Thread by @JoshuaCypess

1/ I love #Thanksgiving but #Purim is pretty awesome too & the pandemic hit my town right on that holiday. We were supposed to go to someone's house for seudah & of course traipse all over town delivering mishloach manot. We didn't b/c, thank God, I understood disease

2/ Unbeknownst to us, my whole family were COVID19 positive on Purim. If we had gone to the seudah, if we had given out shlach-manot, we would have been passing disease to dozens of people. I was already using sanitizer heavily but nobody wore masks in March.

3/ I told my family (and anyone who would listen to me) that we had to not only assume that every person was infected but that WE were infected & contagious. Sadly, I was right.

As people have been saying, we needed to follow zombie apoc. rules.

https://twitter.com/editoremilye/status/1329194879226834945?s=20

4/ Purim has even more congregating than Thanksgiving; and I've been informed that Xmas is a major holiday, but I've had to skip shul for months, and Passover, and Sukkot, and the High Holidays nearly wrecked me.

https://twitter.com/JoRoseSings/status/1329346323536089089?s=20

5/ And whenever I feel I'm not doing enough, I remind myself that my whole family had COVID (thank God with comparatively mild symptoms & some still linger for the ones hardest hit in my house) and by taking science seriously, we likely saved people's lives

6/ It's a problem of #Literalist thinking: people judge actions by demonstrable, visual, results. Prevention is given short shrift, if not outright denigrated.

Literalism is also why people insist on individual actions to solve what is a structural problem (a PANDEMIC)

7/ When people ask "how can we sacrifice [this thing I think is important] while we wait for a vaccine" I respond that if we (1) tested & traced when there were small pockets of infection & (2) demanded the gov. pay people to stay home, we could have [thing] *before* the vaccine

8/ Ultimately, being a halakhist helps me understand these solutions b/c I'm trained to understand the interconnections of responsibilities.

E.g. when asked for a leniency to do [thing they want but think they need] on Shabbat, I recog. these ppl don't think Shabbat is serious

9/ Shabbat violation carries the death penalty in the Torah & while we definitely don't enforce this (at all, get real), the rule tells us that Shabbt is *super serious*

They don't get that. They want a leniency because their convenience is paramount in their solipsistic world.

10/ Same dynamic with this virus

I've been asked why I rule it's at best optional - even forbidden - to have shul during the pandemic when that would result in no minyan for months.

I retort that we need to demand test/tracing/money from the gov. first

torahweb.org/torah/special/…

11/ These people think I'm being unrealistic to say that; but I hold (like Rav Twersky, as I linked above) that pikuach-nefesh (safeguarding life) is paramount over nearly every commandment.

But to my surprise, chagrin & shame, I've learned that many people don't agree!

12/ Human life is important to them only in theory, but when presented with the halakhic solution - no shul until you do everything to demand from the gov the testing/tracing/business-aid - they look around with their #Literalist eyes & become Jaws Mayors

https://twitter.com/JoshuaCypess/status/1237066567688622080?s=20

13/ I keep promising a longer essay on how being Modern Orthodox helps understand the disease & how to reconcile conflicting values. This is a precis/prolegomenon for that endeavor.

#ShabbatShalom

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