In Praise of Israel’s Response to the Coronavirus

As governments around the world rush to formulate policies for responding to the threat of pandemic, Israel’s policy has been among the more stringent: barring entry to residents of certain countries as early as mid-February, and imposing self-quarantine directives on citizens who have visited them. Yesterday, the quarantine was extended to anyone arriving in the Jewish state from abroad. Yair Schindel argues that Jerusalem has acted wisely:

Aggressive as Israel’s policy may be, it is without question the right one, and it will end up saving a lot of lives, as well as a lot of money. Its apparent overreaction—especially in forcing quarantine on relatively large groups—is a shining example of how to do health policy right.

The greatest danger to the population—and the economies—of countries affected by the coronavirus right now is not the mortality rate but the transmission rate. Until a vaccine is developed, the only treatment for the coronavirus is helping patients weather the disease, which involves, in the more difficult cases, hooking them up to a ventilator and isolating them in a hospital quarantine zone. Imagine if half the population of the country were exposed, 10 percent became infected, and 10 percent of those became acutely ill; could any healthcare infrastructure provide the tens of thousands of hospital beds—and ventilators—to treat these patients?

Thus the wisdom of the Israeli policy. Keeping potential carriers of the coronavirus under quarantine won’t prevent the complete spread of the disease in Israel, but it will slow it down, allowing the healthcare system to cope with the few dozen cases that might appear each week, instead of a massive influx of thousands or tens of thousands of patients at once. The former allows hospitals to properly treat coronavirus patients; the latter could potentially overwhelm the Israeli healthcare system.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Coronavirus, Israeli society, Medicine

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society