4/5/20 Sunday: Normal? What Normal?

          Under normal circumstances, at the conclusion of Shabbat, I turn on my phone to check the scores of my favorite teams.  These are not normal times. Our family finished Havdalah and there were no sports, no favorite teams, no scores to check. In fact, I dreaded turning on my phone and the television. I knew that the first thing I was going to check, was the increasing number of infected, and the increased number of deaths from this plague. I looked in Toronto, and then New York and California. The number only seems to go up and go up faster.  After spending 15 minutes catching up on the news, not much of it too good,  I turned to my evening project. With Pesach beginning on Wednesday, my first task was Family Shlepper. It is my job to bring all the Pesach boxes from the basement up to the kitchen so my wife can begin the monumental task of making our kitchen kosher for Pesach as well as begin cooking. However, my task is the first task of this intricate chain of Pesach Kitchen preparation, a task that we call "Dad's Job". Suddenly everything became normal again. I muttered to my self that this was the year my 15-year-old son could finally help. When I knocked on his door, to let him know that I was heading down to the basement to begin shlepping, I received a normal answer, "O.K. I'll be there in a minute".  Even the end result was normal, it was the longest minute. He never showed up to help. My evening progressed in a normal manner. I turned on some music and began shlepping. Yes, I stopped for a minute or two to catch my breath. Yet, within 45 minutes, including a few 2-minute breaks, the job was done. I was tired, I was sore, I drank some water. I could hear my daughters chatting with their friends, I could hear my wife at "virtual birthday party",  and my son laughing while watching a movie on his computer. I was ready to pass out from 45 minutes of shlepping. Under normal circumstances, I would have been really aggravated with everyone since no one lifted a finger, no one opened a box and no one began putting anything away. Instead, I sat down on the sofa stretched my cramping legs, drank some water and smiled to myself as I realized that what used be a source of stress, Pesach preparations, were instead a source of comfort.

Shavuah Tov
Rav Yitz