Dear Friends,
The news on the COVID-19 front shows more and more signs that home isolation and social distancing have been effective measures toward leveling the curve. That gives us something to be genuinely hopeful about.
At the same time, this necessitates a very serious call for caution. We can easily lose what our hard work and sacrifice has won for our community and our society. My message today is about how essential it is to continue to do what we’re doing. Let us celebrate the signs of hope but not let them prevent us from accurately seeing the bigger picture.
I want to acknowledge the sacrifices we have already made, for a moment.
For working people, confinement away from the work place has been a real hardship on many levels. For many, it has impacted their earnings in a significant way.
For children and their parents, the closure of school buildings and the distance learning model have created tremendous stress. It has been extremely challenging, as well, for teachers and principals, who have been forced to create digital learning systems in a matter of days. Zoom is a great tool, but it cannot possibly replace the classroom. School tuition collections are down because some parents are unable to afford their payments without steady income.
There is so much anxiety about the future, about whether and when we will return to life as we knew it before March 2020, or whether there will be a strange and limiting “new normal.”
We wonder whether kids will be able to return to school before the end of June. What about graduations? Will summer day camps and sleep away camps be able to open? We wonder whether our planned milestone events will take place.
So many plans are on hold. This is a source of tremendous stress.
We, along with many religious Americans, wonder when we can return to our houses of worship. We urgently want to be able to return to the synagogue for daily services as well as Shabbos services.
We have sacrificed a lot. We are ready to be done with all this sacrifice.
So it is tempting to seize upon the good news and to begin to relax the inconvenient restrictions. But this would be a grave error.
The Talmud in Shabbos 151b tells us that we desecrate the Sabbath to save the life of a day-old child so that the child will live to be able to observe many Sabbaths. When we desecrate a precious commandment in order to save a life (and in this case many lives), we do so with a belief in the infinite value of human life, and with the hope and belief that the sacrifice will ultimately lead to the exponential sanctification of that very commandment, through enabling its observance many, many, many more times.
That is the situation we find ourselves in. We must be patient for as long as necessary in order to insure that once we relax restrictions, we will not be confronted with a second lethal surge. (Let me remind all of us that after restrictions were eased, there were two deadly surges in the 1918 Flu pandemic). If we are patient, we will have many good days ahead of us. We will be together for many more daily minyanim and Shabbos services, if only we remain patient now.
Last week, fifty-seven community rabbis sent a letter cautioning all of us to carefully follow the safety guidelines that our doctors unanimously issued. Only four rabbis did not sign.
Most of us are not physicians. COVID-19 is a medical problem that only capable physicians can responsibly address. This is not the domain of laymen or Rabbis.
In a separate letter, thirteen Five Towns Rabbis (all of whom signed the other letter) stated that we will only recommend returning to public services when our panel of distinguished doctors gives us a green light.
A well-meaning Five Towns Jew wrote a letter to Yeshiva World News criticizing the letter signed by the fifty-seven rabbis in which we intructed our constituents not to have any outdoor gatherings or services. He correctly points out that there are violations of the socializing rules in the streets and outside of food stores. He asks, why can't there be services as well?
But his premise is wrong. We teach our children that two wrongs don’t make a right. We all must be attentive to the guidelines. People who violate the guidelines could harm themselves and all of us. Because they err does not mean that we should encourage more errors even for reasons of piety – indeed, especially for reasons of piety. Our tradition discourages this emphatically.
The part of the letter that disturbed me the most is that it was anonymous. Only a coward criticizes others without identifying himself.
We continue to rely on a large panel of local doctors who are cardiologists, pulmonologists, infectious disease specialists, and COVID-19 ICU unit directors. They are all Orthodox Jews. They understand our physical as well as our religious needs. They, too, long to return to their shuls. They, too, are pained that the doors of our beautiful institutions remain shuttered.
And they are unanimous in cautioning us that we must continue home isolation, social distancing, regular hand washing, wearing gloves, masks, etc. They are unanimous in emphasizing the absolute necessity of refraining from any form of social gathering, whether indoors or outdoors.
Unfortunately, many of our citizens are not taking this seriously enough. People do not understand that even when they feel well they could be asymptomatic carriers of the disease. If they recovered from the disease and think that they are no longer carriers, they could be wrong. It is not yet known whether those who have recovered from COVID-19 are immune to future infection.
Failure to follow the unanimous guidelines of our distinguished doctors puts everyone at risk! This is a matter not only of individual health, but of public health.
To put it most directly, if you infect someone, you could inadvertently harm them very seriously. (This is especially true of people who are known to be particularly vulnerable to serious manifestations of the disease). And public health teaches us that it doesn’t stop there. If you infect someone, then they can infect someone (or multiple people), and that person infects someone, and so on – and we have another outbreak where many can die. All from one source.
Hence, there can be no religious services indoors or outdoors. That includes in driveways, and parking lots, on lawns etc.
I want to have the opportunity to return to public prayer. I believe in it and I miss it as much as you do. We all want to go back to our synagogues immediately. But we cannot do that yet!
Those individuals and rabbis who continue to violate these directives are sincere in their desire to serve HASHEM. But they are misguided in their actions and are doing the reverse of what Halacha demands. They see themselves as acting for a greater purpose, but in reality they are selfish and guilty of the sin of hubris. Their blood is not redder than anyone else’s blood. And their desire for a minyan is not greater than our desire for a minyan.
I fully understand that there are safe ways to make public gatherings by abiding by proper social distancing rules and with masks and gloves. But that misses the point!! This matter is so serious that we must create an extra protective layer around it, just as Chazal added chumrot to protect the integrity of halacha.
Even if rules are relaxed on the premise of the community’s adherence to strict medical standards, they will be violated consistently, even if unintentionally. We all know how hard it is to actually remain 6 feet apart, and how we instinctively shift closer and closer to our fellow human beings. There will not be supervision. Everyone will create their own gatherings. We will inadvertently socialize inappropriately. People will be infected. The numbers in the hospitals will spike and people will die. That is what the doctors tell us. I am sure none of us wants that to happen. In order for this isolation to work, everyone must comply until the doctors tell us that it is safe to do otherwise.
I know that my message has been grim. And we’ve all have enough of grimness. We so badly want to look forward to something good. So let me return to my opening words. I encourage you to hold onto the signs of hope. They are there. They are real. And if we continue to follow these guidelines, they will not be taken away from us, as they likely will be if we fail to do so. It is so hard to be patient. (Anyone who knows me knows that I find it hard to be patient)! But if we do this, then a time will come, and I pray it is not too far away, when we will safely be able “to observe many Sabbaths in the future” together, with social closeness, in our beautiful shuls.
RHB
Young Israel of Woodmere
