Posts Tagged ‘coronavirus’
The Correct Brochoh On Being Vaccinated
- This is such an obvious point that I would not have troubled to blog about it, if I hadn’t heard someone questioning it.
- What brochoh does a person make on receiving the COVID-19 vaccine?
- There is no doubt that a brochoh requires to be made: any event that is life-changing has a brochoh – and being vaccinated against an illness that has killed hundreds of thousands of people world-wide, ruined hundreds of thousands of businesses and incarcerated millions of people for around a year, is clearly life-changing.
- It is also clearly one of the most profound achievements of medical science, in pursuance of their Divine commandment – v’rapoh y’rapeh – in living memory, to have produced and deployed vaccines against this plague in such an extraordinarily short time and with such impressive results. Again, how could that not require us to bless and thank HaShem for giving humans the wisdom to protect us in this way?
- Bewilderingly, I heard someone seriously suggest that the appropriate brochoh is shechechiyonu – but that is clearly wrong: we say shechechiyonu to thank God for preserving us to witness and enjoy an event that is important to us personally.
- But on an event which benefits me but also benefits others, the correct brochoh is HaTov v’Hameitiv.
- Receiving the vaccine helps and protects me, God willing; but it also protects anyone with whom I come into contact and to whom I might otherwise transmit the illness having contracted it asymptomatically.
- Iy’h I will receive the vaccine this coming Thursday, the local NHS having reached people of my age and summoned me accordingly; and when I receive it, I look forward to being mevoreich HaTov v’Hameitiv. Thursday will be Taanis Esther: it was Esther Hamalkah who turned the selfishness of the banquet of Achashveirosh at the beginning of the megillah (“la’asos k’rtzon ish v’ish”) into the concern for each other at the end of the megillah (“u’matonos ish l’rei’ehu”), by discovering and articulating the need to return to Avrohom Ovinu’s equating belief in God with chessed (kindness and sensitivity), when she says “you fast for me, and I and my maids will do the same” (which former Chief Rabbi Bakshi-Doron explains as meaning “we’ll stop worrying about ourselves and start worrying about you, and you stop worrying about yourselves and start worrying about us”) in a way that storms the gates of Heaven.
- Y’hi rotzon that once the vaccine has controlled the pandemic throughout the world, our lives will have changed irrevocably through our experiences having taught us greater sensitivity to those who are weak or vulnerable, and we will be zocheh to recreate a religious world which places sensitivity to others’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses at the heart of our worship and other religious practices in a way that revives the ruchnius of our people and through our people the whole world, ad she’yovo Melech Go’el u’Moishia bimheiro b’yomeinu omein v’omein.
Kol Dichpin – A Seder Without Guests
- This year around the world for the first time in living memory almost every seder this Pesach will have to take place without guests.
- I have set out my general thoughts on how our Judaism can best flourish at a time when the community cannot function – see my post What’s The Derech and Who’s off It – A Discussion of Core Jewish Values (below and at https://www.danielgreenberg.co.uk/shiurim-and-lectures/).
- But a specific issue arises for the seder: we will begin as always with a ritual announcement that all who are hungry should come and join us – and we will know that we do not mean it: that we have not been able to invite guests, and that there will be people sitting alone whom we would have loved to have invited.
- So, simply, what kavono can we have in saying “kol dichpin” this year? Perhaps we should leave it out?
- It seems to me that we need to start now: there are many people for whom existing financial difficulties have been exacerbated by coronavirus; or whom the lockdown will have precipitated into new financial difficulties.
- There are also many wonderful charitable organisations which are doing their best to help.
- So if we make efforts to give to those organisations now a little bit more than we might otherwise have done (perhaps particularly where we have money that we might have spent on a large seder that is now available for other things) then we can sit at our seder table and in saying “kol dichpin” we can reflect that we have done our best to ensure that as many people as possible are joining our seder remotely, in the sense that we have shared with them before Pesach so that they can enjoy their seder in peace and comfort.
- L’shonoh ha’bo’oh b’Yerushalayim to us all – hoping that we can celebrate next year’s Pesach in a world that has been spiritually enriched by our collective experiences of a closer connection with God and Jewish values as a result of our enforced isolations.
Coronavirus in Jewish Law and Thought
- The sages say “turn it [the Torah] over and turn it over for you will find everything in it”.
- So what are the key Jewish messages in relation to the present state of the outbreak of coronavirus?
- There is a Biblical requirement to look after one’s health. That involves, in particular, not deliberately exposing oneself to unnecessary danger.
- There is also a rabbinic dictum that those involved in doing meritorious actions do not come to harm as a result.
- And there is another rabbinic concept based on a verse in the Psalms (God guards the simple) that those who do things through habit without really thinking whether or not they are good or bad for them, can look for a degree of divine protection.
- Rabbi Moshe Feinstein applied the latter principle to those who were already addicted to smoking when the dangers began to be publicly known apparent in the mid-20th century; and he used it to excuse their continuing in the habit of smoking, even after he was clear that it was halachically prohibited to begin smoking because of the biblical injunction to guard one’s health.
- Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch has written that the principle of divine protection for the simple-minded could reasonably be applied when Rabbi Feinstein originally wrote about smoking, but that he would no longer have applied it now, given that it is no longer a question of an unknown degree of risk but a known and definite damage to oneself every time one smokes a cigarette.
- (Yes, it is true that there are still people who look like orthodox Jews and who smoke cigarettes: the answer to the conundrum is that they are not orthodox Jews, any more than are those who dress like orthodox Jews and fiddle their taxes or cheat on housing benefit by having their father-in-law buy a house through a limited company so they can sign that they are not related to their landlord.)
- So, where we are at the moment with the coronavirus spread in the UK, it is entirely reasonable to carry on life as normal and in the knowledge that Jewish law and thought requires reasonable precautions, but neither requires nor supports paranoia.
- So we go about our ordinary business but without exposing ourselves unnecessarily to obvious dangers, such as travelling without particular need into areas in the world where there are hotspots of the virus.
- Obviously that adds up to common sense: but isn’t it nice to know that God agrees?
- Two thoughts to add.
- First, there is a halachic principle requiring obedience to the law of the land. So if the law of the land requires self-isolation, for example, for people travelling back from a particular country, whether or not one thinks that is sensible or necessary as a matter of health and hygiene, we follow the law of the land as both a secular requirement and a religious obligation.
- Secondly, trying to look for positives in the present experience, traditional Jewish values place enormous emphasis on kindness to others, which was the foundation of the religion that Abraham discovered: and any public health outbreak creates multiple opportunities for kindness in looking after each other; so the present experience is a spiritual opportunity as well as a time of anxiety.
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