I’m in my early 30s, live in suburban Atlanta, and work in the staffing industry. I’m fortunately able to work remotely. When I do venture out, it’s strictly for food or medicine, or to prepare for my upcoming move. With the lighter traffic, warm temperature, and blooming plants it feels like Spring Break or Memorial Day, except with a brooding anxiety. People have been good about social distancing; the biggest “everyday” issue so far is that toilet paper is impossible to find.

My fiancee and I live in an apartment complex and regrettably have no relationships with our neighbors–probably not uncommon for people in our situation (not that there’s a whole lot neighbors could do in a time of social distancing). Fortunately our property management is very community-oriented and has been great about communication and taking precautions. I’d be very interested to learn how people are showing solidarity (or not) in different types of living accommodations.The mayor of Atlanta has shown good leadership, issuing a 2-week shelter-in-place order earlier this week.Of course, this only applies within the Atlanta city limits–the millions of people living in the surrounding metro area live under a variety of orders.Governor Brian Kemp has been less impressive. He has declined to declare a statewide shelter-in-place, arguing that the situation varies across the state and it doesn’t make sense to kneecap the economy in counties without any reported cases. Various state political and medical figures are criticizing him, calling for the whole state to be shut down. I’m sympathetic to his argument but don’t think it’s a wise approach while we still have such limited testing capability.

As I mentioned, I work at a staffing company and am on the front lines of COVID-19’s economic destruction. We’ve sadly had to lay off a number of employees, and our clients have instructed us to terminate the assignments of many of our contractors. Many clients have implemented hiring freezes, although some areas–healthcare for example–are doing pretty well.

I went into HR partly because I know firsthand the pain of being unemployed and wanted to help people find meaningful work. Ending someone’s employment is usually difficult, but when someone loses their job from no fault of their own, on top of having to worry about potentially contracting a nasty, possible fatal disease, it’s especially depressing. Despite the fear, anxiety, and tension, it’s been inspiring to see the support, concern, and solidarity I’ve encountered in my work. I would humbly request you and your readers to include those of us who are trying to find people work and who are in employee-support roles in your prayers.

There’s been a lot of talk about how the COVID-19 pandemic will change things. I’m not very sanguine about deep, fundamental change happening, but it would take something like this pandemic to bring about major change. I do think we’ll see more support for things like better (mandatory?) paid leave, unemployment benefits, some kind of socialized healthcare, better public health operations, and possibly UBI. This will be true especially among my generation (millenials), having been hit with first the Great Recession and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaking of change, if we really want to change our everyday lives, now is an excellent time to start. Now is a time to reflect on what we value–and what we want to value–and to work on ways to put that into practice. Yes, policies from the government or employers could make our lives better, but we shouldn’t wait or depend on politicians, bureaucrats, or CEOs to act–it’s up to us to do it ourselves, and ultimately, bottom-up change will be better than top-down engineering. For my part, I’m grateful for the extra time to be able to journal and perform a “life inventory.”

A final note–I’ve been struggling with spirituality for a long time. I’ve felt drawn to Orthodoxy but it feels like my “religiosity switch” is stuck between On and Off. With this pandemic, I sense a change; I know it’s a cliche that people run to God when they are afraid or are suffering–but this doesn’t feel like frantic fleeing, but more like a new awareness of a supportive presence…it’s difficult to explain, but it’s there.

I am a 63 year old special education teacher (and Orthodox convert) in rural northeastern Oklahoma. I have an autoimmune disease, Sjogren’s Syndrome,  for which I have taken hydroxychloroquine for 20 years. At the beginning of March, I became aware of the research using it and zinc to treat COVID 19. My current prescription wasn’t quite up but I was able to refill it a bit early. I had a feeling there might be a run on it. I was right. A few days later Trump began talking about it.  I called my local pharmacist who informed me that the drug was now unavailable. He orders from 5 different wholesalers and all of them had been cleaned out, presumably by the Feds.

I get the impression that people think this drug is only used to treat malaria, and who has malaria anymore, right?  But millions of patients like me, with a wide variety of autoimmune diseases rely on it. It helps regulate our wacked-out immune systems, reduce inflammation, debilitating fatigue and pain.  We are already at higher risk for COVID 19 because of our pre-existing conditions. Add to that, most of us are also on some kind of immunosuppressive therapy which further heightens the risk.

So why is there such a shortage when it is only available by prescription?  I refer you to two articles recently published by ProPublica. The first is regarding lupus patients that are unable to get the drug (Lupus is only one of many diseases treated with hydroxychloroquine).

https://www.propublica.org/article/lupus-patients-cant-get-crucial-medication-after-president-trump-pushes-unproven-coronavirus-treatment

The second article is a disturbing investigation into the hoarding of hydroxychloroquine by DOCTORS.   https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-are-hoarding-unproven-coronavirus-medicine-by-writing-prescriptions-for-themselves-and-their-families

Our governor has placed restrictions on dispensing the drug, presumably to prevent this kind of behavior but that doesn’t help very much when the shortage is on a national level.  So for now, I’m reducing my daily dosage by half to try and stretch out my current supply. I am so incredibly frustrated and yes, angry, with the ineptitude of our president and the selfishness of the hoarding physicians who should know better. Let me be clear. I don’t begrudge medical staff on the front lines of this pandemic having access to it if it might help them.  But shouldn’t patients who are already taking it for serious, incurable autoimmune diseases at least go the head of the line for what is left?

I’m betting Donald Trump does.

From Israel:

I’m writing from a small town in Israel, where the rainy season is coming to an end and the sun has started to show its face for summer – not that any of us are outdoors enough to see it. Social-distancing measures have been in place for about two weeks now; those two weeks have felt like decades, but the swift response seems to have kept our coronavirus numbers relatively low, God willing. As of yesterday, we’re in complete lockdown, with all non-essential businesses closed and trips of more than a few minutes’ walk outside the house prohibited.

On a personal level, my husband and I have experienced this time as a kind of complicated gift. We’ve suddenly been forced to reorient our lives around the most basic and fundamental elements of the human condition: our home, our family, our religious life, and our physical health. We both work at home now, and my studies have been moved to Zoom, so our little house has become the exclusive geographical nucleus of our lives. The daycares are all closed, so I’ve become a stay-at-home mom to our 11-month-old by default, and I’ve gotten to see lots of glorious baby moments that I would otherwise have missed. Because so many other things have been stripped away (commuting, social gatherings, errands), we’ve been able to devote more time and effort to prayer, study, reading and writing, and avodah shebalev – the work of the heart, or the elements of religious and spiritual practice that are more difficult to categorize. My husband is learning more Torah than he has since he left yeshiva, and after the first few days of initial shock, I’ve found my anchor in learning as well. 

And now that all of these things have been forcibly highlighted for us, I wonder how we ever lived according to other priorities – bear in mind that it’s only been two weeks. On the one hand, I’m painfully aware that this understanding comes at a high, high cost in human lives and societal stability. On the other hand, I can’t help but hope that humanity in general, and our small family in particular, will build something beautiful in the rubble of this crisis: that the destruction is an opportunity for tikkun, repair, of the things that were already broken in our world.

Our provincial town has mostly been spared so far. There have been a few exceptions, mostly before the social distancing really began, and here I’ll share two of the most instructive. A well-loved and hugely influential rabbi and teacher in our community was diagnosed with coronavirus, but only after several days of teaching at the local high school, leading prayers, and hosting a festive communal meal for Purim (I’ll get to that in a moment). As a result, all of the staff and students of the high school, as well as many of the adults in the community who learn and pray with him, were sent into 14 days of quarantine. Miraculously, he seems to have recovered completely, and only one of his colleagues ended up getting sick. 

There was also a case in a neighboring town where a woman immersed in a mikvah, a ritual bath, and then discovered she had the virus; all the other women who immersed that night were quarantined, and I don’t know whether any of them were infected in the end. (There’s a difficult and interesting conversation about the mikvahs going on at the moment; it’s complex both from the perspective of Jewish law and from an emotional standpoint, as it throws in stark relief many of the questions of self-sacrifice that all religious communities are grappling with right now. But that’s a subject for another post.)

This is to say that Jewish life holds a specific set of pitfalls in a pandemic, one that I suspect has raised Israel’s numbers higher than they otherwise would be. Religious Jewish men, as well as some women, congregate for prayer three times a day. Shabbat, the Sabbath, is a weekly day of total immersion in community – prayer, public Torah reading, lessons and social activities for kids, and huge meals that bring together not only the family but guests from outside the family. Shared learning is commonplace, as are various forms of help to others in the community (checking in on the sick, cooking for new mothers, visiting and comforting mourners in their homes, etc.). And the use of technology is largely forbidden on Shabbat and holidays, which means that virtual connection is often not an option in the moments when we will most need it.

This is especially true of the particular period in which the virus has hit: the weeks between Purim and Pesach (Passover), a stretch of time usually experienced as redemptive. Most Israelis are not religious (your humble narrator isn’t a fair representation), but most take part in at least some religious traditions and customs; while the things I’ve listed above may be less relevant for the non-practicing, almost everyone observes the holidays. And what are the holidays these days? 

On Purim, the chaotic and whimsical celebration of the events recounted in the Book of Esther, Jews dress up in costumes, come together for public readings of Esther, dance together, give one another gifts, open their doors to all comers for celebratory meals, and – in a departure from our usually staid ways, documented as early as the Talmud – get rip-roaring drunk. In times that mandate introversion, it’s a recipe for disaster; it took place in the first days of the pandemic, before people were really starting to take it seriously. 

And then there’s Pesach, which I’ve always believed is the most beautiful holiday of the Jewish calendar: a holiday that celebrates the string of miracles in the Exodus, which we are commanded to experience “as though we ourselves went out of Egypt.” As many of your readers may know, the holiday is marked primarily with a seder, an experiential gathering that combines learning, storytelling, food, song, and prayer. A family seder routinely sets places for as many as 30 people, if we account for all the members of the family, including children, and the handful of other guests. As part of the ritual structure, we pass symbolic food and drink to one another and wash one another’s hands. 

This Pesach, we will have to dramatically change the way we mark this holiday, or we will open ourselves up to serious danger. We will be hosting seder in our house, just the two of us and our baby; I know many single people who will be doing it solo. A communal and national miracle, a communal and national deepening of the connection to God, will have to be experienced alone and in small groups. In a way, we could read it as a shift in the point where we enter the story: we are not walking together between the raised walls of the Red Sea, but rather sitting in our houses with blood smeared on our doorposts, praying that the plague will pass. 

It’s an entirely new paradigm, a sudden jolt from the plural to the singular, that may help to balance us in the long term but which is devastation in the short term.

This brings me to another point which I feel is important to make, and which may resonate with readers of this blog. It has been widely documented, both in English-language and Hebrew-language media (including by you, several posts ago), that Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) Jews are not complying with social distancing regulations. Indeed, the results have already been frightening; as an example, the Satmar Rebbe, the head of one of the largest and most famous Hasidic sects, now has coronavirus, which means that many of his Hasidim likely will develop it as well. 

Most of the writers documenting this from the outside characterize it as religious zealotry: a total faith in God and obsession with observance that precludes even the most basic measures of self-preservation. I don’t come from this community – the world in which I live could be described as “modern Orthodox,” and has a relationship to contemporary Western society which is probably similar to that of most Dreher readers – but it’s clear to me that the picture is much more complicated than that.

Here I’ll translate a Facebook post by the popular writer Yehuda Gizbar Fenigstein:

“A few things that need to be said about the Haredi sector (full disclosure: I’m not Haredi, I just grew up in a Haredi neighborhood. Sorry about all the broad generalizations; obviously this isn’t true of everyone. Readers are invited to weigh in)

1. Their homes aren’t meant to hold everyone. As in, literally, a nuclear family isn’t supposed to be able to fit everyone in the house. That happens only on holidays, and even then there are mattresses spread out on the floor. Usually the sons are in yeshiva, the father works or learns, the daughters are in school (they sleep at home, but don’t study or work there), and so on. These are huge families and relatively small homes, and so there is a certain dependence on public spaces (parks, streets, synagogues) where the kids and the parents spend their time; those are the places where life happens.
2. The ability to maintain large families is usually based on support from within the community: educational frameworks, children playing together, nearly-free summer camps during breaks from school (ten shekels per day [translator’s note – this is like paying three dollars per day for summer camp]), older girls looking after the younger girls, and the boys operating within their own social sphere. When none of this exists and everyone is stuck at home, it becomes a pressure cooker. Think of your family and the amount of interaction within it, multiply it by three or four, and make the house one square meter smaller. That’s what it looks like.
3. They don’t have Internet. That is, some do, but fewer than in the general population, and it’s only at work, at the library, maybe for a select few at home – and even that has strict browsing limits. There’s grocery delivery, but not to the same extent. There’s exposure to certain websites, but not to social media (with the exception of online Haredi forums). Unlike us, they aren’t totally immersed enough to know what’s going on all over the world, and not enough to get enough information to realize that people are dying from this whole story. That’s true for many people who aren’t on Twitter, but it’s a thousand times more true for people who don’t have Facebook and barely have WhatsApp with browsing limits. A significant percentage of them just don’t really know what’s going on.
4. I’m not trying to make excuses for people who go out of their houses. I think that this is a matter of saving lives [translator’s note – the phrase used is pikuach nefesh, the Jewish injunction to save lives that overrides almost every commandment in the Torah], and we need to shut ourselves up in our houses as though there were Cossacks outside. Like everyone else, it drives me crazy when people go out of their houses, and public gatherings (secular and religious alike) seem to me at the moment like lethal dangers which should be prohibited by law. I’m just saying that generally speaking, in extreme situations, people are driven to accuse the other, the outsider, and to forget that other people – whom, fundamentally, we don’t understand at all – are also human beings.”

In other words, it’s convenient and comforting to scapegoat Haredim, but they have good reasons for what looks like irrational behavior from the outside.

I’ll rephrase this in more Dreherian terms for emphasis: this is a radical communitarian society built expressly to enable the mutual service of God, one which relies heavily on religious institutions and shared spaces built by the community, a sort of Benedict Option lived by millions. And precisely the principles which keep it healthy, functional, and even inspiring in ordinary days – fellowship, mutual support, large families, resistance to technology, and of course an overarching religious devotion that steers one’s every decision – are the principles that make it so dangerous in a pandemic. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to castigate the Haredim for not being able to re-engineer their entire society in a matter of days, or for being reluctant to do so. I pray that they will be able to change just enough to survive, and at the same time that they will preserve the many crucial and wonderful things that they have managed to create. 

Ironically, in my own community and probably yours as well, it’s our connection to the modern world – which so often can be fraught, complicated, antagonistic – which has helped us. Our dependence on social media and our alienation from one another may be mousetraps in peacetime, but in plague-time, they may save our lives.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov teaches that God is found even in the “hiddenness within hiddenness,” in the places where we can’t see Him and don’t even sense that He might be concealed. I’ve started to see this teaching in my own relationship to modernity. God is there too, acting through certain facets of the modern world, and this pandemic has only revealed what was already present. 

I hope that this will also be true of the plague as a whole: that even there, God will be found. And I hope that Pesach, a yearly experience of redemption and closeness, will once again redeem us.

(I’m acutely aware that I can’t call myself a spokeswoman either for Jews or for Israelis. I’d be thrilled if other readers from either or both of these categories would chime in, should they happen to exist.)

Thank you, readers. Thank you so much. Keep them coming to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Please put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and don’t forget to say from where you write.