BEYOND A TOOL FOR MEETINGS

 

I don’t often have a reason to use the same topic for both of the blogs that I have been keeping for a while now.  However, it just occurred to me as I was thinking about what I was going to write about this week, that what seemed appropriate for one blog was also appropriate for the other. So here it goes.

 

In the Jewish religion, as most of you will know, our Sabbath begins on Friday at sundown and ends at sundown on Saturday.  It is our tradition to symbolize the end of the Shabbat by the recitation of a service called Havdalah.  In Hebrew, “LeHavdil” is the Hebrew verb for to make a difference, as to distinguish one thing from another. Havdalah signifies the difference between the holiness of the Shabbat and the mundane or profane things that mark the rest of the week. We light a special candle, smell incense representing the sweetness of the Shabbat, the day of rest, and say the Kiddush or blessing over the wine which represents sanctity.  Oftentimes, this is a ceremony which is a cause for gathering of the extended family or a group of friends.  There is food to eat, singing and dancing.  We have come to call this a Kumsitz, which means almost how it sounds.  Come and Sit. 

 

This past Shabbat evening, the cantors and rabbis from the vast majority of the synagogues in Toronto and some from outside the city, like St. Catharines, had a virtual kumsitz using Zoom.  I know you are going to wonder about the food and drink and dancing, and, of course, there was none of that. But there were almost 400 computers linked together and we all enjoyed a program of singing by the cantors, some speeches from several of the rabbis, and lots of messages sent back and forth across the netherspace.  

 

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed this Zoom-facilitated program indicated not just by the messaging but also the fact that almost everyone of those 400 computers were still online after over two hours of camaraderie.  When I was young enough to still go to camp, we often had such a kumsitz but around the campfire and we’d sit and sing and dance for hours.  It was all very extemporaneous and casual.  And that’s the point of my blog post today.  This age of the Pandemic has been marked by attempts to keep alive a spirit of community and togetherness despite lockdowns and limits to visiting and so forth.  

 

Zoom is only one virtual tool but anyone who thinks that it cannot be used to facilitate collaboration and community is not thinking out of the box enough.  It’s very true that there were technical problems and people complaining at the beginning but that’s because it was so very much an experiment.  But once everyone got beyond the technology, that was the end of it.  

 

Zoom can be used for so much more than meetings.  WE used Zoom very successfully at the synagogue for our annual meeting and we even managed to have voting online and overcome handicaps with that.  There is no end to the ways Zoom can be used once you start to think about it.  It can be used for birthday parties, for meetings, for concerts, for book talks (something we are going to participate in tonight), for presentations of all kinds.  And, the best part, it seems to me, is that it is fairly easy to get to figure out how to use.  The only major real drawback right now is that the bandwidth needed to carry that many signals distributed across a wide area is not so far able to keep up with how we want to use it. But, I am sure that, given time, Zoom will evolve along with the bandwidth.  HAVE NO FEAR!