Easter, Passover together – apart
Upcoming holy days for Christians and Jews in the Greater Boston region are going to look very different amid the coronavirus pandemic, without packed churches for Good Friday and Easter, nor long tables filled with family and friends for Passover.
Instead, religious leaders and families are adapting to these quarantine times — and preparing for virtual services and seders to observe some of the holiest days of the year.
Priests are shifting worship to online this weekend, using platforms such as the popular Zoom app.
The Rev. Burns Stanfield of South Boston’s Fourth Presbyterian Church plans to hold a virtual sunrise service on Carson Beach for Easter. The church over the last few years has partnered with Roxbury Presbyterian Church for a sunrise service at the beach, and will continue that tradition this year — only this time online.
“So much of being a religious community is community, is seeing each other, seeing other human beings,” Stanfield said on Tuesday. “It’s living life together, praying together, singing together, and we can’t do that right now.
“But this online tool is a way to try to stay connected,” he said. “We’re trying to get fun and creative, and do things in a different way to stay connected.”
Cardinal Sean O’Malley, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, will be broadcasting masses on CatholicTV for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. People can watch the services on TV or stream them online.
“The virus keeps us from being under one roof but it doesn’t keep us from being a community,” O’Malley wrote on his website.
Local Jews are preparing to hold virtual Passover seders with family and friends, while rabbis are hosting Zoom seders for congregants.
Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, president of Hebrew College in Newton
Centre, said this will be a Passover “unlike any we’ve ever experienced before.”
“It’s clear to me that this Passover may be unfamiliar, but it will not be forgotten. Not at all,” she said. “If anything, people are embracing it — and its message of hope — with fierce creativity, determination, and love.
“I think we will remember it for a very long time to come,” the rabbi said. “I think it will become part of the Passover story we tell our children’s children.”
Family togetherness is a core aspect of Passover, noted Rabbi Marc Baker, president and CEO of Combined Jewish Philanthropies.
“For thousands of years, we’ve been celebrating with the people we love most,” he said. “There’s a lot of sadness that people cannot be with the people they’re used to having a seder with.”
But people are thinking in more innovative ways, and might learn how to hold a seder at their house for the first time, he said.
And while Jews cannot open their doors to invite others in for a seder, Baker said it’s important to remember that “even in the face of darkness and crisis and fear and uncertainty, there’s always hope for a better tomorrow.”