Living in a community that's been making headlines around the world for its recklessness in the face of a raging pandemic and which is exacting a huge cost in death and suffering, I too have been wondering, what is going on? Is it lack of education, insularity, ignorance of, if not outright hostility to, science, a fanatical commitment to religion and culture, blind faith in religious leaders, victimhood, an ingrained quest for martyrdom? I keep on asking myself, which switch in our system has tripped to produce this crazy result?
I’m afraid that the unpalatable answer is that our system is broke. We have had plentiful moments of madness before but never at this sustained level and never with this horrific cost to life, horrific suffering and our horrific indifference and complicity in it. We are staring death in the face the world over. Chareidi websites and social media call daily for Tehilim for the sick and constantly report on the passing of yet another white beard, and not a few black ones too. We could, were we so minded, adopt with relative ease a whole string of measures that would minimise the risk of contagion even without closing shops, schools and shuls. But we take no action whatsoever. To the contrary, we defiantly continue holding packed events and celebrations as people around us fall like flies with the wedding mitzvah tantz turning into a morbid danse macabre.
The pundits say it's ignorance of science, notwithstanding that our same system and communities constantly embrace the latest medical advances in infertility treatment, heart surgery and cancer. So any depiction of us as primitive communities out of touch with the modern world is simply false.
It’s not that we accept or reject anything, but that we do not think in terms of cause and effect, assuming we think at all. By the yardstick of the Talmud, "Who is wise? He who anticipates the consequences" our communities must contain far too many blistering idiots who understand only results. We can see a scalpel, we have heard enough of chemotherapy and its awful side effects and we trust in anything that assists in the magic process of producing a kicking, crying baby. Raising funds, as we do, and arranging treatment also occupies hordes of fixers, lends prestige to philanthropists and bestows a halo upon the rebbes whose blessing and 'advice' is sought. The 'noise' and drama of illness, prayers and sirens and the sentimentality of tears whether of joy or tragedy, excite the onlookers and keep our never-silent, dizzying and deafening whirring machine running.
But where’s the fun and excitement in prevention? There's no glamour in sitting at home, no noise in quarantining, no sirens in mask wearing, no whizz in following simple instructions and no kudos in not being infected. For as much as our system was ever designed for anything, buzz and turmoil were always an integral part of it.
In the entire chareidi counternarrative to the government and media response to the pandemic, no rational explanation has been proffered for failing to adhere to even minimal rules. The best they can come up with are contrived exclusions to pikuach nefesh (the mandatory obligation to preserve life), turning the very principle on its head, distortion or outright denial of verifiable facts, ridiculing of science, and that's when they're not skirting with quackery and crackpot conspiracy theories or engaging in populist whataboutist shots.
If they’re being honest, they will tell you that too many of our youths may abandon our way of life as a result of calling a halt to our daily and life-cycle rituals. We need not ask why children brought up in our supposedly sound education system and in what we are told is a superior way of life, should head for the exit at the first opportunity. Rather, the question is, how does this justify packed weddings, parties of all kinds, school plays to which grandmas are invited and the many other breaches we carry out defiantly in full view and for which we daily pay the price? Could it be that the risk lies simply in teaching our youth to think rather than to react, to adhere to an additional set of rules, and one set by governments and not by rabbis?
Thinking, cause and effect and reasoning are just not part of our bargain. It’s not as if rabbis and scholars have met to discuss the situation, engaged their own scientists, set up their own committees, formed their own rules or formulated their own response. It's each Chasidic rebbe, or 'court' as they like to label their lavish trappings, making up its own rules and damn everyone else.
If the chareidi response were translated to a state it would resemble Baghdad in the aftermath of the Iraq war, with each warlord and several thousand clan members controlling their own few streets. As if coronavirus can be stopped by a roadblock or an eiruv string. For if we are, as is often suggested, a state within a state then we are a failed state.
This has come at a pivotal moment in world and especially US politics and it feels like we've met at a junction. It is no coincidence that some of Trump’s most fanatical supporters are in our communities, and while America has been imploding under Trump for its own reasons, our society is imploding from decades of weak leadership and an education system barely worthy of its name. Led on by amoral leaders with stagnant minds who do little but parrot the reigning dogma while trading principles for expedience, we are finally reaping the generation we have sown. A gyroscopic system that must continue at any cost lest it collapses the moment it stops spinning.
Americans have finally had a chance to fix their own system. We alas are stuck with ours unless and until we take matters into our own hands.
