ON VIRUSES AND HOLINESS

This week’s Torah portion, parashat Emor, begins with an instruction to a special group of people, the kohanim or priests, to keep far away from any people lest they become contaminated, which ought to strike an eerily familiar note to all of us now living through the pandemic of 2020. What makes it even more uncanny is the fact that the people whom they must particularly avoid are the dead. And these days, with a prohibition against hospital visitation, even for a spouse, a sibling or a child who may dying (has v’Shalom), and with graveside funerals attended by no more than ten people, and usually fewer, and with shivahs conducted in cyberspace but not in the space of a living room, dining room, or perhaps the most important space in the home, the kitchen, we have all become the priests of old, avoiding death, in a world where this virus has already cut short the lives of 77,000 Americans, 21,000 New Yorkers alone.

For some of us, the ancient prohibition imposed on the kohanim is odd. After all, isn’t it a mitzvah to visit the dying, to sit with them in prayer, to attend to the dead? And don’t we have in our consciousness great religious figures who have done just that, like the biblical prophet Elisha of old who revived a dead child or a more contemporary example of Mother Teresa who devoted her life to care of the poor, sick and dying of Calcutta? Both are profoundly religious characters who confronted death rather than avoided it. And we honor them for their courage. So, what are we to make of the priestly prohibition against coming in contact with the dead?

For one thing, Judaism is very much a tradition of life, in stark contrast with the Egyptian religion which was focused on death and the afterlife. As a result of that emphasis, the Jewish people to this day regard life a priority, health a value, and medicine a noble art. Pikuah nefesh doheh et haShabbat—to save a life takes precedence over Shabbat. Save a single life and you have saved an entire world. Have you met my daughter, the doctor? These are all Jewish prescriptions with which we are familiar. But there is something else going on with the priests which in our highly secularized minds we may miss, and it is this.

Holiness is always something that is set apart. The Hebrew term for holiness, kedushah, actually comes from a root meaning to set apart. When something is holy, we encounter it in a way that we encounter no other thing. The Torah is never touched with our bare hands. We dare not walk around the Temple Mount, where the holy Temple once stood, in Jerusalem. To pull a blade of grass from the earth on Shabbat would be unthinkable. We cover our heads immediately upon walking into the sanctuary of a synagogue. The holy pulls the shades down on the world around us and thrusts us into the world beyond us. It awes us. It silences us. In a world where no thing is holy, and no time is holy, we are forever trapped in the here and now. But in a world where an object, a space, or a day, or a week become holy, it removes us from the here and now, and makes us think about our place in the grander scheme of things: the role we play on earth, the space we occupy in the solar system, the meaning of our life in the Milky Way, and what in God’s name are we doing at all in this thing we call the universe? That is what the holy does for us. It humbles us, it matures us, it fills us with wonder about the simple fact that we are alive.

Had I the power, I would have rid the world of this dreaded Covid-19 before anyone could have become familiar with its name. But neither I nor anyone else had the power to do so, and it has descended upon us like a noxious gas, invisible and lurking, with us doing all that is probable to avoid it. And now that the virus is here, and may be here for some time to come, and now that we, like the priests of old, are bidden to avoid death to the best of our ability, we might just start thinking about how to strengthen or enhance the holiness in our own lives.

The religiously keen know that however many steps we take to control our fate, we are never and never will be in total control. We are guests in God’s world and when we strive to avoid death, grab life, do all that is possible to promote good health for ourselves and those around us, we are in lockstep with the path God has laid out for us. The pandemic of 2020 affords us the time to rethink the place of holiness in our own lives. What Jewish tradition can we incorporate into our lives religiously, that will make us think about our own holiness? When people genuinely incorporate holiness into their lives, they never become holier than thou, which would be the exact opposite of holiness. Rather, when we incorporate holiness in our lives, it makes us realize the holiness in the thous, and the thees, and the yous, and the hims and hers. The genuine pursuit of holiness makes us see the sanctity of life around us, and that is a better way to live, and an essential tool to get us through even the most challenging of crises we may encounter.