Every night at 7, my Brooklyn neighborhood comes to life with the calculated whimsy of a cuckoo clock. It starts with a single neighbor clapping. Soon dozens more join in, throwing open their front doors or hanging from their windows to put their hands together and say “wooooo.” Perhaps 20 seconds into the proceedings, a man emerges from the garden apartment across from me, banging a pot with a spoon, and a woman appears on the stoop of the house next door, her spaniel barking helpfully at her side. Often there is a special guest: On a recent evening, a guy motored by on a delivery bike, a whistle blaring from between his lips. It’s all over within five minutes.

The Clapping first spread through New York City on a Friday night in late March. Following similar gestures in Italy, India and Spain, the New York iteration was seeded by a strategic marketing firm and circulated over social media to thank workers on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak. It was originally presented as a one-off event, and after that, residents were asked to repeat it once a week. But now we do it every single night.

The Clapping has surely been heard by doctors and nurses and E.M.T.s, by UPS workers and Instacart delivery people and the many other New Yorkers who are putting themselves at risk to protect their city. I live just a couple of blocks from the choked I.C.U. of the Brooklyn Hospital Center, and on Tuesday, firefighters lined up right outside the center to cheer the staff on.

But the more the ritual is repeated, the more it feels as if it’s for the rest of us, too. We used to go out to concerts or movies or plays and clap for the performances. Now the clapping is the performance. It is our regularly scheduled programming, live and in person when basically nothing else is.