My Jewish communities are talking a lot lately about collapse: the crumbling of the interconnected systems and structures that support our lives (industrial food production, shipping, medicine and healthcare, communication and transportation systems, and so on), as a result of human-created climate crisis. We can see this happening in ways that are both slow (the egg shortages and high prices caused by the bird-flu pandemic in chickens) and fast (cities devastated by fires and flooding, with basic services returning after weeks, months or not at all). The actions of the people in power are escalating these crises as quickly as possible; most of us alive today are likely to experience far more dramatic versions of the catastrophes and shortages that are already widespread.
Last year, Derekh Travers and Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg held a conversation about collapse and resilience for Tzedek Lab. We brainstormed gifts and tools from Jewishness that can help us face collapse — land-stewardship practices, grief practices, stories of survival and persistence, prayer, practices for teshuvah and accountability. Jewish tradition can support powerful communities. But it is also hard to build community, hard to keep communities intact in crisis and scarcity and hard to adopt practices that run counter to what we are taught by the extractive, individualist systems that shape broader society. It’s hard to build communities to take care of each other when the power structures we live in don’t value care. One way that many communities have struggled in this way is in addressing the Covid pandemic.
As I write this in March of 2025, we are well into the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency. Among many horrific actions and executive orders, Trump has done massive damage to our already-flagging public health systems, including pulling out of the WHO, canceling the CDC’s flu vaccine campaign, the meeting to plan for next year’s U.S. flu shots and ending the HHS advisory committee on Long Covid. His appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead HHS (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) has provoked an outcry from experts due to Kennedy’s history of anti-vaccine activism, misinformation and conspiracy theories. During a measles outbreak and facing significant risk that the bird-flu pandemic will cross into human-to-human transmission, the consequences of this public health dismantling are painfully apparent.
Jewish practices can help us face collapse — land-stewardship practices, grief practices, stories of survival and persistence, prayer, practices for teshuvah and accountability.
In the midst of a dizzying flood of attacks on democracy, civil rights and marginalized communities, many people have barely noticed the blows to public health. It’s easy to miss them because these institutions and practices have been slowly eroding for years. The stage was set for these rollbacks well before Trump entered his second term.
In May of 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden declared the Covid public health emergency over while hundreds of people were still dying from the virus each day in the United States, and tens of thousands more were being infected and ending up with Long Covid. Covid transmission has remained high since then — much higher than in the first two years of the pandemic, when much of society was still taking precautions like masking and distancing. Although the rates of death and hospitalization have significantly lowered since vaccines became available, that lowering is relative — hundreds, and sometimes thousands — of people have died of Covid every week in America since society has been told that it is no longer a problem and has abandoned public-health measures accordingly.
For those of us who are high risk for the worst impacts of acute Covid, who are protecting loved ones who are, or who simply understand and want to avoid the realities of Long Covid that everyone is vulnerable to, it’s been jarring and painful to witness the transition to a widespread attitude that taking precautions to avoid spreading this and other illnesses is no longer necessary and/or worthwhile. In the early months of the pandemic, many people in our communities seemed to be on the same page about collective care and interdependence, reiterating that “my mask protects you, your mask protects me.” Many Jewish institutions pivoted quickly, moving services and events online, and instituting practices to avoid spreading Covid.
Today, the vast majority of Jewish spaces, along with most of the rest of society, have returned to pre-pandemic norms and practices. This doesn’t reflect the actual risk of Covid, which still kills many people and comes with a significant risk of Long Covid (a risk that grows with each infection, even mild ones), a condition with no known cure or reliable treatment; rather, it reflects attitudes and behaviors that are mostly unrelated to objective risk. The writer Beatrice Adler-Bolton has termed this “the sociological construction of the end of the pandemic”: The pandemic has been “ended” not by stopping Covid or reducing its spread, but by increasing the amount of death and long-term illness that society is willing to tolerate so that the economy can charge forward.
Rabbi Jess Belasco, who founded the Jewish Covid Resilience Network and leads the Svara Disability Justice Torah Circle, has been working since early in the pandemic to support disabled, high risk and otherwise Covid-conscious Jews — many of whom are dealing with deep grief about the ways they’ve lost access to Jewish community and ritual life, as synagogues and other Jewish spaces have abandoned the collective practices that kept them safe. In their recent essay on Evolve, Jess writes about the dissonance of this exclusion by communities that claim Jewish values of community and care: “ … this experience of needing a community that already sees itself as ‘enlightened’ to do better (and feeling gaslit, however unintentionally, by the supposed progressiveness of the people doing the harm). For me, as a high-risk person, the Covid pandemic has exacerbated many of these communal dynamics.”
Mariyama Scott, a disabled Jew and community leader living in the San Francisco Bay Area, wrote a piece in March 2022 for the Jewish News of Northern California, pleading for Jewish communities to continue to protect their disabled members and their communities as a whole by taking precautions to prevent spreading Covid. Three years later, Mariyama told me:
While most of the Jewish world has continued to exclude those of us who can’t risk getting Covid, I’m grateful to a few leaders who have worked with me on creating layered Covid protocols that have allowed me and other high risk and disabled folks to still be in community. With community support to purchase at-home molecular testing supplies (similar to a PCR test), mask requirements, and the extreme luck to live in California where it is possible to be outside much of the year, I have been able to participate in ritual that had been closed to me for several years.
We can shift from framing Covid protections as being something we do to include disabled people to being something we do to protect us all.
In an era when Covid-conscious people are increasingly pressured to justify not wanting to get or spread Covid, I, my family and my closest friends have never stopped masking, testing and taking precautions. I feel incredibly lucky that my Jewish community’s practices around pandemic safety and care are some of the best I’ve experienced. Food is always served and eaten outdoors. Services are held outdoors when the weather allows. All services require well-fitting, high-quality masks, and everyone wears them, including service leaders. We acknowledge that community members all have different practices in their personal lives but that in our shared community spaces, we take responsibility for collective well-being, which includes centering the needs and safety of the most impacted people.
When I talk to Covid-conscious Jewish friends in other places, it’s clear how rare and precious my Covid-aware community is. We have oriented to these practices as our new normal, and, for now, have managed to avoid significant conflict or resistance. I’ve heard enough stories from disabled Jews who have been dismissed, gaslighted and abandoned to know that in many communities, this isn’t the case.
Covid-conscious Jews are also directly impacted by the actual (and threatened) mask bans that began proliferating last year, led by the MAGA right, often directly as an effort to repress pro-Palestine protests. Jews for Mask Rights began organizing in response to New York’s proposed mask ban, to push back on the common excuse that banning masks in public is a way to address antisemitism. In their open letter, they connect masking to Jewish values and explain how mask bans harm everyone while disproportionately impacting the most marginalized groups. Mask bans protect power, not people — and they certainly don’t protect Jews from antisemitism. One of the main asks from organizers resisting mask bans is for more people to wear masks — to normalize the practice, as a way of pushing back against rising authoritarianism.
The communities that I’m most deeply involved in enact our values both by fighting for a better world that values life and liberation, and by embodying those values in the ways we show up for each other. Public health is a collective project; by definition, the responsibility for public health should not rest on individuals. We should have integrated what we learned in the early years of Covid to create safer societies that protect people and help us weather the next pandemic. We should have paid sick leave, free and easy access to masks (and mask-fit testing), accurate and reliable tests, regular vaccines and treatments like Paxlovid. We should allow people to work from home when possible and allow kids to stay home from school when sick. We should expect that public spaces be designed to keep people safe, with ventilation, clean air and regular masking, especially in places like healthcare settings. We should have universal healthcare, not our current system that largely treats healthcare as a luxury item.
But just because institutions have abandoned people, our communities don’t have to. Even when it’s unpopular, we can weigh the safety and accessibility of high-risk people more heavily than the comfort and convenience of people who don’t want to be asked to mask. And we can recognize that five years in, almost everyone is at higher risk of serious and/or long-term impacts from Covid because of having already had multiple infections. We can shift from framing Covid protections as being something we do to include disabled people to being something we do to protect us all. We can invest in shared resources like molecular tests and air filters. We can make sure that all of our events prioritize — and communicate — their Covid precautions and other accessibility information.
As we face the escalating impacts of the climate crisis, we need to be adaptive: learning and using new skills and practices rather than staying committed to an old version of normal that is disappearing, no matter how we try to cling to it. Though many people want to forget the closures and mask requirements of the early pandemic, they prevented a lot of death, suffering and long-term illness. We are likely to face a near future in which much more collective care will be needed. What will help us weather this is the same thing that always helps in crisis: being part of a community that looks out for one another. The pandemic has been, and remains, an opportunity to practice this. Instead of endangering our communities and excluding people, we can choose to change our practices to center care and safety — for the survival of us all.
