Sanitizer & Sanity | Coronavirus Blog Post XV Cats on Camera (A mini-post)

A very short post, to honor my daily rhythm. I’ll return with a full-length reflective piece tomorrow.

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On Friday night, in the middle of a pre-Shabbat call with the community, our family cat, Oscar, leapt into my lap. He joined on screen for a short while before departing and then nudging the door open and escaping the program early. The right side of my Zoom window flashed as the private chat window lit up. One of my congregants was writing to me: his preschool-aged daughter wanted to know, who was that who’d just been on my lap? I smiled a little and typed back: That’s Oscar, our orange kitty. We adopted him from Jerusalem!

There was a pause. We have an orange cat, too. They introduced me to their cat by name. A few minutes later, the young girl disappeared and then reappeared with a hunk of feline in her arms. She was beaming. It was this wonderfully casual exchange but so revealing and precious, too. The cameras had transformed into window panes at the edges of our homes and it felt wonderful to let them in, and to be let in.

My cat joined me at Friday night davening, and today my kids danced and painted watercolors and sang along in the living room, mostly clothed but a total mess of silliness and joy as we celebrated Josh Warshawsky’s concert together. I’m appreciating the permissiveness of synagogue life relocated to the home front, the kind that lets a cat’s tail dangle past a screen without too much worry of distraction. The kind that invites my children to dance until we’re dizzy as we sing out Mah Rabu to our hearts’ content.