“These days, in my opinion, are very meaningful. There isn’t a building without coronavirus patients, there isn’t a family who doesn’t know someone who is hospitalized or, heaven forbid, no longer here.
In recent days I personally experienced several goodbyes over the phone with people who left this world. A member of the health fund who spoke about getting the coronavirus test at his home and two days later I went to comfort mourners. A young woman fighting for every word but begging: she is afraid to go to the hospital, afraid she won’t return, and requests treatment at home – which we cannot provide.
People who really deserve to go to a quarantine hotel cry to us to speed up the process with the Home Front Command. And these days I am the Front Command Room. Up until Yom Kippur began, I was working with the computer next to me to track tests that got stuck in some laboratory and you can “say kaddish” for them, to support people seeking mental health assistance, and to publish distancing guidelines; even on eve of the holiday.
The reinforcement that I feel is the call of the great men of the generation, may they have long life, from Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky and Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, who sent out a call again in an exact way. On the one hand they said: Wear a mask, even if it is uncomfortable, over your nose. Do not host or be hosted and pray as much as possible only in open spaces. And with this: preserve the atmosphere of joy and calm as much as possible at home and be strengthened through Torah study and Psalms.
It strengthened me greatly, the notice that what I am doing right now is simply a commandment, a mitzvah. Wearing a mask is fulfilling the commandment to preserve your lives (ונשמרתם לנפשותיכם””) A commandment!
And I hope that we shall merit to see the Messiah here, for through the hands of man, I don’t see the illness going away. So, I dream about the refreshing morning with the report of a cool breeze that gathers the coronavirus and it disappears…Amen!”