Kindness in the Time of Cholera

I’m still up in the air about the whole thing in terms of where this potential catastrophe may be heading. But what seems beyond dispute to me is that we should be heeding the advice of those wise experts specifically whose counsel is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. And equally clear to me is that we should be insisting unwaveringly that the government put the responsibility and authority to deal with this looming crisis squarely and solely in the hands of scientists, public health officials, physicians, and epidemiologists…and as far as possible from the hands of politicians.  

One of the most intelligent essays about the coronavirus outbreak that I’ve read, by Donald G. McNeil Jr., was published in the New York Times just this week (click here) and I recommend it highly to you. Basically, he observes that there are two ways to deal with a looming pandemic. There’s the modern method of bringing to bear the full force of modern technology to identify the infected, to perfect a vaccine, to develop new strains of drugs to deal with the already-ill, etc. And then there’s the medieval method of locking the infected inside their own cities, closing borders, forbidding international travel or commerce, and quarantining people who may have inadvertently been exposed to the virus until the danger passes and the infected either recover or die.

The latter approach, the one McNeil calls “medieval,” surely does have an old-fashioned feel to it. And it equally surely features a harshness that will make most moderns uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t work and hasn’t worked. President Benjamin Harrison, for example, apparently successful kept America safe from an outbreak of virulent cholera in 1892, for example, by closing American harbors to any ships arriving from Germany, the epicenter of that particular epidemic in Europe. But, as McNeil goes on to muse, just how possible would that approach be today really? The word “quarantine” derives from the Italian word for “forty” and came to have its current meaning because the Venetian Republic had the very successful idea during the Black Death plague epidemic in the mid-fourteenth century of requiring that all ships arriving in their port be isolated for a full forty days before their crew could come ashore or their cargo be unloaded. But Venice has one harbor and its masters had the ability absolutely to control the comings and goings of boats in and out of their city, whereas it is very hard to imagine that approach being fully successful in our globalized world of highly porous borders and uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) interstate travel. Nor am I only theorizing here. The Chinese actually have turned Wuhan, the city where the virus first erupted into the world, into a single huge quarantine zone. But the virus behind COVID-19 is still spreading dramatically in the world, both inside and outside of China.

The Jewish world has yet another way to combat a pandemic, one that was the subject of a fascinating piece on the Lehrhaus website that I read just last week. The essay, by Jeremy Brown, the director of the Office of Emergency Care Research at the National Institute of Health, concerns a long-forgotten ceremony developed specifically to address the possibility of epidemiological catastrophe: the shvartze chasaneh, literally “the black wedding.” (To read the full essay, click here.) The name, derived from the fact that brides normally wear white to their own weddings, was intended to suggest that the wedding in question is not just the union of an affianced couple eager to wed under a chuppah, but something else entirely—something rooted not in love and devotion, but in fear and community-wide anxiety.

As far as anyone knows, the last time anyone participated in a shvartze chasaneh was in 1918 at the peak of the Spanish flu epidemic. I’ve heard people mention that specific epidemic many times in the last few weeks, but even by today’s standards the numbers are still astounding. Five hundred million people around the world were infected, about a third of the entire population of the world. (Click here for more on that almost unbelievable number.) The death toll is estimated by most authorities to have been somewhere between forty and fifty million people, but some authorities put it as high as one hundred million. Life expectancy in the United States dropped by twelve years after just one year of the epidemic. This was a terrible time, the cataclysmic coda to the orgy of senseless killing that was the First World War. And the pandemic lasted for three full years, from the beginning of 1918 through the end of 1920.

The idea of the shvartze chasaneh itself is a simple one: the community seeks out a single man who is disabled, orphaned, and/or impoverished and arranges for him publicly to marry a similar destitute and handicapped woman. The ceremony takes place, as would any normal Jewish marriage, under a chuppah. But this chuppah is set up in a cemetery—perhaps as a way of inviting the dead to participate in the simchah—and then the community showers the couple with gifts, including gifts of cash, in the hope that this great act of kindness towards the especially needy will somehow avert the plague.

To document his research, Brown uncovered an account of one of these “black weddings” that took place in Philadelphia in 1918 during the height of the Spanish flu epidemic. Citing from a contemporary newspaper account published in the Public Ledger of Philadelphia, Brown reports that one Fanny Jacobs and one Harold Rosenberg were married just behind the first row of graves in the Jewish cemetery near Cobbs Creek, Pennsylvania, on Friday afternoon on October 25, 1918. A certain Rabbi Lipschitz presided; a full thousand spectators showed up to witness the union. And then, to quote the newspaper story directly, “spectators filed solemnly past the couple and made them presents of money in sums from ten cents to a hundred dollars, according to the means and circumstances of the donor, until more than $1,000 had been given.” And the point of the operation was also made explicit in the newspaper account: so that “the attention of God be called to the affliction of their fellows if the most humble man and woman among them should join in marriage in the presence of the dead.”

Nor was this something invented on the spot to deal with the influenza epidemic. The earliest report of a shvartze chasaneh goes back to 1785, when one was performed in the presence of two of the greatest hasidic masters, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk and Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Halevi Horowitz (the latter better known today as the Seer of Lublin), and was intended to address an outbreak of cholera. Brown reports that similar wedding ceremonies took place for orphaned teenagers in Jerusalem and Tzfat in 1865 during an infestation of locusts that threatened to destroy the food source for the entire country. (The picture below is of the one in Jerusalem.) They must have been quite something to see, those ceremonies: the one in Jerusalem took place amidst the graves on the Mount of Olives and the one in Tzfat took place in the old Jewish cemetery there, where the chuppah was set up between the graves of Rabbi Isaac Luria and Rabbi Joseph Karo, each in his own way the spiritual leader of an entire generation of Jewish people. Other such ceremonies took place in Berdichev in 1866 and at Opatow in 1892, which town Joan and I actually visited last summer.

The Philadelphia ceremony inspired at least one further attempt to ward off the flu epidemic: on November 11, 1918—the very day of the armistice that ended the war—a similar wedding was held in Winnipeg, duly reported in the Winnipeg Evening Tribune under the headline “Hebrews Hold Wedding of Death to Halt Flu.”

I do not think—at least not yet—that we should consider going this route at the current time with respect to COVID-19. But I do think that we could be inspired—and profoundly—by the idea that underlying our response to what could conceivably turn into a world-wide pandemic should be the same sense Jews of a different day had that one responds to the possibility of disaster by being kind and generous, by reaching out formally and publicly to the most needy, by focusing on the future and not solely on the calamity at hand, and by refusing to abandon our most basic values merely because we suddenly find ourselves negotiating straits that even a few months ago were unknown to any of us. The notion that the correct response to looming catastrophe lies in deeds of compassion and charity is very resonant with me personally. My plan for the moment is to wash my hands carefully and often, to leave the real decision making to the kind of public health experts who actually know what they are talking about, and to try to avert the worst by ramping up Joan and my gifts of charity to the poor and the most needy, and I encourage you to do the same!