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What, if anything, lasts forever?\xa0 What is impervious to the ravages of time? What can we do today that will still be talked about a hundred years from now?

I have been thinking about these questions since May 13, which is the day that a great writer named Alice Munro died.\xa0 Alice Munro won the Noble Prize in Literature in 2013.\xa0 She was an absolute master of the short story genre.\xa0 I had never read her work before her death, so I started reading a collection with the title Too Much Happiness, published in 2009.\xa0 As you might imagine, the title Too Much Happiness is ironic.\xa0 The characters in this collection do not have too much happiness.

One story is about a recently widowed woman named Nita.\xa0 She had been married to a man twenty years older named Rich.\xa0 They expected she would be the first to pass, because she was fighting cancer, and because he had gotten a recent clean bill of health from his doctor. But soon after the doctor\u2019s appointment, he passed suddenly and unexpectedly while on the way to the hardware store.

It dawns on Nita that her life has changed not temporarily, but permanently.\xa0 Rich is not coming back. The patterns they used to enjoy will not happen again.\xa0 Who she used to be, a wife to Rich, she is no longer. \xa0\xa0And she faces this new reality with her own health challenges. She used to be a voracious reader. \xa0When Rich died, at first she thought I\u2019ll just read.\xa0 So she would sit with her books in her comfy chair.\xa0 They kept her company.\xa0 She liked the feel of them.\xa0 But she realized she could not read them anymore. \xa0Her medical treatments had diminished her attention span.\xa0 What she used to be able to do, she can do no longer.\xa0 Is happiness when circumstances change permanently still possible?\xa0

Munro\u2019s story captures a dilemma that many of us find ourselves in.\xa0 The world is\xa0changing. Our world is changing.\xa0 And we wonder is it changing temporarily.\xa0 Or is it changing permanently?\xa0 It is not always easy, or even possible, to know for sure.\xa0 Think back to the worst of Covid.\xa0 In the darkest days of the pandemic, we wondered whether we would we ever be able to gather in big, robust, happy gatherings without worry again.\xa0 Now we know the answer is yes. But we didn\u2019t necessarily know it at the time. There is a recency bias. The moment we are in is so powerful.\xa0 Remember how we all felt in the early days of the pandemic.\xa0

Now we have a different set of questions.\xa0 What will be with Israel?\xa0 What will be with the American Jewish community?\xa0 Is our golden age over, or will the spike of anti-Semitism pass like Covid 19 passed?\xa0 Will our relationship with our alma mater ever be loving and uncomplicated again?