Notes from the Narrow Place

Book excerpt: The COVID years. A time of constriction, of staying at home, of restricting our breathing and our voices with masks, of limiting our travel and leisure experiences, of narrowing our social lives to those who live with us in our suddenly cramped and crowded houses. When our lungs suddenly didn't seem wide enough for our needs. When we quarantined, and then again, and sometimes again. Welcome to the Narrow Place. In these personal essays and stories, Rabbi Philip Graubart ranges through his extensive rabbinic career and paints moving portraits of characters, both real and imagined, who find themselves stuck in narrow places, and then, through grace or dogged effort or luck, manage to widen their circumstances and find a measure of redemption. A Palestinian friend yearns for companionship with Jews. An inspiring young baker wrestles with a deadly disease. A straying holy man struggles with his conscience. High school students rage against their confinements. And the author shares his battle with a confining illness. In each of these tales of restriction, expansiveness lurks in the background, and then, blessedly, breaks through.