Every year, during these days, the days of the counting of the Omer, we mourn the plague that struck twenty-four of Rabbi Akiva's disciples. This year, the word 'plague' takes on a different, tangible, chilling meaning. No more stories about distant days, but a painful contemporary reality.
Our sages set this event as a sign for the generations. They taught us that the plague struck the disciples of Rabbi Akiva because they did not show respect for one another. Hence the lesson, how important it is to respect one another, to love one another, to stay away from controversy, from quarreling, from gratuitous hatred.
Why not the other way around?
Unfortunately, the urge for controversy never leaves us for a moment. It penetrates every corner, every public, every community. It always finds a reason for a quarrel, and wraps it in the appropriate justifications. It knows how to speak to everyone in their own language and trap them in its web, the web of argument and division.
One of his successful techniques is generalization. Taking an exceptional and marginal event and painting an entire community in its colors. We all fall into this trap, and we don't always manage to rise above the tendency to generalize, to blacken. And after all, in every community, sector, and community there are exceptions and exceptions to the rule, who do not teach about the general.
Why doesn't it work equally well in the opposite direction? Why, when we see a person from a certain sector doing a good deed and being praised, don't we rush to conclude that 'everyone is like that'? Why don't we rush to project it onto the entire public from which he comes? Why, in such a case, is the tendency to say: 'There are also good people among them'?
This is proof that this is not an objective judgment, but a way of seeing that stems from a prior position.
When you have a basic hostility towards a certain public, every negative exception will become representative of the entire public, while a positive event will be interpreted as a local and isolated case, not indicative of the character of the entire public. This preconceived position is the instinct for debate and controversy that resides within us.
These days we are all required to do self-work in this area. To cleanse ourselves of hatred for other communities and other people. To see the good in others. To believe that every Jew, no matter who they are, has treasures of goodness, faith, love, and caring. We just need to uncover them.
Great gratitude
These days, we all need to express our deepest gratitude to those on the front lines of the fight against this severe pandemic. To the medical teams, who are doing sacred work with a dedication that cannot be described in words. Many of them are infected with the virus, or sent to quarantine, and then return to the work of saving lives.
We see their exhausted faces. Their eyes red from lack of sleep. Their pain for every instance in which they failed and were unable to save the patient's life. They are the soldiers who are sacrificing their lives in this campaign.
And next to them are the police, who are tasked with a thankless role. They are sent to save people's lives, to prevent them from contracting the virus, and instead of words of gratitude and appreciation, they receive angry responses and sometimes even curses. But they continue their work and continue to protect our lives and our safety.
Let us turn these days into days of unity and love, days of gratitude and appreciation, days of connection and learning virtue, and God, the Almighty, will say enough is enough for our troubles and send us our righteous Messiah.
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