My Big Fat Hasidic Wedding
Thanksgiving's over. What's next?
Last week, I wrote about how excited I was for pandemic Thanksgiving. It seemed like a holiday with none of the drawbacks: no argumentative relatives, no awkward hometown reunions, no sitting in traffic and realizing you have to pee but you’re thirty miles from a rest stop and already late so you try to go in a bottle but you don’t have anything with a wide mouth like a Snapple or a Gatorade so you have to try to thread the needle into a Poland Spring and end up arriving at your cousins’ house damp, reeking, and humiliated.
I think I overestimated how much fun this Thanksgiving would be. The food was good. But wolfing down 2300 calories at the pace of a Dust Bowl child trying to beat out eleven siblings for a second potato skin, immediately complaining about how bad I feel, then passing out is not behavior exclusive to holidays for me. I always thought Thanksgiving arguments were caused by politics. But there I was watching the National Dog Show with my dad, telling him that if he actually thought Clare the Scottish Deerhound was “the picture of elegance,” he needs to get his fucking eyes checked. And as much as I dreaded uncomfortable meetups with high school classmates, I miss the raw thrill of texting seven of them, “you ain’t fuck with me way back when but how bout now?” and getting no response, save for one “who is this?”
This Thanksgiving was just further proof of something we know all too well by now: pandemic life sucks. No matter how optimistic your attitude or rosy your outlook, there’s no way you can keep convincing yourself there are positives to this. As we careen toward Lockdown 2.0, there is no fun on the horizon this time. Nobody’s going to bake focaccia gardens or do jigsaw puzzles this time around. If you try to host a Zoom happy hour now, you should face justice at The Hague.
I am finding it increasingly distasteful to judge people for their Covid behavior. The notion that people could not stay at home for two weeks or a month to avoid a deadly disease was laughable. But can we scoff at people for saying they can’t do it for nine months? It feels unfair to malign people for cutting corners, especially amid the insulting lack of government assistance. Because this shit sucks!
What we are living through is the end state of American personal responsibility doctrine. That insidious philosophy has fed Reaganomics, right-to-work laws, the gutting of the welfare state, and underpins the survival-of-the-fittest economy we live in today. “Personal responsibility” as an unassailable concept is not just a Republican idea; you can find that idea at the heart of many liberals’ refusal to consider single-payer healthcare or student debt relief. Our national approach to Covid-19 is the ne plus ultra of personal responsibility: you take care of yourself, corporations will figure out a way to help. Government will stay out of the way.
So, we have left the decisions of disease control to individuals. Can we really expect those decisions to be good? The human brain is absolutely terrible at assessing probability and risk; just ask anyone who plays the lottery or is afraid of flying but drives a car. There are 253 million adults in America, which means there are 253 million fluid, irrational perceptions of what is safe to do. Therefore, anger at people who make bad decisions is misdirected. They should not have been left with the choice at all. Getting mad at each other just distracts us from being mad at the government that is still failing us.
Of course, it bothers me when people behave in a way that is obviously unsafe. In New York this week, Brock Colyar described the wide range of partying still occurring in the City. From 200-person Bushwick raves DJed by a Dutch teenager dressed as steampunk Joe Camel to coke-sprinkled kickbacks in the SoHo penthouse of the guy who disrupted the hemorrhoid space. Also happening recently in Williamsburg, was the 7000-person wedding of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, grandson of Grand Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum. The wedding, planned and executed in complete secrecy, comes just a month after a 10,000-person wedding for Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum, a fierce rival of Joel’s, was cancelled. And while you’re right to be pissed off at Joel, do spare a thought for Zalman. Having his wedding cancelled while Joel’s went on clearly makes him Fredo in this fight to take Aaron’s chair as the heimishe Godfather. There is a plus side, though. Some of the millions of mink being culled in Denmark may find a second life as a Brooklyn wedding-goer’s hat.
These gatherings are clearly dangerous and reprehensible. But they are extreme cases. Most of the Covid-shaming around Thanksgiving concerned much more trivial violations: Eating outdoors but serving the food buffet-style inside. Getting a rapid test instead of a PCR test. Immediate families reuniting though they live in separate households. Are these things completely safe to do? Probably not. But this is what it looks like when people are made to estimate their own risk tolerance and act accordingly. Everyone has their own idea of what’s safe to do, but that’s what happens when the decisions are left to everyone.
The coming few months will be extremely bleak. Hospitalizations are peaking with no sign of slowing down. Deaths are following close behind. Eviction moratoria are ending. Stimulus is a pipedream. We are losing the battle against Covid, if we have not already lost it. The solution is not in blaming individuals, just as the virus can not be stopped by individual behavior alone. It’s unlikely the government can save us from the disease at this point, though we desperately need them to ease the pain of its economic and social effects. But until the vaccine comes, the best we can do as individuals is be generous, compassionate, and patient.