The 10 Plagues of Corona

The Jewish holiday of Passover is upon us. Every year, this festive 8-day period celebrates the liberation of the Israelite slaves from ancient Egypt.

Friends and family gather to remember the bitter taste of slavery and oppression and to ensure that it never happens again. It is considered the responsibility of every person during Passover to unmask oppression wherever it is present and to help those oppressed find a way to freedom.

For one year, the world has been mired in tyranny and complete loss of individual (and collective) freedom. We have become slaves to tyrannical governments who have unilaterally imposed draconian and inhumane measures without even so much as a conversation. What’s more, those measures have been proven to be completely ineffective in combating the spread of SARScov-2.

In the Passover story, the prophet Moses leads the Israelites to freedom. He first has to negotiate with the Pharaoh of Egypt, who keeps flip-flopping on letting the slaves go. One day he says yes, and the next day he changes his mind. But Moses has God (the Great Spirit of Universe) on his side, who unleashes ten plagues upon the Pharaoh and the people of Egypt one after another until the king has finally had enough and must free the slaves. Although darkness and dictatorship seemed powerful, eternal, and invincible at the time, eventually it was defeated by the Great Spirit of the Universe, in a series of miraculous events.

Who will be our Moses now? Who will stand up for rights and human dignity? The dignity of our elders not to die alone. The dignity of children to have a real childhood, of teenagers to have a real social life (as opposed to a virtual one), and the dignity of grandparents to see and hug their grandchildren. The dignity of an individual to decide for themselves what to put on or inside their bodies.

Passover is traditionally a time when families gather, when grandparents can shower love and fawn over their grandchildren. However, for the second year in a row, this opportunity has been lost. “It’s a small sacrifice to make,” many grandparents lament. “I want to make sure I’m alive to see my grandchildren grow up.”

But life doesn’t work like that. We never know when we will breathe our last. And sadly, many a bubbie and zadie (grandmother and grandfather in Yiddish) have been lost in the past year, the dream of future grandchild hugs and kisses gone. How many of their final years are our elders willing to mortgage on the false pretense of “just until things get back to normal.”

Similarly, many good and decent people who want to do right by themselves, their family, and society, have grudgingly accepted the draconian measures. They don’t like them, obviously, but they see lockdown (and vaccine) measures as necessary evils to get us back to normal. But will the tyranny and propaganda ever end? Especially with a highly risky vaccine that miraculously appeared in less than nine months, does not apparently prevent “infection,” and whose long-term safety and effectiveness remains unknown.

We Are All Slaves Now

We have all become slaves to unyielding, all-pervasive propaganda about a “killer boogie-man” virus whose IFR is no worse than the flu (as proven by one of the world’s top epidemiologists). We are slaves to insane beliefs that defy a 5-year old’s common sense such as my mask will protect you, but it won’t protect me. Slaves to the belief that a miracle vaccine can be developed in less than a year with no animal trials and no standard FDA-approval.

In the Passover story, many of the slaves did not want to leave Egypt. They had become so accustomed to their oppressed condition, that freedom was a frightening proposition. The same can be said for lockdown enthusiasts. Those who are comfortably tucked away in their homes, addicted to their Netflix series, and Amazon shopping, free from the hassle of having to deal with people on a day-to-day basis. Safe from the fear of “super-spreaders” and “long-haulers,” who in their right mind would want to go back to the way things were? Who would want freedom anyway?

Coronavirus Is Not a Plague

Some people have likened the new coronavirus, half-jokingly, to a modern plague. However, Covid-19 is not the plague. It is more like a weapon of the Pharaoh’s army to keep the slaves in check. The real ten plagues since last Passover have been:

1. Elders dying in nursing homes not from the virus but isolation and neglect
2. A dramatic increase in depression among all age groups
3. A significant spike in suicide (especially among teens and pre-teens)
4. Domestic abuse and violence against women
5. A surge in consumption of child pornography and under-reporting of global child trafficking to feed the industry
6. Crashing of the global economy, waves of unemployment and poverty
7. The inability of patients with other diseases (cancer, heart disease, etc) to get timely and effective care
8. Loneliness and chronic isolation from friends and family
9. A whole generation of children traumatized by forced masking and isolation
10. A highly experimental vaccine being force-fed to the world either willingly or unwillingly (threatening to wipe out the protections of the Nuremberg trials for which six million people had to die under the Nazi regime in WWII)

We Are All the Chosen People

There is no more Moses to lead us to the Promised Land. We must all be like Moses. We must all take responsibility and stand up and speak out. Those who do not, through their silence, buttress the tyranny and oppression, as did many German people who failed to speak out during the evolution and carrying out of the Holocaust during the Second World War.

We need to be the wake-up call for our leaders (Pharaohs) to reverse course and let the people go. I recently read that during the American Revolution against Great Britain in 1765 only 4% of the American people actually stood up and participated. The rest were either against it or did nothing. I believe that is what it will take today to force governments to stand down. Four percent of Quebec’s 8 million citizens would require about 350,000 people to openly defy the government and the lockdown and recapture our fundamental rights and freedoms. A very realistic number that highlights the power that each of us possesses to effectuate change.

This Passover let us all regain our freedom — freedom of movement, of association, of choice, and of life, love, and liberty.