The new Hebrew year began with closure. But that was only the official declaration. In practice, every faction pulls its own way and tries to ease the restrictions on it and make them more convenient. In this tag of war, the public’s health is of no interest to anyone and everyone is losing.
The people of Israel that’s living in the State of Israel are not a nation. It is a collective of many sects and factions. I don’t see a collective and I don’t see an Israeli nation. For this reason, we will not emerge stronger or healthier from this closure, since getting better or stronger is not on anyone’s mind. The more we sink into this pandemic, the more divided, hateful, and alienated from each other we become.
As long as we continue our separation, there is zero chance of curing from the virus. This hatred between us is the exact opposite of what we should be doing, and this is why the virus is winning. We are already the country with the second highest number of cases per million people in the world, and we are quickly racing to the “top.” Instead of a role model for the world, a light unto nations, we have become the world’s laughing stock.
If we don’t take the time while we are in closure (assuming we obey it) to think about the future of our nation and what it means to be the people of Israel, we will bring on ourselves a third, and more painful closure.
Being Israel means being united. It means making unity the top value, above all our differences. We pride ourselves in our legacy of debates and arguments and often give the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai as examples of two conflicting views within the nation. But we omit what is not convenient: They helped the nation scrutinize essential issues precisely because they were a part of the same nation.
Today’s so called debates are nothing of the kind. We wish to eliminate our dissenters, not learn together what is best for the nation. We’re not using disagreements in order to grow. In fact, we don’t even want to grow, but to obliterate our opponents and be left alone in the rink. By this we are bringing on ourselves our doom.
There will be no vaccine to Covid-19, since the real pathogen is our sick egos. When we change our relation to each other, we will be freed from the virus. Our ill-will creates it, and it will create ever worse pathogens until we switch our ill-will into good will.
Currently, we aren’t doing this. We are defying the closure to go out and protest, clash with the police, and shout in defiance without masks and without distance. Why are we not defying the closure in order to get closer to each other? As long as our motivation is to destroy, we will continue to destroy ourselves. If we maintain it long enough, we will succeed.