Urchatz: Public Health and Mutual Responsibility | Passover haggadah by Noraa Kaplan

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Jewish tradition has long seen handwashing as vital to physical and spiritual health. Though the Torah never explicitly commands us to wash our hands, the rabbis of the Talmud considered it a duty sacred enough to be incorporated into halacha. They found an asmachta, a biblical hint that implies its importance: “All who [a ritually impure person] touches, without having rinsed their hands in water, shall be impure until evening.” (Leviticus 15:11) Handwashing isn’t described as a way of cleansing oneself, but as a way of preventing the spread of ritual impurity. Handwashing isn’t an act of individual hygiene, but a practice of mutual protection.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clearer than ever that our personal wellbeing is inextricably tied to the health of our communities. Measures like wearing masks and getting vaccinated do more than benefit one’s individual health: they prevent the spread of virus. Before facemasks were widely available and the vaccines had been developed, the best tools we had to curb COVID transmission were handwashing and quarantine. In retrospect, these preventative measures feel ancient, almost Levitical. The complex laws of ritual purity offer rich insight into early attempts at safeguarding public health. They also explain why Jews fared better than their Christian neighbors during the Black Death; halacha instructed them to wash their hands before eating and after using the bathroom, bathe at least once a week, avoid sewage, and take swift action to bury corpses. Jewish mortality rates during the bubonic plague were far lower than Christian communities, which tragically led to sweeping anti-Semitic massacres across Europe, due to lies that Jews were poisoning wells.

Since well before the Black Death, people have claimed that certain diseases and ailments are divine punishment. But divine punishment isn’t enough for some people; the carceral state has been called in to punish sick people too. As of 2022, the World Health Organization says there are two active global pandemics: HIV and COVID-19. In most US states, transmission of HIV is a crime. Hundreds of drug users, sex workers, and queer people have been successfully prosecuted and incarcerated for knowingly or unknowingly infecting others with the AIDS virus. In recent years there have also been logic-defying cases where violating COVID restrictions has gotten people sent to overcrowded prisons where the virus runs rampant and inmates are denied basic sanitary supplies and medical care. Instead of being given the resources they des- perately need, housing insecure people have been met with increasingly draconian laws in a misguided attempt to slow COVID’s spread.

The criminalization of sickness is a disturbing trend that reveals one of carceral ideology’s articles of faith: that isolated individuals, and not state institutions, structural oppression, or society at large, are responsible for all our problems. The idea that a HIV+ sex worker should be locked up for transmitting the AIDS virus instead of the Evangelical politicians who fought to keep the government from researching cures for “the gay plague,” or that a homeless person should be arrested for violating COVID restrictions while pharmaceutical CEOs insist on maintaining patent rights for their vaccines at the expense of millions of lives is absurd and abhorrant. Being sick does not make one impure, unclean, immoral, or criminal. The transmission of a virus is neither a divine punishment nor a reckless crime. But the reality is that all of our lives and wellbeings are inextricably linked, so what do we owe each other?

The concept of public health is still unfamiliar to many living in highly individualistic US society. The capitalist American ideal of ‘liberty’ is individuals having the right to do whatever they please, without any obligations to anyone else. This noxious ideology has informed millions of Americans’ decisions regarding the vaccine. Anti-vaxxers say, “I’m healthy, the virus won’t hurt me, why should I get vaccinated?” Those who refuse to get vaccinated because they don’t see the personal benefit cut themselves off from the collective and remove themselves from their communities. They fail to see their responsibility to their fellow human beings. When they end up on ventilators because of their arrogance, we should be saddened (because after all, they are human beings too, who deserve to heal from the terrible viruses of COVID and capitalism) but not surprised. The Talmud warned us thousands of years ago: chevruta o meytuta, community or death.

Jews have long understood the importance of public health. When an epidemic of typhus spread through the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nazis did nothing to slow its spread, so the Jews had to take matters into their own hands. Despite cramped conditions and a starvation diet of 200 calories per day, the Jews organized highly effective autonomous public health campaigns, including courses on public hygiene attended by 900 people at a time, large-scale sanitization efforts, and an underground school that secretly trained medical students and conducted research on the epidemic. Through these mutual aid efforts the Jews of Warsaw were able to bring the typhus outbreak to a stop. No wonder over 85% of American Jews are vaccinated against COVID, more than any other religious group.
The same individualist sentiment that’s defined America’s lackluster COVID response is responsible for apathetic indifference to carceral violence. Most white people, if they are concerned about police brutality and overcrowded prisons at all, see these things as “Black issues” that don’t affect them. They say, “I’ve never been to prison. The police don’t harass me. I am not a ‘criminal.’ Why should I fight for abolition?”

The great civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was not speaking rhet- orically when she said, “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Neither was Jewish poet and activist Emma Lazarus when she wrote, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free. We ignore and repudiate our unhappy brethren as having no part or share in their misfortunes—until the cup of anguish is held also to our own lips.” These women knew that systemic oppression is all-consuming. It targets everyone, albeit in different ways at different times. The carceral state will not be sated with the slaughter of Black people today, because it seeks total control over everyone and everything. The virus may come for the vulnerable today, but it will come for the ‘healthy’ tomorrow. As prophet and beautiful soul James Baldwin wrote in a letter to Angela Davis upon her incarceration in 1970:

As long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness… they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into [surrendering] themselves to what they will think of as a racial war… Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule in this country, are no more sacred than black ones, as many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove…
We know that a man is not a thing…. We know that air and water belong to all mankind and not merely to industrialists. We know that a baby does not come into the world merely to be the instrument of someone else’s profit… We know that we, the Blacks, and not only we, the Blacks, are the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit… And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized… If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

The Exodus was not individual departure from slavery but a collective liberation. Let us heed the words of Hillel the Elder: don’t cut yourself off from the collective. To do so is to choose death, but to strive for communal wellness and liberation is to choose life. As we wash our hands tonight, let us remember that our lives are in each others’ hands.

haggadah Section: Urchatz

Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan