Justifications for Medical Quarantine in Jewish Ethics
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Justifications for Medical Quarantine in Jewish Ethics Tsuriel Rashi1 Accepted: 28 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The current Corona epidemic broke out at the end of 2019 and by early in the year 2020 was spreading all around the world from China to the USA. Among the moves in the fight against the proliferation of the illness, international borders were closed to prevent travel among countries. In the next stage in the fight, many countries imposed quarantines on carriers of the disease as well as on those around them and even on entire civilian populations. Herein, I offer the religious justifications in Judaism for preserving the public’s health in general and particularly in the face of disease, especially during of the course of an epidemic. Similarly, I also deal with the religious requirements for preventing the spread of an illness, which come at the expense of fulfilling religious commandments (mitzvot) and suspending them with a view toward preserving life. My conclusion is that ever since the time of the Bible, Judaism has viewed the maintenance of health as having social, religious, and medical importance. Rabbis over the last centuries have justified separating and isolating the sick and extending that isolation to individuals who are in danger of succumbing to the illness. They have found religious justifications for issuing instructions to suspend religious observances in order to prevent the spread of a disease, as is the case in the epidemic that the world is now experiencing with the Corona virus. Keywords Quarantine · Isolation · Judaism · Ethics
Background The Corona virus (COVID-19) global epidemic broke out at the end of 2019. The virus of the SARS-CoV-2 strain passed from infected animals to humans and to the present date has caused hundreds of thousands to be infected and dozens of thousand deaths. At first, most of the morbidity was seen in China. However, from the middle of February 2020 the virus started to spread rapidly and by the middle of March had reached 150 countries and caused a worldwide panic. At the beginning of * Tsuriel Rashi [email protected] 1
Ariel University, Ariel, Israel
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Religion and Health
March 2020, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. The responses of governing bodies and health systems around the world have included various restrictions, from imposing curfews to canceling flights, to closing down complete sectors of the economy, to calling for self-isolation (quarantine) in their homes for millions.1 Self-isolation at home has been recommended for both those diagnosed with COVID-19 and those who suspect that they may have been infected. The virus has reached the stage of community spread in large parts of the world, which means that it is proliferating within communities whose members have not necessarily travelled to areas with widespread transmission. Government health agencies recommend that individuals self-isolate if they develop a cont
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