Our Gemara mentions an interesting social fear, that of being called a Kerus Shafecha. What is a Kerus Shafecha? Kerus shafecha literally means a cut pipe, a deformation or injury to the urethra or male organ, often stemming from a botched Bris Milah that leads to a dysfunction in the ability to properly urinate and ejaculate. In fact, this deformity would invalidate the person as a marriage partner, and also it was believed medically to make the person functionally infertile. Therefore, there was an intense hysteria about being accused of having this deformity. Pages of halakha were devoted to proper privy conduct in order to avoid being gossiped about that one had this deformity - and by implication his children were not his own, but mamzerim. (Bastard children conceived from an adulterous or incestuous relationship. See for example, Niddah 13a.) Though this fear used to be vividly felt, it is safe to say, that this fear is not an active concern in present-day culture. Indeed, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) has an extensive Appendix of culturally-based manifestations of mental illness. Thus, every generation and culture has its collective fears and anxieties, conscious and unconscious, and physical manifestations of them. And, once the anxiety reaches a tipping point, it develops into a cultural and social phenomenon.
Let us look at some cases in history of mass medical hysteria and cultural contagions:
- Interestingly, there is a fear of the male sexual organ shrinking and/or retracting into the abdomen, which is called “koro”, and has manifested in Chinese, other asian cultures and Africa. ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227752162_KoroThe_Psychological_Disappearance_of_the_Penis )
- There was the dancing plague of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) in July 1518. Numerous people took to dancing for days.
- An odd, non-medical, social contagion occurred in regard to the Seattle windshield pitting epidemic. In Bellingham, Seattle, and other communities of Washington state in April 1954 There was some kind of panic regarding previously not-noticed windshield holes, pits and dings. People thought someone or something was doing it, vandals, toxic waves from nuclear bomb testing, and whatever. Car lots and parking garages reported particularly severe attacks. By April 17, the pitting suddenly stopped. Although natural windshield pitting had been going on for some time, it was only when the media called public attention to it that people actually looked at their windshields and saw damage they had never noticed before.
- Then there was the June bug epidemic (1962) – The June bug epidemic serves as a classic example of hysterical contagion. In 1962 a mysterious disease broke out in a dressmaking department of a US textile factory. The symptoms included numbness, nausea, dizziness, and vomiting. Word of a bug in the factory that would bite its victims and cause them to develop the above symptoms quickly spread. Soon 62 employees developed this mysterious illness, some of whom were hospitalized. The news media reported on the case. After research by company physicians and experts from the US Public Health Service Communicable Disease Center, it was concluded that the case was one of mass hysteria. While the researchers believed some workers were bitten by the bug, anxiety was probably the cause of the symptoms. No evidence was ever found for a bug which could cause the above flu-like symptoms, nor did all workers demonstrate bites.
We also find an intersection between Halakha and mass hysteria that has relevance to modern times, which revolved around the prohibition of Halanas HaMess. In the 18-19th centuries, there was a widespread fear of being buried alive. You can even see numerous patents and pictures of special coffins designed to let the buried person signal outside of his grave, such as via a bell, that he was still alive. In 1772, Duke Freiderich II decreed a mandatory three day waiting period before burial which of course posed a halakhic problem of Halanas HaMes, letting a person remain unburied past the day of their death. Moses Mendelssohn was able to intervene by proposing a compromise regulation that the body not be buried unless examined by a doctor and certified deceased. Despite assisting the Jewish community, Moses Mendelssohn also editorialized and offered his opinion that since the delay was coming from a concern that the person might be alive, it was pikuach nefesh, life saving, and thus possible to override any Torah concern. The problem with Mendelssohn’s position was that he was casting doubt on tradition that was thousands of years old, i.e. whatever our traditions are about signs of death such as cessation of breathing, they have been in place for millennia and no one ever raised a concern about being buried alive. The Chasam Sofer (YD Responsum 338) rejects this possibility, and criticized Mendelssohn by name (Ramad, Rav Moshe MiDessau, because of this very reason that our traditions about signs of death have greater relevance than spurious scientific theories and fads.
I bring this up because I believe the tension of differentiating between legitimate scientific studies and mass hysteria often finds expression in halakhic debates between those who are more secular and more insular. On the one hand, the secular are more open to scientific or sociological developments and are more willing to alter their religious choices in light of that. The advantage of this is, indeed sometimes religious thinking can be too rigid and unable to take into account new realities. Consider how much slower the more religious and insular communities and sects were to respond to the emerging awareness of the prevalence of sexual abuse and predators. Yet, the more religious are less likely to succumb to sociological fads and hysterias, because they take their traditions as a serious source of information and are reluctant to shift unless circumstances reach disastrous proportions. The religious community is less likely to accept ideas that are more about social change than true science, such as the emerging phenomenon of transgender persons or the biological innateness of homosexuality.
In COVID we saw the same pattern play out. The more religious communities were resistant to buying into the need for extreme social isolation and masking if it represented too significant a disruption in their valued way of life. The secular were more compliant and adherent to the various guidelines, one can stay for both positive and negative reasons. On the positive side, they are more open to secular influence and may be correctly influenced and concerned about scientifically based precautions. On the negative side, because they are rooted more in secular culture and care more what the outside world says, they are more likely to be inducted into whatever pseudoscienitifc mishegass that is being embraced by the dominant culture.
On the other side, the devoutly religious community may have kept its head in the sand too far, ignoring what arguably was a serious public health crisis. This is how it played out with halanas hames controversy and in similar ways that’s how it played out with COVID. However, when it came to halanas hames, history has judged those concerns to be mass panic and scientifically bogus. Keep in mind, obviously there were some minute cases where a person appeared to be dead but then was not. It is just that the rare case was not considered significant enough to disrupt Jewish life and practice. (Sound familiar?) In that case, the traditional community’s stability, source of wisdom and truth about determining death, proved to be accurate and helpful. They were wise not to jump on the cultural bandwagon, though you can’t blame anybody who did. After all, for centuries many distinguished rabbonim and poskim rejected the Heliocentric model, with some even declaring it to be heresy, but we can say that heliocentrism has been proven through experience to be correct ( https://hakirah.org/Vol13Brodt.pdf ). So we often can be confused about what is physically contagious or socially contagious. In times of panic, each group uses its favored psychological defenses to protect itself. Rigidity and conservatism versus compliance and open mindedness. Each defensive behavior can bring benefit or damage, depending on how extreme and how out of touch the group is with rational, balanced thought and discourse.
I am not a scientist and cannot know what is true and what is not true about COVID, in truth scientists and researchers are also struggling with this. However, my “Spidey Sense” tells me that some of the precautions seem a bit absurd and not consistent with other risk behaviors. For example the closing of public schools and many private schools for a year in certain cities does not seem sensible or commensurate to the risk benefit ratio, nor did some of the other precautions that resulted in complete paralysis and shutdown for society.
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, much of the extreme measures feel to me like a displaced guilt reaction in a world culture that has thwarted all traditional boundaries and rules. If you don’t believe in a moral God who punishes and rewards, then society’s collective unconscious manufactures its own bogey men to quell its guilty conscience and reign in excess.
On the other hand, people really did die, and not just a few. Whatever COVID is, it surely is deadly and worth taking reasonable precautions. But ask yourself this question, during the entire COVID lockdown was one single cigarette prohibited from being sold to anyone? In fact, bizarrely and paradoxically, several states ratified legalizing marijuana during this time. Can we credibly consider the public health and personal health threat of smoking, along with Nicotine’s intensely addictive quality, to be anything less dangerous than COVID?
It will take historians decades to sort out what really happened over here, what was real and serious about the pandemic and what was mass hysteria. Remember, regardless of what you may believe or feel, our best weapon against mental and physical disease is open non-defensive intellectual curiosity and discourse.
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