Posts Tagged ‘COVID-19’
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.
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