Silly Rabbis, the Flu is a Virus
August 11th, 2009
|
| Share |
At one time, before germ theory and modern science-based medicine, there was a lot of mystery about what caused diseases. In many cases, outbreaks were believed to be caused by the wrath of god against sinners or the work of the devil and evil spirits. Prayers, ritual blessings and exorcisms were often used to try to stop diseases. As it was believed that this was punishment for the sins of man, some even believed that the only way to stop an epidemic was to inflict injuries and pain on themselves, in an act of atonement. Amongst the best known for this were the Flagellants, who roamed from town to town in Europe during the Black Death.
Today, organized efforts to reduce the impact of pandemics usually involve things like screenings, medical preparedness and, if avaliable, vaccines. This has the big advantage over religious methods in that it tends to work. There are still plenty of people who pray, but science and medicine are the method of choice in fighting disease.
Although this is not always the case, as can be seen in one effort in Israel.
JERUSALEM — A planeload of Israeli rabbis and Jewish mystics held an airborne prayer meeting in the belief that it could help check the spread of swine flu in Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported Tuesday.
The Yediot Ahronot daily said a plane with 50 people on board circled over Israel on Monday, with the passengers chanting prayers and sounding the ritual ram’s horn.
The newspaper report carried a photo showing bearded and black-clad Orthodox Jewish men standing on the steps of an aircraft of Israeli short-haul airline Arkia. Airline officials could not be reached for comment.
“The purpose of the flight was to stop the (swine flu) epidemic so that people will not keeping dying from it,” Rabbi Yitzhak Basri, one of the participants, told the newspaper.
Israel’s Health Ministry has confirmed more than 2,000 cases of swine flu, with five fatalities in the country so far.
Warnings have been issued of widespread infections in Israel in the fall and winter, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to obtain enough vaccine to protect every Israeli citizen from swine flu.
Well that’s…. different. It seems that Jews are less often the ones who are invoking religious rituals in this kind of way, although this is Israel, where one might expect to find a fair number of fundy Jews. Such an event seems harmless, as it is organized privately, but if any countries actually started to use this as their official policy in how to deal with disease, then it might be time to worry.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Misc, Quackery, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
August 11th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
“The glory of Israel will fly away like a bird, for your children will die at birth or perish in the womb or never even be conceived. Even if your children do survive to grow up, I will take them from you. It will be a terrible day when I turn away and leave you alone. I have watched Israel become as beautiful and pleasant as Tyre. But now Israel will bring out her children to be slaughtered.” O LORD, what should I request for your people? I will ask for wombs that don’t give birth and breasts that give no milk. The LORD says, “All their wickedness began at Gilgal; there I began to hate them. I will drive them from my land because of their evil actions. I will love them no more because all their leaders are rebels. The people of Israel are stricken. Their roots are dried up; they will bear no more fruit. And if they give birth, I will slaughter their beloved children.” - Hosea 9:11-16
See they have to worry that they have pissed Him off because He has a habit of coming down on them rather hard if they don’t toe the line.
Quote Comment
August 11th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Buzz0: I love the Monte Python picture and captions! However, I need to know if they stick the ram’s horn out of the window of the airplane or keep it inside. This is an important detail when exercising these sorts of rituals. Can I substitute a bullhorn for the ram’s horn? I’m in short supply of ram’s horns. Is an F-16 okay to use for the airplane? I don’t want to piss God off by using the wrong airplane. Geez I hate it when we have to update the rituals and incorporate modern technology. You just don’t know if you are getting it right. Maybe I should use a powered hangglider? Yeah, I think God would like that better. As such, I should be over your house by next year, so be sure to hold your breath until then.
Seriously, anyone want to bet that this ritual lowered a lot of anxiety levels? Not a bad thing if it did.
Quote Comment
August 11th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
I just wonder if this group of rabbis has ever made a similar flight to protect Israel from regular flu?
Considering that H1N1 is only slightly more dangerous than plain old every day run-of-the-mill flu, you’d think they would be concerned about that as well.
Quote Comment
August 11th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
By the way: I know I’ve had a bunch of religion oriented posts recently. That’s really a coincidence. This I had to write about. I mean it was just begging to be posted. I just found it randomly.
Quote Comment
August 11th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
leg said:
If it’s a horn from an actual bull.. uh, maybe. If it’s an amplified megaphone then no.
leg said:
I’d stay away from the F-16. That might seem like too much of an act of aggression. It might be too loud too, especially with the afterburner.
I disagree on the powered hangglider though. He might expect you to use the best airplane you could get and that might come off like you’re cutting corners. Maybe a corporate jet or something.
leg said:
I don’t know about that. It seems to me like every bit of unnecessary publicity over a strain of the flu that is not substantially worse than many others is not a good thing. It makes people more likely to have anxiety. The message here is that it is so horrible we need to resort to extreme measures, like praying from an airplane instead of just at sea level.
Chuck P. said:
Point well taken. Each year the flu kills thousands. Most of those who die are in bad health and so many probably would not last a long time before something gets them – not to be insensitive or anything. It’s rarely the only factor leading to death.
There were fears early on in the N1H1 spread that it seemed to be killing otherwise healthy young people, which the flu doesn’t normally do, but since then that seems to have been overstated and the cases may have been just a freak thing.
Israel has had 2000 reported cases and five fatalaties. That is a fatality rate of .25% That’s not any worse than flus in the past. No doubt there have been more cases which never went for treatment and never were verified (the CDC has estimated at least three infections for each verified one and possibly as much as five, so it could be as high as 10,000 cases in Israel, where most people were not sick enough to bother going to the doctor).
It’s all an overreaction. Some flu seasons the flu strain that is prevalent is and sometimes it is on stronger side. This seems to be one of the stronger ones, but it’s not really abnormally strong. It’s definitely no worse than the 1968 one.
People seem to almost want something to panic about.
Quote Comment
August 11th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Seems as much a publicity stunt as anything else. If it is, I guess it worked
Quote Comment
August 12th, 2009 at 1:38 am
This all seems like an overreaction, but so is everything involving swine flu. They already are testing out the vaccine and will go into production soon.
Quote Comment
August 12th, 2009 at 7:09 am
leg said:
I would recommend a A-10 Thunderbird II or another anti-tank plane: see Judges 1:19.
Quote Comment
August 12th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Amongst the best known for this were the Flagellants, who roamed from town to town in Europe during the Black Death.
Flagellants vs. flagellates? No contest. The bacterium will take that nine falls outta ten.
Quote Comment
August 13th, 2009 at 12:55 am
When this story first came out I tried to find some images of the flight, but the first few web reports didn’t have any. Now there are several more news sources reporting on it, in the past day or so. Also, we have pictures of the event:
http://news.google.com/news/image?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&ncl=ddmKeK2ONYYLqxMuAJqCmfWqdUciM&imv=1
Quote Comment
August 13th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Of course this will do nothing for the flu, but if the N1H1 strain ends up not hitting Israel very hard, they’ll still claim credit. They always do.
Quote Comment
August 16th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
@Mister Fisk: No, a real bull’s horn will not work for this purpose; they are specifically excluded from the specification. A ram’s horn is best, but if you can’t find one, any hollow horn, such as from a goat, antelope, lesser kudu, etc. can be used instead.
Quote Comment
August 18th, 2009 at 1:10 am
Unless Israel has made a breakthrough in giant unicorn farming… The horn that one of the fellows at drbuzz0’s link seems to be blowing a metallic horn. Heavy metal rules!
Quote Comment
August 18th, 2009 at 3:51 am
Plamus said:
There is a video in another post here: http://depletedcranium.com/rabbis-on-a-plane-and-you-thought-your-flight-was-bad/
They appear to be using several different kinds of items to make noise. Metal horns, rams’ horns, the plane’s intercom system and just praying really really loud too..
Quote Comment