5 YEARS ON / Mental Health

See How We Made Ourselves Stronger

Dr. Ruchama Fund

W

hen Covid hit, I was seeing that people needed a reminder of their strengths, of the skills they had acquired. I do a lot of this as a psychologist: helping people remember positive things about themselves, their successes and their growth. I found myself serving that purpose, reminding people, “You did hard things before, you can do it again, and maybe even in a new way.”

When it comes to positivity, we really have to purposely remember it, because the brain has a negativity bias. As psychologist Rick Hanson says: “The brain is Velcro for negativity and Teflon for positivity.” This means that negative and frightening thoughts stick in our brain, while positive thoughts slide right out — unless we make it our business to take in the good, let it sink in and make it part of us.

So people who have learned to take in the good and make it part of them will have access to it later. After many repetitions, it becomes hardwired; you automatically validate yourself and your hard work, and if hardships come, you have tools ready to deal with them.

Another thing I had to remind people to do then was to identify their values, like kindness, curiosity, or perseverance. Because Covid distracted people and prevented them from expressing their values, we had to find ways for them to move toward their values. This common focus of my work had to fit the new circumstances.

Today, many people can look back and see how they were able to persevere through those difficulties and take that as a sign of their own resilience. They identified their own strengths and can tap into them when they encounter challenges today. For many people, the fragility of life is a lasting consequence.

Those who started the pandemic with more difficult challenges than others had a harder time being resilient. My granddaughter told me of someone in her community who hasn’t left home since 2020, and another man who took four years to be convinced to come back to shul. For some people with mental illnesses, Covid set them back seriously, and they may be emotionally disabled to this day.

However, many people saw potential for growth. They seized rare chesed opportunities they’d never imagined would come their way. Pre-pandemic, my son-in-law, Rabbi Gil Friedman, had been saying shiurim on a conference phone system. Once schools were closed, he called his children’s yeshivos and offered to set them up on this platform.

My teenage grandchildren stayed up late for many nights setting up as many lines as they could, and by the time Pesach came, there were hundreds of yeshivos signed up. That experience has had a lasting effect on the members of this family. Many individuals and families acquired this mindset during that difficult time. They see opportunities and ask, “Is there something I can do?”

Approximately 20 percent of the population experiences an anxiety disorder. Covid heightened anxiety for many of those people. And they went into treatment, therapy, or on medicine, for the first time in their lives, and they were helped. And now, they’re different people because of it.

People are more open to mental health treatment now. Covid was a factor in that, as was telehealth. Before Covid, around 40 percent of therapists in the US occasionally engaged in teletherapy. But there was concern about its effectiveness.

I know that when my Brooklyn-based clients moved away, I would discourage them from continuing therapy with me long distance, and urge them to find a therapist in their new location. I believed that having that face-to-face, in-office connection was worth the disruption of starting over with a new therapist.

I no longer believe that to be universally true. If there is a way to coordinate time zones, and if there is a strong Internet connection, continuity of care is advantageous. Covid taught us that for many clients, teletherapy is as good as in-office therapy, and for some it is even better.

It expands access to those for whom it was previously unavailable. Those who live in “therapy deserts.” Clients who live in small Jewish communities with a limited number of Orthodox therapists who are also friends and neighbors (too close for comfort). Mothers of small children without access to babysitters, but who can schedule sessions during naptime or after bedtime. Individuals with mobility issues, or hearing issues, or limited access to transportation.

So while it’s important to acknowledge the dreadful costs of Covid, we need to remind ourselves of all the positives that came out of it, and all the ways we made ourselves stronger.

Dr. Ruchama Fund is a clinical psychologist with a special interest in “coaching for effective dating” and in the treatment of relationship OCD as it affects shidduchim. She has a private practice in Flatbush for she adults.

5 YEARS ON / Chinuch

Let’s Take Stock of What Worked

Rabbi Menachem M. Karmel

T

he world seems to have gotten back to its everyday grind. You’d hardly know, five years on, how thoroughly a global pandemic changed our lives. Widespread mask-wearing is largely a thing of the past, hand-sanitizing stations are no longer the entrance pass to public places, and the most the media will discuss about it is whether Fauci will face criminal charges. Although the 9/11 attacks decades ago still obligate passengers to remove their shoes at airport security, somehow, the Covid storm has dissipated much more completely, leaving little residual impact.

But what about nuanced long-term effects? Do they exist under every surface? Let’s explore this through the lens of the chinuch system.

Our school counselor recently observed that an outsider visiting the school would never be able to tell that a storm called Covid had swept through our school, forcing weeks and weeks of closures, and imposing many challenging ordinances even when we were opened. The school now functions normally, there are no specifically increased cases of anxiety, nor are teachers reporting any specific overall deficiencies academically.

This is not to say there are no subtle effects. For instance, a middle-elementary grade I know of is facing a larger than normal challenge with basic translation and Hebrew language skills. These students were in the younger elementary grades when Covid struck. Does this simply indicate a higher than expected percentage of students with language challenges? Or is this a result of lapses in their development during formative years? In general, though, there don’t seem to be any dramatic deficiencies being reported.

At the same time, in general, schools are experiencing a surge in resource-room needs. This is a combination of many factors, in no small part due to schools’ increased focus on reaching every child and helping more and more students in every grade. But Covid might be lurking under the surface. All in all, while there is possibly some “Covid residue” in the mix, I don’t feel it has dramatically impacted our educational system overall.

Other changes, however, are more long-lasting. We see this in communication with our parent body. During Covid, many families made greater use of email. While many parents never even started with email, and others used email during Covid but have since removed it from their homes, the overall number of parents who find this to be an effective communication method seems to have climbed since Covid. For them, email has allowed for a more consistent mode of staying in touch.

In our school, while we always send out hard copies in addition to our emails, there are sometimes last-minute messages that can only be sent digitally. We keep a list of parents who need phone calls because they do not have steady email access. That number has dramatically shrunk over the last few years, particularly since Covid. This is obviously not a statement in favor of steady email access; it is simply a reflection of the current reality.

During the Covid days, many families made allowances for certain technologies that they previously managed without. At the same time, the world at large is moving rapidly toward a more exclusively technology-based communication model, and a certain amount of this might have happened organically, even without Covid. The cracks that likely have been created need to be watched, but I don’t think anyone can really point out specific consequences.

It is certainly more important than ever for communities and schools to revisit their technology guidelines and expectations, and to speak to rabbanim and ensure that whatever standards are appropriate for our current times and our specific communities are upheld to the best of our abilities.

But Covid brought about some positive refocusing points as well. My general observation is that parents are now more involved in their children’s “school life” than before. At school events over the past few years, the attendance and interest has clearly grown, and I believe Covid does have something to do with this. We have actually added several events over the past few years, and while we expected that holding more events would cause the total attendance to shrink, with parents too busy for so many school visits, we were blown away at the attendance numbers.

After Covid, my wife and I — and I shared this with our parent body as a call to action — sat down to reflect. We took inventory: Of all the changes we went through at home, what was beneficial that we should be sure to maintain, and what may have been a necessary evil and should be washed away with the final embers of Covid? As an example, in my own home, suppertime since Covid has become much more cohesive, with most of the family eating together, instead of in multiple shifts with each child making his or her own way into the kitchen. This has helped generate an important family dynamic that is so meaningful to us.

A parent reached out to me after I delivered this thought. She said it gave her such validation. Yes there were some messes that needed to be cleaned up. But there was also a way to focus on something positive that may have come from all this. Something that may have been born in the throes of desperation but proved to be objectively positive was something to consider keeping around.

Some rebbeim I know have been allowing boys to call in to class while traveling or out sick, something that did not really exist pre-Covid, but after becoming a standard during Covid, it has been maintained as a norm in many classrooms across the world.

All in all, Klal Yisrael has proven once again that while challenges can certainly set us back, in the end, we are a resilient people who not only spring back, but manage to strengthen ourselves in many ways moving forward.

Rabbi Menachem M. Karmel is the menahel at Yeshiva Gedola of Montreal’s elementary school, the segan menahel of Torah Umesorah’s Yesud Ma’aloh training program, and a writer and speaker on various chinuch subjects.

5 YEARS ON / Communal Support

I Remember All of It

Sarah Rivkah Kohn

I’M

in the grocery store, loading up my cart with my Pesach meat order, when the screams come.

A four-year-old: “I want my Tatty!”

A wife and mother, 41: “He left the house seven hours ago and the hospital just told me he’s dying.”

A 17-year-old: “No. No. No.”

I try to make them stop. I’m at the potato starch section and I see me, five years ago. With AirPods, shopping cart, talking a teen through the fears. Her father died of Covid. Her mother is in the hospital. She is 16. Home alone, in every sense of the word. I have not a clue how many cans of potato starch I bought, then or now. I am here but I am not.

The screams stop. Now the visuals take over for a full-trauma light show. There I am, picking up my phone at 5:45 p.m. to find a video call. I’m in my bedroom, the only private space I have. My phone is propped on a hospital table over my bed. Onscreen I see the cutest toddler. Curly head. I say hi.

I don’t see an adult but I hear the voice of her aunt, whom I spoke to earlier. “My niece is with us for two days now. She won’t take a bath until her abba comes home. How do I explain this?”

I look around for the adults. I don’t find them. Helplessness sends a wave of nausea over me. I have to tell this three-year-old, over a video call no less, that her abba won’t be coming back….

I think I buy sugar. Do I get grape juice? I have no idea what I come home with then. But now, now I better know. So I hit pause and tell myself that I’ll deal with this… later. It stops. And starts an hour later.

I feel like there is no stopping it anymore. My brain doesn’t believe in later.

In 2006, I founded Links Family to provide emotional support and guidance for children and teens who had lost a parent. We would typically get to know families after their loss. This was by design; families are often not interested in seeing those who were with them at their most vulnerable moments, such as the levayah or the shivah. We stay on the sidelines for those first few days. Our caseload grew to where we were dealing with six to eight families a month.

When Covid hit, that suddenly grew to six to eight families a week. At its peak, we were dealing with five to seven new losses a day. There were no public levayos, there was no public shivah. Children and teens who had suddenly lost parents had no crowds of comforters streaming through their homes, heard no hespedim. They only had a lot of empty time. So they processed a lot faster than usual, and more intensively. I started getting a lot of calls I didn’t usually get.

I kept telling myself: later. Later I will deal.

Eighteen months later, at Kever Rochel, I slowly uncoiled. I couldn’t cry. I just slowly allowed myself to feel. I came back for a second visit, and I cried.

I continued my supervision during this period. I continued therapy. But every year since, during this season, I feel flooded.

As I stood helplessly in the grocery, not knowing where I was or how to make it all go away, I felt a sense of shame: Was I crazy?

I finally reached out to colleagues. Were any of them dealing with a body doing whatever it wanted? With a mind playing it all out in slow motion?

They were all in the same space. All of them.

And suddenly I wondered why I had been so afraid to say this aloud, and then it hit me.

There was a very deep divide that played out in the frum community then and continues to play out now. For some, it was fun in the sun and the best time they had as a family. For others, it was mostly business as usual, even without the fun element.

And then there was us. Those of us who work in crisis intervention, in grief support. Isolated in our corners, dealing with a world where nobody knew what was happening, and we couldn’t stop the flow of death.

When I had a few minutes to call a friend, I would hear about the makeshift recording studio and the hilarious ways her kids were ditching remote school and how she was finally learning how to make sourdough.

“And how are you?”

I shut down. How was I? I was eating yogurts and smoothies that my husband brought to my bedroom-turned-office so I would not forget to eat. I was working 18-hour days on average, sometimes 21-hour days, processing death after death after death. Some days it was three families. Sometimes seven families. I’d wake up at 5:30 a.m. to cook for Yom Tov and get a frantic text: I’m not sure he will make it. Can you talk?

So how was I?

I was fine. My husband was running a Zoom show daily from 3-5 for his campers and any kid. My kids were playing with the makeshift arcades we put into our small apartment. And we did a family “Chopped” competition on Zoom.

I was fine. Except that I had to hop off the call because I saw the number calling me was unknown but I knew in my gut exactly what the call was.

I couldn’t talk then and I find it difficult to talk now.

I tiptoe into the minefield at a wedding this year.

A woman at the table says, “Do you know the secular papers are talking about the Covid effects five years later? What effects? Anyone here even remember it?”

Nods around the table. Laughs.

“Ha! We spent three months in our bungalow. My kids still say it was the best three months.”

“I had my baby right before Purim and had the longest maternity leave of my life.”

“It was hard — my couple was in Israel and we didn’t see their new baby for 13 months.”

“Oh, my gosh, it’s five years?”

I’m not usually quiet. But what am I supposed to say? I remember.

I find myself not making the best eye contact. “Yeah, not really the best time of my life.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Right. A lot of people died. It’s true.”

There is still the divide. And so I go quiet. It’s exhausting to talk.

I unpack the groceries and it hits me: This will never get better if I continue to ignore it. It will never get better if we don’t collectively acknowledge the experience.

So I put out feelers to my colleagues. Immediate yes. One of them encourages me to write. “You need to write about our experiences.”

And I hesitate. How do I pitch it to a magazine? How do I put this nuanced experience into words? And can I deal with an editor who isn’t sure if this story is a story?

I pitch it. I don’t know if the editor gets it, but she is gracious enough to allow me to write it and see if it works.

As I begin to write, I find it comes. All of it. The screams, the sights, the clenched shoulders.

And I allow them to creep onto this page and show up.

I will myself to write it all. I hope we can open a supportive conversation. I hope others will know they’re not crazy.

And most of all, I hope we all collectively can find the capacity to heal.

Sarah Rivkah Kohn is the founder and director of Links Family, providing emotional support to children and teens who lost a parent.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1055)