Musings of a COVID19 Skeptic--Part I, by Shoshanna Silcove

    It has been said that cool heads prevail, but do they? As I watch the majority of modern society go down the rabbit hole of COVID19 mass hysteria and panic, I question the validity of that saying. It's as if one day someone flipped a switch and suddenly we were thrust into a surreal world in which panic and paranoia are the new norm.
    Admittedly at first, I too got caught up in the fervour of it all. I listened to the ominous news reports of rising infection and death tolls akin to the Spanish flu of 1918. Scary words like 'pandemic' conjured up images from a bad science fiction movie.  I was worried and lost sleep. I wore gloves and a mask when I went to the supermarket. My initial response was fear.
    Then after a couple of days, I found myself contemplating the onerous task of washing every single grocery item before putting them away, and I took hold of myself. This is not healthy, I thought, this is panic and hysteria. This is no way to live.
    Death and loss are not strangers to me. My mother passed away when I was five years old. As a child I lost many close relatives.  My father always told me that life was for the living, and life must go on. That attitude helped me get through the grief of my childhood. Many years ago at age 24, I came close to dying and, had a near death experience. I am, unfortunately, quite practiced in the emotions and rituals of grief over lost loved ones, and I overcame my own fear of death many years ago. Perhaps this, along with a skeptical analytical nature, helped me to control myself from joining the mass hysteria and panic of COVID19.
    It is never easy to follow the path less traveled. It is far easier to follow the pack and accept the media/government narrative without question. Nevertheless, I noticed that the story we were being told had too many holes in it and it kept shifting.
   Initially, we were told to expect literally millions of lives would be lost to COVID19. The hospitals would be overrun. The chemists would be running out of drugs. Almost every house would have had at least one infection, or even worse, a death. We were warned, stay home, or you will be risking lives. This would be a plague!  I waited and watched from my home in Melbourne, Australia. I heard horror stories coming out of Italy, England, and America.
    As a member of the Jewish Orthodox Chassidic sect known as Lubavitch,  I was especially interested in the events of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY, the headquarters of the Lubavitcher Chassidim, and a place I lived in for 14 years.  Lubavitch is a close knit group, everyone is only six degrees from everyone else, even from overseas. The Jewish community in Melbourne were horrified to hear of a number of people passing away in Crown Heights.
    Fear is an extremely powerful emotion. I once heard a business coach say fear stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. Often when a person is gripped by fear their intellectual faculties can be stifled.  I wondered, was this applicable to COVID19? I was stuck home like everybody else, and on top of that I was suffering from a bruised hip from a fall so I couldn't really move around much. So I decided to do research, to do some truth seeking, and find out if the Great Panic of 2020 was actually anything to panic about  at all and,  I discovered  what may be of interest to others.

....to be continued in Part 2.

A Plea to Rabbis Not to Submit to Tyranny, by Shoshanna Silcove

The paranoia, the mass hysteria, the naivety of many of the Rabbis when it comes to the COVID medical tyranny, who totally submit to the tyrannical lying government with their ignorant Draconian decrees and virtue signaling, that is destroying Jewish life, all combined, means it stinks to be in the frum community these days. I am especially disappointed in many of my fellow Chabadniks. Have they forgotten what it means to have courage? These are descendants of Jews who were unafraid under the Soviet oppression, who would go to the ends of the earth to make sure the mitzvah could be performed even under the pain of death. And many did indeed die. And today, supposedly in the name of pekuach nefesh (saving of life), they are slavishly, naively, and sheepishly submitting to and trying to force upon us absurd unnecessary restrictions, going even beyond what the government demands. Why? Because of fear from the mass hysteria and lies by the media? Because of fear of losing government funding? Fear of losing prestige, hence the virtue signaling? Some Rabbis say these extreme restrictions are for pekuach nefesh. I wonder, how exactly is this pekuach nefesh to go beyond what even the tyrannical corrupt government requires? As the Rebbe taught us to ask, "Mei Heicahn Dan Tuni"?( From where do you derive such a directive?). This is what our Rebbe taught us we need to ask Rabbonim when we cannot accept or understand their directives or decisions. Rabbis are not closer to Hashem than the rest of us. I daven that they remember the strong Chabad tradition and history of courage and of strength to go against the evil societal trends, and get a hold of their senses with the Chassidic adage of 'Moach shalit ha el ha lev',(mind over the heart) and use their Chochoma, Bina and Daas, (Knowledge, Intuition, and Wisdom) and do the work needed to truly understand the facts of the situation we are in before they do untold damage, especially to our youth!