Published: 22 September 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
JEWS KNOW ABOUT masking. It is probably only the Haredim who never hide their Jewishness. Unlike black people, who can’t hide, no doubt many Jews are happy to simply blend in with the crowd on the street.
We’ve got a whole festival devoted to hiding and, not surprisingly, it is characterised by masks and fancy dress. Purim is the archetypal diaspora event. Jews, at the mercy of their rulers, can often only quiver in fear as the flow of events swirls around them.
Esther hides herself (admittedly in plain sight), Mordechai gets to dress up, Haman (boo!) disguises his antipathy for the Jews when persuading Ahashverosh to sign the decree against them. Nothing is what it seems. All is continuously befuddled and confusing. The boozing is of heroic proportions.
But in the end, the festival outs us. You can’t hide, it tells us – and counterintuitively for so many Jews, it insists that we’ve got more friends and more power than we think. Yes, we are understandably afraid from time to time. We can’t control everything. But we can bring about far more than we initially realise.
Rabbi Akiva tells a parable about fish being lured out of the water onto dry land where they’re told they’ll be safer. Wisely, they recognise that if they’re not safe in water, their natural habitat, they’re certainly not going to survive out of it. But still Jews seem not to learn that lesson.
Many bring up their children to behave as if being less Jewish will somehow help them - save them messing up schooldays with festival absence, enable them to eat what they like, make it easier to socialise with colleagues over the weekend.
But do masks help us, either as Jews or as grapplers with a virus? In our corona-world we think of them as protective, but masks were originally for disguising, for crime and deception, or perhaps transgressive flirtation. Even wearing make-up was thought to be an unacceptable dishonesty for decent folk (“To mask or not to mask” remains one of the hottest issues for lockdown survivors). Masks clearly touch a nerve in all humanity.
Or not quite all. We’ve all seen people from oriental countries wearing masks as almost routine, though in their case it was mostly to avoid intensely polluted air. But surely their air was not necessarily more polluted than in the industrialised West. Why did they find it easy to mask themselves but so many Westerners have to be coaxed into buying fashionable masks to seduce us into using them?
I suspect it’s to do with our strong Western culture of individualism. We want to express ourselves, be true to ourselves and so on, rather than devote ourselves to the community and give of ourselves for the greater good. Until now.
Now we applaud lowly workers who help people in care homes, posties who make sure we can keep in touch with each other. We notice the garbage collectors who keep our streets clean. We value the train and bus drivers who kept working while the rest of us cowered at home. They put themselves on the line for the greater good and to keep society rolling.
Perhaps, then, the Covidend – the Corona dividend – is a renewed appreciation that greed and self-interest really doesn’t do it in this situation.
Might we come out of this better people in a better world? Will Black Lives Matter more and will the climate crisis finally get the attention it deserves? Changing our lives radically for the greater good seemed unthinkable six months ago. Now it’s the order of the day.
Masks had two functions – either they deceived so the wearers could take advantage of those they encountered, or they protected us from disease or pollution. But now we are to use masks in the medical style. This is not about protecting ourselves, but protecting others. We have to do something we don’t really want to do because others need us to. I suspect most people still haven’t really understood that.
This is not the way the world has been. The social solidarity required people to pay their taxes ungrudgingly, not for what they get back but because society needs it, has been a hard sell in much of the Western world for 40 years or more.
Even after the banking crisis of 2008, when greed was outed for the devil it is, it took a while but eventually things righted themselves and we went back to the dog-eat-dog system we were used to. But Covid has come to teach us. A mask might be a barrier, but its purpose is not to hide me, but to protect you.
There are no barriers that will work selfishly, unless we simply shrink our own worlds to our disadvantage. Only co-operation will work if we want to live at all freely.
We all know that, as Jews - educated, generally prosperous, mobile, well-networked globally - we have a lot to offer. And now’s the time to do it. But we’re not just clever or well-placed or entrepreneurial. Jews are something in particular. We have distinctive Jewish insights, particular Jewish experiences and rich Jewish wisdoms to add to the world’s pooling of its resources.
But before that, for some of us … we’ll first have to learn what that distinctive Jewish contribution can be. Time to get studying!
Illustration: Avi Katz
