Behind The Corona

It's been a whole year since the coronavirus hit us like an eleventh plague.

During that time, more than half a million people in the United States died from the plague. One would think that such a catastrophe would devastate our business. During the spring and summer, terrible news was read every day: that hospitals were flooded with dying patients, that the dead bodies no longer had a place on the bodies. I was deeply concerned about the collective mental health of our society. I imagined millions of people would fall into a depression, quenching their desperation with volume and drugs.

And yet we did not break down. Reverse. Despite the fact that many of us have lost parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors and schoolchildren, we have proven to be as psychologically strong as iron. We have not lost confidence that a vaccine will quickly save us from the coronavirus and now the future looks a little better. In a growing number of states, children are back in school, albeit part-time, and restaurants may allow people to sit and eat there.

But silence strikes a chord with me: is it possible that the reason we are not mourning the more than 500,000 victims of the pandemic - because the majority of them - 400,000 - are over 65 years old? Is it possible that, subconsciously, we think that because people in old age are already suffering from so many diseases, that they would have died one of these years anyway? And even though it's really sad, we shrug our shoulders because this is how life goes?

For most of us, the answer is probably yes.

A big irony of the whole matter is that the decision not to allow guests, even relatives, into the homes of the elderly and the moshav-zknims - a decision that was supposed to protect the elderly from being infected with the coronavirus - led to Unfortunately, it makes it easier to forget about them and at the same time move emotionally away from the reality that so many of them go out.

Or as they say: far from the eyes, far from the heart.

And this brings us to another idea that we, Jews, have, a face, forgotten. One of the most important values ​​in the Jewish tradition - one might even say, an essential means of passing on the tradition from one generation to the next - is the principle of honoring ob um. Although many people see it as just a religious mitzvah (this is the fifth of the Ten Commandments), its meaning is, in fact, much broader.