Every posek in the world has clearly ruled during this crisis that preservation of life is paramount

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’ve written several times here about the importance of Torah Jews being circumspect about any particular political philosophy or party, no matter how much its policy agenda might in the moment seem to dovetail with ours. A too-tight embrace of either left or right will inevitably result in a false conflation of our unique Torah-based values with others that may bear some resemblance but are in fact far, far from ours.

The current crisis provides an example of this danger. We are comrades-in-arms with the pro-life movement, aren’t we? And, when years ago, Republicans railed against the so-called “death panels” that were purportedly a part of Obamacare’s vision for the American healthcare system, we Orthodox Jews felt they were kindred spirits, didn’t we?

But here we are, struggling amid a frightful pandemic, whose fury has been visited upon our own community with a terrifying intensity, and a national debate is underway about the necessity and duration of lockdowns and other mitigation measures. It’s a necessary debate, and given the steep societal costs whatever path is chosen, it’s also a complex one, not given to simple answers.

Yet, it has been so very unsettling to now see longtime ostensible proponents of the pro-life position suddenly begin to speak a different language, to find people who’ve advocated cherishing life at both its beginning and end suddenly downplaying preservation of life as a supreme value and attaching an economic price tag to the healthcare and longevity of people in their sixties and seventies.

Consider what one magazine’s editor wrote some weeks ago:

Governor Andrew Cuomo said, “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” This statement reflects a disastrous sentimentalism. Everything for the sake of physical life? What about justice, beauty, and honor? There are many things more precious than life…. Fear of death and causing death is pervasive — stoked by a materialistic view of survival at any price….

Those are the words of R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, a leading conservative Catholic, pro-life intellectual journal.

But it’s not just religious Catholics who’ve lost their moral bearings. So too have Jews who are seen, even by some Orthodox Jews, as representing Jewish values. Dennis Prager, a self-styled sage of moral teaching and Biblical ethics (sans the accompanying rabbinic tradition called Torah shebe’al peh), opined recently that the lockdown instituted in response to a plague that has, at this writing, taken 75,000 American lives in seven weeks was “the greatest mistake in the history of humanity.”

And then there’s another conservative writer (and Orthodox Jew) who has also apparently undergone a rapid moral evolution. When the pandemic first appeared, she wrote that “every single person saying the economic cost is too great to contain this pandemic would be silent on that front if this virus targeted the young and healthy instead of the elderly and vulnerable. We all know it.”

But just weeks later, she set off a national firestorm on social media when she wrote this: “You can call me a Grandma killer. I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers, in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not.”

As I noted above, the questions of when and how much and how quickly to begin easing up on the lockdown are complex ones given the human toll on both sides of the equation. If poskim were to be consulted by government in this decision-making process, I have no idea how they would rule on those questions.

But I do know this: Every posek in the world has clearly ruled during this crisis that preservation of life is paramount. They have instructed repeatedly that we must closely heed the directives of the very “majority of scientists, especially health officials, doctors, and epidemiologists” whom Prager sneeringly dismisses, and that not only that Orthodox writer’s missed trips to museums and zoos must yield, but when necessary, the kol Torah and tefillah of Klal Yisrael too.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 810. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com