Was reminded today that Judaism actually has a ritual for reuniting with friends you haven't seen in a long time.
If 30 days or more have passed since you have seen your friend, upon seeing them, you recite the following blessing:
Blessed are you, Eternal One, source of all being, who as sustained us and brought us to this moment.
If it has been 12 months or more since you have seen your friend, you say the following blessing:
Blessed are you, Eternal One, source of all being, who revives the dead.
That one hit hard. We've been buried in our homes for the past year, and we've lost so many people, and any one of us could have died from COVID.
What if we let ourselves treat seeing each other in person again as miraculous?
What if we truly treated these reunions not as a given, but let ourselves really feel that there was a possibility that we might not have gotten them?
What would we want to build between us that was new? What would we want to let fall away?
Guys, especially, would you build something new with your best friends? Would you let our culture's disapproval of affectionate physical contact between men fall away?
And for everyone: if you treat this as a second chance, what would you try to create with it? What intimacy that you wanted before would you ask for, if you were dead, and got a second chance?
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