to visit each other’s communities for the first time, sparking new ideas and new online groups. We have all learned some new skills for entertaining ourselves in isolation, new strategies for soothing anxiety, new appreciation for all the things we long to do, the people we long to see, when we finally reach the aftertimes.

All three of my younger siblings and both my young adult children have now been vaccinated, but not me. As a writer, I have been deemed the least essential member of my family. As the alpha, I find this comic, and I laugh a dark little laugh. Another humbling experience in this pandemic year. While I wait, I have gained weight. My greying hair curls long for the first time in decades. My pandemic puppy has grown up wild as a wolf, barely groomed, barely trained, suspicious of anyone who approaches. I am trying to stay still, stay safe, stay patient, and stay grounded enough to keep writing. I have no profound lessons to report. I am still here. Apparently, so are you. That is all.

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). Follow her on twitter @susankatzmiller.

Top Posts in 2020

My current jigsaw puzzle, also a mandala, also reminiscent of a covid sphere.

Does anyone else feel like these final days of 2020 are moving in slow motion?

We’re “on vacation” with nowhere to go, no one to see. The psychopathic demagogue in the White House is using every final moment of 2020 to wreak more havoc. The pandemic continues to roar through like a tidal wave, and lifeboat vaccines seem to sweep out of reach. Honestly, it is hard to focus on interfaith families (or anything). Though of course family, any family, every family, remains crucial in this time of unbearable stress and trauma.

So this was not a year for big accomplishments, unless you work in medicine or public health, or you are a teacher who managed to transition successfully to working online, or entirely outdoors. Myself, well, I sure did a lot of jigsaw puzzles–a “mindless pleasure” my family likes to indulge on vacation together, but something I had never let myself do alone at home before. Finding a missing piece, fitting the pieces together, is a balm now, and a meditative practice, and I see no reason to deny myself the hours of “unproductive” puzzling.

But I also feel I owe it to my readers to look back on this year as it ends, and think about how interfaith families are weathering this moment in history, a topic I wrote about here, and then here and here and here. What else? I gave some keynotes and talks that were supposed to be in person, on zoom instead–others got postponed.

Back in the spring, the facebook group I founded, the Network of Interfaith Family Groups (NIFG), got excited about meeting up on zoom, for awhile, until we all got zoomed out. And I helped some of those families connect to online worship and interfaith religious education for kids, through IFFP in DC, the Brookville Multifaith Campus, and the Family School in Chicago. So all of that was satisfying.

Especially, to be perfectly honest, the jigsaw puzzles!

After blogging for more than a decade, I took some months off, but then found a lot of energy for writing short reports and essays in the final weeks of the year. Since it launched in 2009, this blog has been visited by over 195,000 people, with over 366,000 views, and 382 essays on interfaith families.

My top posts in 2020 had nothing to do with the pandemic, and may surprise you:

1. The Interfaith Family of Kamala Harris. This was the feel-good story we all needed in 2020. An interfaith kid raised with both Christian and Hindu traditions grows up and marries a Jewish man, and goes to the White House! Surely this example of what I call an interfaith trifecta family will help to normalize the beauty of our complex, rich, multireligious heritages and extended families, going forward. While many in the Jewish (and South Asian) press wrote about Harris’s interfaith family from monofaith perspectives, this post got a lot of hits because I pointed out that we–those of us who grew up in interfaith families–are a demographic force to be reckoned with, and we are showing up in leadership positions, even at the very top now.
2. Ten Reasons to Teach Interfaith Children Both Religions. This is exactly what Kamala Harris’s mother did! I love that this little essay, written ten years ago now in 2010, continued to hold down the #2 spot for popularity on my blog ten years later in 2020. It lays out the argument in my first book for giving interfaith kids an interfaith education, in a condensed list of ten points. As a growing segment of the population is celebrating more than one religion, this post is only becoming more relevant.
3. Interfaith Marriage and the Rise of the Religious “Nones.” This is another older post (from 2012) that is only becoming more and more relevant with time. The religious “nones” (atheists, agnostics, the spiritual but not religious or SBNRs, anyone who doesn’t affiliate with a single religious identity anymore) continue to grow. Families spanning Christians and “nones” are the largest segment of interfaith families in the US, and the fastest-growing. Recently, I reviewed a new memoir, Blessed Are the Nones, that is a dispatch from this world. This is a topic I will return to in 2021, and beyond. So, onward through the unknown.

As pandemic fatigue sets in, keep your interfaith family safe–and that means keep everyone safe, because as I like to point out, we’re all interfaith families now. Keep your mask on outside your house. Stay inside, or outside in the wild, if you have that privilege. Me, I am trying to get beyond jigsaw puzzles, to some creative new endeavors. And that may or may not happen in 2021. And that’s okay.

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). Follow her on Twitter @susankatzmiller.

A Silver Lining in Zoom Community

My grandfather Edward David Katz (right) and his twin, Edna.

My father’s grandmother lost both parents in a yellow fever epidemic. My father’s father lost his twin in the flu pandemic of 1918, and later spent decades in a wheelchair. My father was a child of the Great Depression, and a World War II veteran. And, despite all this, or because of it, he was a stubborn optimist. On the piano, he loved to play “Look for the Silver Lining,” “Accentuate the Positive,” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” I miss the comfort and counsel of my parents as we go through this traumatic historical period. In their memory, I try to channel the blessing of optimism.

And so it was that I have been looking for silver linings, and I found one, on zoom.

Five years ago, I created a facebook group to bring together “doing both” interfaith families of any two (or more) religions, from across the country (and the globe). For five years, this Network of Interfaith Family Groups (NIFG) has been a place to share ideas and resources and support, especially for families who feel isolated, in geographic areas where they don’t know many (or any) other interfaith families doing both, or don’t have the support of clergy.

With the start of the pandemic, we began to meet every week on zoom. Gathering online, with our partners, children, and pets wandering through, has been a revelation. From Iowa and North Carolina and Tennessee, from Boston and Rochester and Pittsburgh, we now get to tell our stories, and brainstorm together. Why didn’t we think of doing this sooner?

Our gatherings are rich with new ideas. A teen interfaith kid meet-up? A big sibling program for interfaith kids? A family interfaith summer camp? And we get a chance to celebrate all of the many ways to give interfaith kids interfaith education, whether it is in one of the “big three” interfaith family communities (DC, NY, Chicago), or in a three-room schoolhouse like the one in Philadelphia, or a one-room-schoolhouse like the one in Ames, Iowa. And we share ideas with the many parents who are looking for support in homeschooling interfaith education for their kids in an era when homeschooling is, well, universal.

Discovering this new community, one that existed but did not come together with sound and moving pictures until now, has been a rare bright spot for me in these dark times. Like most of you, I have now lost friends to the virus, and when we finally reach that sunny side of the street, a whole string of delayed funerals, of family and friends, await us. With the blues on parade, community has never meant more to me, though we must work harder to find and create it. We persist, in that stubborn belief that the sun will come shining through.

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). Follow her on twitter @susankatzmiller.

New Video! May This Hamsa Protect Us All

After weeks confined at home, I felt a brief surge of creativity, and decided to make a speed coloring video. I had created the coloring pages a year ago to celebrate the publication of The Interfaith Family Journal. But I had never made time to actually color the pages myself. I found it did create peace and joy to color the detailed drawing of a hamsa. Speeding up the video means you can watch me color the whole page in less than 15 minutes, and I found watching the page fill up with color is indeed mesmerizing.

I commissioned the hamsa coloring page from a local artist friend, along with two other drawings. I encourage you to download the coloring pages for free on my website, and color along with the video. Both adults and kids seem to be enjoying coloring while , along with baking, doing jigsaw puzzles, reading, singing with family, and making videos!

While researching coloring videos, I discovered that some people watch coloring videos as a way to reduce stress, create calm, and even induce sleep, whether or not they enjoy coloring themselves. My musician son, 23, recorded an original soundtrack for the video on guitar, with a peaceful vibe. I hope it will bring you moments of pleasure.

For my coloring pages, I chose three images. Each image (a nature scene, a mandala, and the hamsa) resonates with more than one religion or worldview. The hamsa, an image of a hand or open palm, originated in ancient Mesopotamia and Carthage. It was retained as a symbol of protection throughout the Middle East, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The hamsa goes by many names, including the Hand of Fatima (Islam), the Hand of Mary (Christianity), the Hand of Miriam (Judaism), and the Hand of the Goddess. For my hamsa coloring page, I asked artist Emily Ettlinger to incorporate Islamic tile designs, and the pomegranate, a sacred symbol in Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.

If there was ever a moment when we needed the protection of a Mesopotamian goddess, this would be that moment. So if you are searching for ways to engage your kids at home, or to calm your own spirit in these difficult times, take a look at the new video. And then I hope you will be inspired to print out the coloring page and give it a try. Choose your own color scheme, and post the result as a comment on my facebook page. Share the beauty! And stay home. And stay well.

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). Follow her on twitter @susankatzmiller.

A Steep Mountain: Interfaith Life in a Pandemic

In my Easter bonnet. On mute.

We made it through Holy Week and Passover. Dayenu.

Dayenu is everyone’s favorite song at the Seder. It means, “it would have been enough.” We use it to express gratitude. Even in this harrowing time, we need gratitude. (We also need big helpings of courage, and righteous anger, and passion for social justice, all themes of the seder).

Since I last posted here, the pandemic has gotten very close and real. I know people who have died, are sick, were separated from dying loved ones, have not been able to mourn these losses with traditional ritual.

We are locked down. We are masked. We are anxious, depressed, at times terrified.

Pot by Martha Legg Katz. Photo by Aimee Miller

Still, I have the privilege of being able to feel gratitude:

For the cherry blossoms and daffodils. Dayenu.

For the mourning doves nesting on our front porch in a ceramic pot my mother made. Dayenu.

For the sweet antics of the rescue puppy we adopted just before the pandemic hit DC. Dayenu.

For my years spent in Brazil cultivating a love for rice and beans, which help me live from my pantry now. Dayenu.

For my sister who runs a homeless healthcare clinic in New York City, and all the other workers risking themselves to try to save others. Dayenu.

And for Tony Fauci, that brilliant mensch, whom I interviewed many times while covering the HIV/AIDS epidemic during my years as a science reporter. Dayenu.

And, now more than ever, I feel deep gratitude for my interfaith families community. Just as Holy Week and Passover and the Sikh holiday of Vaisakhi and Ramadan were approaching, we were forced to scramble to make the transition to online religious and spiritual gatherings. Clergy now have to be tech wizards, innovating to conjure up the sounds and smells and tastes of these holidays, while attempting to maintain a sense of community for people in tiny pixellated squares. (Teachers, including my daughter, are faced with the same awesome task and steep learning curve right now).

2020 seder plate with some pandemic substitutions

One silver lining of our abrupt and forced transition to online religious and spiritual community, is that anyone with a computer or smartphone and the link can join in. As someone who loves ritual, I was able to zoom into many different communities in the past week, experiencing different seders, and different Holy Week services. At each of those celebrations, we were joined by people from across the country and the globe for the first time. Dayenu. And I had these diverse Jewish and Christian experiences, without having to drive to the homes of relatives in multiple states (as much as I fervently wish I could do that right now).

Historically, I have not always found Easter and Holy Week comfortable, as a Jew. More like, complicated. But once again this year, celebrating with the Interfaith Families Project of Greater Washington DC, in a service created by and for interfaith families, felt glorious. I could relax the part of my brain on alert for supersessionist ideas or language. Instead, the beauty of Easter’s metaphor, of renewal, of resurrection, shone through in the time of the pandemic, with over 100 families zooming in. In our community, Easter traditions include singing Morning Has Broken (with music by a Christian who became a Muslim), and Lord of the Dance (a Christian song inspired in part by a Hindu deity), as well as more traditional Easter hymns.

Among academics of religion today, the trend has been to repudiate the idea–the metaphor–that all religions are different paths up the same mountain. Instead, the dominant paradigm now is that each religion is a separate mountain, with different goals. I am glad I am not trying to earn tenure right now, because every time I experience interfaith community, I disagree with my heart and soul. I feel we share the mountain, just as we share the globe.

The mountain is the human condition. And on this shared mountain, the slope feels particularly steep right now. How do we persevere through pandemics and plagues? How do we cultivate community and compassion? Each religion and culture develops different strategies, different rituals, different liturgies. (For those in academia, yes, I am forever #TeamHustonSmith, #TeamKarenArmstrong. Apologies to friends on #TeamStephenProthero). No one said all religions are the same–or anyways not Huston Smith, not Karen Armstrong, and not me. If they were all the same, why would I need a life enriched by both religions in my heritage, the sibling religions of Judaism and Christianity?

Both Passover and Easter include the egg as a symbol. The mourning dove lays exactly two eggs. On my front porch, which represents the edge of the permissible world for us right now in lockdown, those eggs are due to hatch any day. Mourning seems appropriate in a pandemic. And doves feel like a hopeful sign, as they were for Noah. The doves (the male and female take turns on the nest) are hunkered down. They have adapted to us walking inches from their home, and even to the bark of our untamed puppy. When they hatch, I will feel another small moment of Dayenu.

It will have to be enough.

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). Follow her on twitter @susankatzmiller.