This last Friday night I fell asleep pondering a scientific riddle: The Boro Park community suffered painful losses during the initial days of Covid. This community mostly ignored the distancing policies. Some will say, with large families and a religious lifestyle dependent on continuous communal interaction between shul, weddings, mikvah and school, they found it too hard to treat as a priority. Whatever the case may be, in the later months, the deaths and new cases slowed down precipitously to the point of near or actual zero. Did they develop herd immunity? It seems no credible epidemiologists want to look into this unique community because the potential findings are loaded. What would happen if it was discovered that initial mass exposure led to equal or even less deaths overall? Not only would we be validating scofflaw behavior and invalidating the authority of government and medical leadership, but it also would mean that all the lost time and money would have been for naught. Can any politician or doctor with so much of their career riding on how they handled the crisis actually face such a possibility? I do not know what impartial research and analysis would yield, maybe this reckless community was graced by a miracle or maybe the findings could teach us more about how to handle an outbreak in the future. But I do know just as politics influences other research venues and at times suppresses research and information when it runs against what is deemed politically correct, here too it will take a long time for the truth to come out. Good research requires government funds. When the NIH or the CDC does not back a certain research financially, they are effectively censoring and suppressing information. It could be research into effectiveness of psychotherapeutic efforts to relieve persons who have same sex attraction and wish to change, or the odd surge in the last decade of late-onset gender dysphoria, or if Boro Park reached herd immunity. If the findings could be politically incorrect, there will be no seriously funded impartial research. We live in a conditionally free country.
Falling asleep with these thoughts on my mind caused me to have a epiphanic dream. In the dream I realized that the manner that the rigidly religious community deals with deadly viruses is the exact same manner it deals with hostile psychological and social phenomena. In my dream the following four stages of process became clear, be it an actual disease or an unwanted social force: Exposure, Reaction, Immolation and Accomodation. Here is how it works:
First the community is exposed to a toxic damaging force which it largely ignores through Denial. Then, there is a violent reaction. Physical and emotional aggression ensues against anyone that is an agent of the exposure. Subsequently there will be serious losses and sacrifice (Immolation), and then finally Accommodation is reached. In the case of Covid, the community first ignored the danger. Then, of course there is the actual experience which is the violent reaction, in this case the disease itself. Some time in the middle, people start to die, and then an accommodation is achieved. On a biological level, this accommodation is herd immunity. Let us examine what it means on a social level.
Whether the issue is child abuse reporting, children off the derech, domestic violence, educational neglect or drug abuse, it seems that over time the religious community changes it attitudes. Less than 20 years ago, victims of these social maladies where not taken seriously and often ostracised. Nowadays, most rabbanim and community leaders are accepting of the realities that these situations occur and try to respond with compassion and even activism. But what made the community go from reaction to accommodation? Unfortunately, this is where the key ingredient involves self-immolation. Somewhere along the way, there needs to be enough casualties, suicides, deaths or family destruction before the change happens. So, the cycle is consistent. It does not matter if it is an actual physical disease or a social malady. Exposure, Reaction, Immolation and Accommodation.
What is the next crisis we need to adapt to? And, would it not be a fine thing if we could somehow skip the casualty and death stage in order to reach accommodation?
Photo by Matteo Maretto on Unsplash
Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation 
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