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Rev. Steven Cousin, Rabbi Michael Farbman, WNHH Station manager Harry Droz on “Dateline New Haven.”
Holy weeks are beginning— when Christians are accustomed to lining up for the eucharist and hearing sermons and music in church.
Passover is less than two weeks away — when Jews cram around family tables for night-long seders.
Those are the expectations, anyway.
This year those expectations are running up against the spread of Covid-19, and the need to avoid public gatherings or even private home gatherings.
Clergy leaders face the task of managing those expectations from their flocks and helping everyone adjust, preserving or adapting rituals in the age of the coronavirus.
“We’re still talking about it,” one of New Haven’s leading ministers, the Rev. Steven Cousin of Bethel AME Church, said about the plans for the weeks leading up to and including Easter. “We’re taking it week by week.” In the interest of preserving life, he, like other ministers, is looking for ways to feed his flock’s souls without traditional in-person services and sacraments.
Similarly, Rabbi Michael Farbman of Temple Emanuel, like other Jewish religious leaders, is advising his congregants that they can hold online seders with relatives this year in order to commemorate the exodus from slavery in Egypt without succumbing to the sometimes fatal coronavirus. “We’re all experimenting,” Farbman said, noting the importance of “people seeing each other’s faces, the ability to connect … at this time of uncertainty.”
Cousin and Farbman spoke about the Covid-19 challenges they face in their jobs, during a joint appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
They agreed that the crisis, for all its pain, has spawned opportunity as well. Both congregations had for years discussed, but shelved, the idea of live-streaming services. Now they both have.
That means seniors who couldn’t make it to services can now participate online, Farbman noted. And a Bethel congregant who now teaches eighth-grade biology in China, and had missed the services, was able to join in this Sunday to hear Cousin preach about deliverance and despair in this era, invoking lessons from the book of Isaiah.
The online transition has been challenging at times. But there’s no turning back, the pair agreed.
“We have faith,” Cousin said. “We don’t know how we’re going to make it. But we’re going to make it.”
Click on the video to hear more of Cousin’s and Farbman’s takes on religion in the era of Covid-19, in the full episode of WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”