Two years and three months later, we now know two things. Covid is not going away any time soon. There will be new variants and new cases. And we have to get back to life. There is a short and haunting passage from the tractate Berakhot 3A that connects deeply with our reality.

Rabbi Yose (from the Maxwell House Haggadah) is in Jerusalem, after the Temple was destroyed. God’s house is ruined. The people are exiled. The community that was is no more. He is there apparently alone, and he goes to the Temple ruins to pray. Elijah (he did not die in the Bible, but went to heaven in a fiery chariot, leaving him free to come and help the vulnerable in the world) pays Rabbi Yose a visit in the ruins. Please read this brief story  ahead of our class on Shabbat with an eye towards four questions.

1. The passage imagines how God must feel in this new, changed, sad world—what Abraham Joshua Heschel would call the divine pathos. God has an inner life. God has feelings. We see God roaring like a lion, cooing like a dove, and shaking his head like a resigned parent. What is the Talmud trying to say here, and how, if at all, does it connect with us?

2. Elijah and Rabbi Yose regard one another with extreme courtesy. There is a lot of “my teacher,” “my teacher and master,” “my son.” What is the point of this extreme courtesy, and what does it teach us?

3. What drives Rabbi Yose to pray in a ruined Temple?

4. What are Elijah’s concerns? After all, he comes down to earth specifically because he does not love the rabbi praying in the ruins. What does the Rabbi learn from the prophet’s concerns, and what do we learn?

Like the rest of the world, Temple Emanuel has to reimagine life in this new, hard, uncertain age. What do we learn from a rabbi and a prophet conversing in the ruins of the Temple in the holy city of Jerusalem?