When i first came here in the sixties, I stayed at a kibbutz where my host took me past the chicken coop, and when I admired it, he told me about a group of European tourists who had just left. They asked him, in English, because he couldn’t bear to speak his native German and so pretended not to understand, why they kept the lights on in the coop for a few hours at night. He explained that it would fool the chickens into thinking it was daylight and they would sleep less and lay more eggs. “Ah,” one of the tourists said to the other in German, “the Jews don’t have any foreigners to fool, so they fool the chickens.”

Now this statement was insulting to the kibbutz guide, to the tourists, and to the chickens, but I often remember it. Of course, the Jews in Eastern Europe were often persecuted and often made to follow rules that went counter to the religion, and of course they took delight in finding ways around the rules, to reject the dominance of another culture. But for some communities that mentality has also been transferred to this country as well. When Naturei Karta communities view the State of Israel as their enemy, for example, it is not surprising that they would not trust the rules of keeping safe from Corona. Since the restrictions placed on their neighborhood are dependent on the percentage of infection, the way to reduce the restrictions is to send uninfected people for testing. It makes total sense, even though to us it is a totally self-destructive mode of thinking. It’s not that they don’t believe that the restrictions are wrong, or that masks and social distancing are not the way to save lives, but they cannot bear the dominance of a ‘foreign’ authority. It is a threat to their entire way of life.