2021: The year sanity returned after COVID-19, political turmoil

• Published date: 07 January 2021
• Date: 07 January 2021
• Author: AMOTZ ASA-EL
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Surveying the lobby and corridors where masked nurses came and went within a crowd of several dozen seated patients, I picked a number: 479. Searching for the sign that indicates which number is already in, I found it flashing three red digits right above my head: 478.

The number made no sense, but seeing a handwritten sign that read "corona injections," I went through the door and asked whether I was in the right place.

"You are," said a nurse from behind her desk, pointing at the chair where I now sat, ready to read a long article on my smartphone, only to hear the said nurse announce my name on a loudspeaker. I lifted my hand and said "That's me," but she was already calling another citizen's name.

A minute later she asked me to enter the door to her right. The nurse within that room asked for my HMO plastic ID, swished it through its reader, asked me if I had allergies, showed me the vaccine's liquid container, and how he inserts the syringe to the exact prescribed quantity.

He then stuck the needle in my arm, told me the next vaccination's date and also printed it out for me before discharging me with the instruction to sit in the lobby for 15 minutes and only then leave. Unrolling my sleeve as I emerged from his room, I looked at the smartphone to see what the time was. It was 12:51.

A strange sensation went through my body. I was hearing a forgotten but familiar sound.

No, it was not about the vaccine's chemistry, nor about the plague's biology. It was about its psychology; about a long-overdue encounter with the sound that last year vanished from the public sphere's every layer: the sound of sanity.

IN A YEAR when schoolyards, airports, malls, stadiums and entire downtowns emptied worldwide, mankind scrambled for a measure of normality.

With weddings, funerals and all other life-cycle events reduced to miniatures of what they once were, we gradually got used to routine's demise.

Our many improvisations – espresso in a disposable cup on a stool outside a café; a bar mitzvah boy's Torah reading on Zoom; online museum tours, book launches and shiva calls – gradually added up to a new routine, peppered with a daily dose of political madness.

Now, as the needle with Pfizer's liquid pricked my arm, it was as if a button had been pressed and life as we knew it before 2020's medical mayhem, economic confusion and political insanity suddenly emerged through the mist.

Yes, 2021 was only three days old, and echoes of 2020's madhouse – a new full-scale...