Progressively Speaking: Why Covid vaccination is a mitzvah

When my mother told my small niece not to go out of the gate when playing in the garden, she resisted, saying she had learned at her Orthodox Jewish primary school that ‘God will protect me’. When my mother explained the God of Israel was using her as the protective agent to watch over my niece’s safety, she reluctantly agreed to stay within the garden.

I think of this story whenever I come across Jews who refuse medical interventions because of ‘the will of God’ and when I hear the phrase pikuach nefesh used in response. While we are used to translating the phrase as ‘saving a life’, its root meaning is ‘watching over’ or ‘overseeing a person’. Our obligation to others is to watch out for them, ensuring they are not endangered.

My niece, disabused of the notion that God would always protect her, grew up aware of the Jewish obligation to take care of each other and that looking out for others is the responsibility of everyone. This means taking public health seriously, rather than allowing each to make a decision for themselves that may have harmful consequences for others. It means not expecting God to intervene, but being the agent of protection ourselves – protecting ourselves and others.

History has shown us that biblical verses such as: “Whoever keeps the mitzvot will know no harm” (Ecc 8:5) cannot be read at face value, that faith in God is not the harbinger of survival, and that the kind of piety expecting divine protection as reward for uncritical devotion is at best misguided. From Talmudic times onwards, tradition sees doctors not as people who frustrate God’s will by healing those whom God has struck with illness, but as people whose work is sacred. Thus it becomes a religious obligation to prevent danger and illness in oneself and others, and failing that, to work to heal them.

Recently, the Charedi world was in uproar when a prominent rabbi advocated vaccinating children against Covid. He received death threats, was called Amalek (whose name must be erased) and was accused of murder by his own community, purportedly in God’s name.

Progressive Judaism does not teach that illness is God’s will, nor that only the undeserving succumb. Faith does not preserve, disease is not a judgement; each of us must watch out for others.  Vaccination protects us all. It’s a mitzvah. Do it.

• Sylvia Rothschild has been a Reform community rabbi in south London for 30 years