The Interconnectedness of Us All

I suppose I shouldn’t admit this, but up until a few weeks ago I don’t believe I had ever heard of Wuhan. Given that Wuhan is a city of eleven million people (which makes almost a third larger than New York City), that is probably not something I should be particularly proud of. On the other hand, one of the more amusing side-effects of the information-overload age is the way in which people (and, yes, myself included) regularly speak with easy familiarity about people and things they hadn’t actually heard of twenty minutes earlier. Also in that category are ethnic groups like the Rohingya or the Uighurs or the Yazidis that up until just recently were familiar names in the West solely to professional ethnographers. But so are places. I don’t believe I had ever heard of Hubei Province either—despite its huge area and more than 58 million residents. Of course, now I mention Hubei Province and its capital city, Wuhan, in the same offhand way I naturally speak about Oslo or Madrid without pausing to identify them as the capital cities of their respective countries. Nor is “information-overload” an exaggerated turn of speech: I just googled “Wuhan” and Google returned 250 million hits in 0.61 seconds.

And while I’m in confessional mode, I suppose I could also admit that I hadn’t ever heard of coronaviruses until just a few weeks ago although I, of course, mention them in my daily speech without any further explanation as though any educated person would naturally know what they are and why they matter. This is slightly less embarrassing to me than not knowing where Wuhan is—coronaviruses were only identified in the 1960s, when scientists first saw the link between something called “infectious bronchitis virus” that attacks chickens and two different kinds of viruses that are found in the nasal cavities of human beings suffering from bouts of the common cold. So at least in that regard I’m only sixty years behind the times. (There have apparently been people living in Wuhan, on the other hand, for about 3,500 years.) But even now that I’m all caught up on coronaviruses, there are still details that surprise. One is that there are only seven strains of human coronaviruses known to exist—some relatively well known (like the one that causes SARS—severe acute respiratory syndrome—or the one that causes MERS—Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome), others (like the so-called New Haven coronavirus, correctly called Human Coronavirus NL63) dramatically less so. Of course, all seven—including SARS and MERS—have now been eclipsed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. (Here too, I surprised myself by not understanding until just a few days ago that the 19 only references the year in which it was identified, 2019, or that the name for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 was chosen specifically—so the head of the World Health Organization—for its blandness…and to avoid irritating the Chinese government by naming it after the country in which it was first identified.)

For a person like myself with no training in epidemiology, it’s hard to keep track of the statistics that have been coming out so quickly over these last days and weeks or to know what to do with them exactly. On the one hand, this is a very new thing: it was not even three months ago that the virus was first identified in Wuhan. In that time, though, more than 80,000 cases have been confirmed—in every province of China and in more than two dozen other countries including our own. The first individual definitely known to have succumbed to the disease only died in Wuhan on January 9, but since then there have been just over 2,700 deaths attributed to COVID-19. As of this week, however, just 38 of those deaths have taken place outside of China. Should that statistic be more reassuring or more upsetting? It’s not that obvious to a lay person like myself. Nor am I sure how to pair the number of confirmed cases with the parallel statistic that more than 27,000 people diagnosed with COVID-19 subsequently recovered from the disease—and that, despite the fact that there is no specific antiviral treatment available. It’s even less obvious to me how to negotiate the outside-of-China numbers with respect to three specific countries: Iran (with 95 reported cases and 15 deaths), South Korea (with 977 cases and 7 deaths), and Italy (with 260 cases and 7 deaths). Of course, since there appears to be about a ten-day window between infection and detectability, these numbers will all be entirely wrong within a few weeks. But the new numbers we will surely have in two weeks’ time too will be unreliable, of course, thereby leading us even further down the rabbit hole in terms of understanding how much of this is hyped-up newsfeed and how much, a serious threat that we should all be taking very seriously. Nor do I want to fall into the trap of assuming that if the Stock Market is reacting to the fear of a global pandemic, those jitters must be justified!

In terms of our own country, the numbers are also hard to understand. As of last Thursday, there are exactly 53 cases of people sick with COVID-19 in the United States. Of them, twelve were people who traveled to China and became sick there, three are American citizens who had been living in Wuhan and were evacuated back to the U.S., thirty-six are U.S. nationals who were passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and only two were made sick through human-to-human transmission inside the U.S.  Are those very low numbers a sign that we should all relax and not panic? Or would taking those numbers as a sign that this is basically a problem for China, Iran, and a handful of other countries be precisely the head-in-the-sand approach our nation should definitely not be taking…and particularly not while our numbers are still low enough for us to respond meaningfully to keep safe the rest of the population? That the President has named Vice President Pence to spearhead the American response to the COVID-19 outbreak is also confusing: should we be more relieved that the government is at least doing something, or should we be more worried that the man at the helm has no background or training of any sort in epidemiology or public health policy? It’s hard to say!

The world is filled with experts who will weigh in and attempt to chart a course forward for our nation—and for the other nations of the world as well, of course—that somehow manages to contain the threat from becoming an unstoppable menace. But what I myself have learned from all my recent reading about COVID-19 has less to do with virology and more to do with the spiritual principle I see shining through all those numbers and predictions.

The story of Adam and Eve, perhaps the most famous of all biblical stories, has at its core the simple idea that all human beings, descended from the same two ancestors, are therefore reasonably to be taken as each other’s kin. (This apparently is not merely a spiritual truth either: click here or here for some serious scientific support for that notion that there once actually was an Eve from whom humankind is descended.) For me, that is the lesson that underlies the whole COVID-19 crisis as well.

On the first of December, a single man is hospitalized in a huge Chinese city that most people outside of China have never visited or even heard of. Eventually, he is diagnosed with a coronavirus that no one has previously identified. Not two months later, there are cases in every province of China. By the middle of February, there are cases in countries as far apart as Australia and Germany, and as disparate as Finland and Cambodia. There are confirmed cases in forty countries on all five of the world’s five continents. In our own country, the confirmed cases are weirdly spread out in states as distant from each other as possible: Massachusetts, California, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Washington.

It seems all to have happened so quickly, far more like the way children living in the same home or attending the same school would easily infect each other with the flu than the way you would expect a virus to spread across the entire world in a matter of weeks. But embedded in the COVID-19 story is a deep truth unrelated to the ill ease the concept of a world-wide pandemic engenders naturally: that the biblical narrative had it right when it described humankind as a vast, interrelated network of distant cousins…and that the prophet has it exactly correctly when he wrote about all humankind having one heavenly Parent and about there being one God who made us all in the divine image not arbitrarily or accidentally, but specifically to embed in our history and our nature the fact that we are truly each other’s kin in this world and so neither naturally nor inevitably each other’s enemies.

That even writing that out has a certain mawkish, Pollyanna-ish feel to it is not at all a good thing. It sounds that way to me as well! But behind my own disinclination to embrace this notion of an intertwined humanity (reflective, in its own strange way, of the intertwined helices characteristic of the recombinant DNA that truly does link all human beings to each other) lies the challenge to set aside the natural prejudice we all bring to our analysis of the world and our place in it and to embrace in its place a sense of us all as extended brethren, as members of the same human family, as passengers in the same boat that either will or will not survive long enough to bring those traveling on it to their desired destination before foundering on the shoals of our own fractiousness and quarrelsomeness. If any good comes from the sudden spread of this terrible virus, it will derive from the degree to which its almost instant spread throughout the world is able to suggest—and to how many—the deep truth that we truly are all in this together.

Wedding Bells

There are many areas of Jewish life in which popular custom adds dramatically to what would just be required by the letter of the law…but the inverse situation also exists in which practices that are theoretically requisite have summarily dropped out of use so totally that they have been mostly (or totally) forgotten by almost all. The procedures involving the death and burial of loved ones stand out as an excellent example of custom deviating from law in countless different ways, but—slightly surprisingly—so do the procedures that govern the maintenance of a strictly kosher kitchen. Synagogue life itself is in that category as well: there are many parts of the standard synagogue service that feel requisite but aren’t actually, yet there are just as many once-standard parts of the worship service that have simply fallen away, barely remembered, let alone seriously missed, by anyone at all.

But I have weddings on my mind this week—my oldest son is getting married to his lovely fiancée next Saturday night—and so I thought I would apply that thought to the customs and traditions that surround the Jewish wedding ceremony and write this week about some of the specific ways what we today find totally familiar and ordinary is not at all what felt that way to earlier generations.

First, let’s talk about the bride’s outfit. There is no legal requirement that the bride dress in any specific way at all! But the familiar white dress, usually incorrectly taken by moderns as a subtle reference to pre-marital chastity, does have a long history and is part of the complex of customs related to the notion that the day of a couple’s wedding is a kind of private Yom Kippur for them alone. It’s a nice idea too, that just as Yom Kippur is a day of atonement and reconciliation, so are all past missteps and errors of judgment both of bride and groom forgiven and forgotten on their wedding day. The old custom, now rarely observed, of brides and grooms fasting on their wedding day is part of the same complex of ideas relating the day of a wedding to Yom Kippur. As also is the old—and now entirely forgotten—custom of brides specifically having their hair braided before the chuppah, which was once intended to bring to mind the old story about God braiding Eve’s hair before bringing her to Adam and to make the simple point that, just as Eve—who, having just been created, obviously had nothing in her non-existent past to atone for—that every bride is an Eve starting life afresh on the day of her wedding.

The veil, on the other hand, actually was intended as a sign of modesty. And that is why the custom lives on: because there is something charming about the bride choosing to veil her face on the very day that she hears over and over how beautiful and attractive she is, thus signaling her understanding that true beauty resides within, that comeliness is a function of virtue rather than mere appearance.

The badecken ceremony, also nonrequisite legally, is only one version of an old custom. There were always places in which it was traditional for the groom to veil the bride as we do today, but there were also Jewish communities in which the custom was for the rabbi performing the ceremony to veil the bride, whereupon the assembled would signal their approval by throwing things at her and the groom: either seeds or wheat kernels, both meant to be suggestive of the community’s prayer that the newlyweds have children easily and quickly. (Wheat was thought of as a plant that grows where it is sown effortlessly and almost always successfully. Whether that is true, I have no idea.) The custom involving kernels of wheat is described in an old book by Rabbi Yaakov Halevi Molin, who lived in Germany at the end of the fourteenth century, in the following way: “The custom is for the assembled to bring the groom to the bride, whereupon the groom takes the bride’s hands in his own, and as they clasp hands the wedding guests shower them with kernels of wheat and call out three times, ‘Be ye fruitful and multiply.’”

The custom of the bride offering the groom the gift of a new tallit has mostly fallen away, but when it was still a feature of Jewish life, the point was that, because there are thirty-two cords that hang from the tallit and the way to write “thirty-two” in Hebrew shorthand is a homograph with the word lev (“heart”), offering the groom a tallit was a way of the bride offering the groom her heart on their wedding day.

The custom of giving gifts to the couple is also very old. In some place, the custom was for the groom to deliver an address on the morning of his aufruf —this was long before brides were routinely also called forward to the Torah on the Shabbat before the wedding—and gifts were then offered as some sort of compensation for the effort of preparing the address. In other places, though, the custom was more like our own and gifts were brought to the wedding itself and presented to the bride and groom formally as they sat together at the head table, the bride always to the right of the groom, just as she stood to his right under the chuppah. (The bride, you see, is always right!)

And that brings me to the chuppah itself, which has its own complicated history. Not precisely legally requisite, yet universally present at Jewish weddings, the chuppah wasn’t a wedding canopy at all in its earliest iteration, just a kind of nuptial tent set up near where the wedding was to take place to which the bride and groom were sent to seclude themselves following the ceremony. (The seclusion part, called yichud, on the other hand actually is requisite.) It was only in medieval times, in fact, that things changed and the chuppah we know came into use, the kind consisting of a piece of gorgeously embroidered cloth held up by four poles. (There was also the custom of using the parochet—the curtain that hangs in front of the Ark of the Law in any synagogue—as the top of the chuppah as a way of signaling the community’s hope that the new union be blessed by God.) The chuppah was most customarily set up outdoors in the synagogue courtyard so that the wedding could take place in the open air, a custom still observed in our day at least by some, and was taken in its own way to constitute a prayer that the couple’s progeny be, at least eventually, as numerous as the stars in the nighttime sky. Even the orientation of the chuppah mattered: just as at Shelter Rock, the chuppah was traditionally oriented towards the east, towards Jerusalem, as a way of suggesting that the couple’s willingness to enter into matrimony and create a family is itself an act of worship.

The parts of the ceremony that are neither legal nor liturgical are pretty much all dictated by custom rather than by law. The custom of the processional, for example, is our latter-day echo of the older custom of the assembled all escorting the groom and the bride to the chuppah, a custom that is the norm today in Israel. (The point of this was to make it impossible for a couple to get married casually since they could obviously not escort each other to the chuppah. In turn, this forced a couple to think twice before marrying, which line of reasoning accords in New York State with the detail that wedding licenses are invalid in New York State for the first twenty-four hours after they’re issued, thus requiring couples to sleep on their decision at least once before actually tying the knot. In my opinion, this is a very reasonable concept indeed!)

In ancient times the bridesmaids gathered to support the bride for the pre-game show, but it was the groomsmen who had the honor of escorting the bride some number of times around the groom before the ceremony could begin. (The oldest texts talk about three circuits, but in our world the number is almost universally seven. And although the circling itself survived, today it’s almost invariably the bride’s mother who accompanies the bride on her seven circuits.) The circling is an ancient custom, not a legal requirement, and has many different interpretations. For me personally, the circling serves as a kind of corrective to the androcentricity of the liturgy: it may be the groom who formally marries the bride and who thus draws her into his sphere of existence, but the seven circuits can be imagined to serve as a prominent reminder of the fact that marriage is a two-way street…and that marriage draws the groom into his bride’s sphere of existence just as surely as it draws her into his.  

There are lots more customs and ceremonies to consider, but these are the ones on my mind this week. Weddings are magic moments for all concerned, particularly (although I wouldn’t have understood this when I was a groom myself) for the parents of the couple, who see their own lives made whole by the willingness of their children to accept the burdens of adulthood, to step into the romance of married life, and to create homes based on mutual respect, affection, and love. Really, what more could any parent want?

New Prospects for Peace

Like most of my readers, I’m sure, I was extremely curious to hear the details of the much ballyhooed peace plan for the Middle East promised for years by the current administration and finally published for the world to see just last week. Yes, I understood that its release date was surely timed specifically to draw the attention of the American people away from the fact that the plan’s presidential sponsor was at the time on trial in the Senate. And, yes, I certainly also understood that the chances of both sides hearing the details and then moving on directly to beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks were, to say the very least, remote. Still, I have to admit that I was extremely interested in hearing the details of the plan and, even more so, in seeing how the various players and non-players out there would respond to those details.

Some of the responses, particularly in the press both at home and abroad, were the knee-jerk ones any savvy observer would have expected. And, as everybody surely also knew would be the case, the Palestinian leadership made a huge show out of rejecting its every detail so quickly that it appeared not even for it to have been discussed at all by their leadership, let alone at length and in detail, before that response was formulated. (Mahmoud Abbas’s “a thousand no’s to this deal” comment was certainly clear enough, as was his reference to the deal as “the slap of the century,” which is actually saying quite a lot.) But diplomacy is the art of the possible, not the visible…and I continued—and continue—to hope that behind all that negative bluster lies at least the possibility of some sort of negotiated settlement based on the idea put forward in last week’s proposal.

One interesting detail that struck me was how uniformly it appeared to be understood—including by ardent supporters of Israel—that the details of the plan strongly favor Israel and that the Palestinians, after seven long decades of playing a loser’s game featuring relentless inflexibility and negativity, need finally to understand that time is most definitely not on their side, that the world—including a significant portion of the Arab world—is tired of their unwavering intransigence, and that most reasonable outside observers still can’t quite understand why the Palestinians walked away from Oslo Accords or—even more to the point—why the Palestinians, who seem never to tire of expressing their wish to function in the world as an independent nation, don’t simply declare their independence and then get on with the business of nation building.

And yet a strong case could also be made that the deal, although strongly rooted in a realistic assessment of Israel’s security needs, also grants almost axiomatic credence to many notions—including some rooted far more in fantasy than history—that the Palestinians have been putting forward as basic planks of their national self-image for decades. For example, the 180 pages of the proposal (which I have actually read and which readers can see for themselves by clicking here) accept the Palestinian claim to an ongoing presence in the region and ignore the fact that the today’s Palestinian Arabs are the descendants of the people who came with an Arab army of occupation that invaded from the east in the seventh century and brought the Jewish homeland under the jurisdiction of a series of caliphates based serially in Medina, Damascus, and Baghdad. (For more on the question of who the occupiers in this story are and who, the indigenes, click here.)  For another, the proposal accepts as basic the right of the Palestinians to their own state as though this were a no-brainer that no one could rationally oppose despite the fact that the world—the real world, I mean, the one in which all parties to the conflict actually live—is filled almost to overflowing with groups possessed of strong senses of national identity whose chances of evolving into independent nations on the territory of other people’s countries are basically zero. (No need to trust me here either—just ask the first Basque you run into, or the first Chechen, Mohawk, Lapp, Breton, Ainu, Norman, Manx, Mayan, Biafran, Uighur, or Rohingya, and see what they have to say.) Furthermore, the proposal seems to accept as basic that the Palestinians have a right to at least a kind of autonomous presence in Jerusalem—despite the fact that the mosques atop the Temple Mount are already under the control of Jordan, an Arab-Muslim state. Nor, needless to say, does the report note—even in passing—that the two-state solution is already a feature of the Middle East, the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab state of Jordan existing side-by-side on the territory of the very British Mandate of Palestine that the United Nations, in the days when it could still be taken seriously as a force for good in the world, voted for partition on November 29, 1947. So to say that the document is hostile to the national aspirations of the Palestinians is not as correct as so many seem to think: in many ways, it accepts as valid and normative the basic principles that underlie those nationalistic aspiration even when they are rooted more in fantasy than in reality or history.

In the end, if the Palestinians can move past their tradition of unyielding obduracy, there are a lot of very good reasons for them to accept the plan put forward last week as the basis for the kind of intense negotiation that really could bring peace to the region.

There is, to start, enough money on the table to start the future state of Palestine off not only on sound financial footing, but possessed of enough funding to begin to create an Arab version of the start-up nation that has brought Israel such renown and prosperity. And we are not talking about trifling sums here—the report sees the potential for pumping $50 billion into the economy of a peaceful Palestinian entity in the Middle East in the course of the coming decade. If that kind of money were used wisely and well, the Palestinians could create a future for their own children that would be the envy of their Arab neighbors throughout the Middle East.

There’s also the practical side of American politics to consider here too. It is certainly well within the realm of possibility that President Trump will win a second term. But even if he loses to a Democratic rival, the chances of a new administration coming up with a plan that will offer the Palestinians more and that the Israeli leadership will still be able to support seem remote to me. Indeed, it is precisely because this plan speaks so directly to Israel’s security needs that the Palestinians should embrace it: this is their chance to negotiate their own autonomy without Israel being able to walk away from the table over its own security concerns without looking obstructionist and unreasonable.

Thirdly, this is a chance, once and for all, for the Palestinians to abandon—both with dignity and a principled acceptance of reality—the notion that somehow, when the dust all settles, the third- and fourth-generation descendants of people who decamped during the War of Independence will be able simply to move back into the homes their grandparents and great-grandparents fled in 1948. No Israeli government would ever agree to that. Nor would any Israeli who wants to live in a Jewish state—and least of all the descendants of Jews who were expelled from Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and so many other countries in the Arab world and who were never compensated for their losses. There was regrettable and unfortunate loss on both sides, but time has come to move past that sense of endless grievance and the agreement currently on the table speaks directly to that point.

Finally, the plan offers the Palestinians a way to wrest Gaza from the hands of Hamas by making it part of a future political entity to be governed by new leaders chosen by the people in free elections. Given what is on the table—and specifically given the way Hamas has failed to create in Gaza anything remotely like a peaceful society with a thriving economy—it’s hard to imagine the Palestinian people handing the mandate to govern to Hamas or any other terrorist organization. The Palestinians deserve to be led by leaders whose primary—maybe even whose sole concern—is the welfare of the governed. I can’t imagine that such people don’t exist. And this could well be the moment for such people finally to step forward and for things to change for the better. Of course, the current leaders of the P.A. certainly understand that they would be obliged—at least eventually—to cede power to a new generation of leaders and that means that agreeing to come to the table to begin working out a new deal for the Middle East would require a certain selflessness born of patriotism and hope in the future. Would Mahmoud Abbas and his people be capable of such a gesture? The odds are not good at all. But, as I have often noted in these pages, even the laws of probability allow for the occasional improbably event. We shall all soon see what the future brings. But, at least for the moment, we can hope that the Palestinians come to realize that they are standing at a crossroads and that a future characterized by prosperity and peace is well within their grasp.