Parshas Vayakhel-Pekudei
By Rabbi Dovid Zauderer
That’s right! The very first recorded quarantine in history to protect people from a plague was on the night of the very first Passover Seder in history over 3300 years ago!
As we read in Exodus 12:22, Moses instructs the Jewish people regarding that fateful night, “You should take a bundle of hyssop and dip it into the blood that is in the basin (from the slaughtered Paschal Lamb), and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with some of the blood that is in the basin, and as for you, you shall not leave the entrance of the house until morning. G-d will pass through to smite Egypt, and He will see the blood that is on the lintel and the two doorposts, and G-d will pass over the entrance and He will not permit the ‘destroyer’ (plague) to enter your homes to smite.â€
Our present ‘quarantine’ inside our homes to protect ourselves from the Coronavirus Disease – otherwise known as COVID-19 – is not unlike the Biblical one. For just as the Jewish people in Egypt hunkered down in their houses on that first Passover night, eating their dinner (the “Paschal Lambâ€) and wondering what will happen to them during the coming plague, so, too, are all of us ‘hidden away’ in our houses, wondering what the deadly coronavirus might yet do to us.
Of course, there is one major difference between the two ‘situations’….
Unfortunately, scientists have yet to come up with an effective vaccine for the deadly coronavirus. [Ed. Note: As of last week, the World Health Organization had posted a list of 41 possible vaccine candidates on its site – so they are certainly trying. Still, no one will be lining up this summer for vaccinations. It will be at least a year to 18 months before any vaccine is ready for large-scale use, according to most estimates -dz]
However, G-d, the “Greatest Scientist of all Scientistsâ€, instructed Moses to provide the Jewish people with a full-proof “vaccine†that was guaranteed to protect them from the plague that would be wreaking havoc just outside their homes. All they had to do to be saved was to slaughter a lamb and to sprinkle its blood on the lintel and doorposts of their homes.
The blood from the Paschal Lamb that was applied to their doors would be an atonement for their sins.
On a simple level, the blood on the doorposts and lintel symbolized a red (Hebrew) letter ח, a symbol for chayim, life. Anyone putting blood on the door would be “passed over†and given life when G-d passes through Egypt to kill the firstborn.
On a deeper level, we need to understand that the lamb was actually worshipped as an idol by the Egyptians. So that by slaughtering the lamb and sprinkling its blood on the doorposts of their homes in full view of the Egyptians – and essentially rejecting their host country’s idolatrous and perverse culture - the Jewish people performed an act of great self-sacrifice, and thus they deserved to be saved from the deadly plague on that fateful Passover night.
Now I make no pretensions as to think that I know the reason why the world has to suffer through this coronavirus outbreak – only G-d knows these things.
However, it is an integral part of the Jewish hashkafah, or worldview, to look for the deeper message in everything that happens to us in life – as individuals or as a nation as a whole.
That said, maybe the take-away here is that just as the Jews in Egypt had to reject the perverse and idolatrous culture of their Egyptian hosts in order for them to be saved during the Plague of the Firstborn, so, too, do we need to make sure that our own Yiddishe homes reflect proper Jewish values and rituals such as Torah Study, Charity, Shabbos, kosher, etc., instead of just gobbling up everything that the world out there throws our way.
This way, we will merit being saved from the plague just as our ancestors were long ago on that fateful Passover night….just sayin’
http://www.torchweb.org/torah_detail.php?id=608