An entire general population has achieved the most rarified and difficult type of mitzvah
During the plague of 1665, which killed up to 25 percent of London’s population, Cambridge University shut its doors and sent students home. Isaac Newton, whose Cambridge career had been until then undistinguished, returned to his family estate, and there experienced an unparalleled efflorescence of scientific creativity over an 18-month period. He laid the basis for the modern science of optics, discovered the basic laws of motion and gravity, and developed the calculus. Only the period of 1916-17, in which Albert Einstein published three papers, each one of which would have been worthy alone of the Nobel Prize, can compare.
I do not know if the plague of 1665 in any way stimulated Newton’s thinking, other than giving him the freedom to pursue his own investigations, but the current one has certainly provoked a rush of thoughts in me – each on his own level.
We are currently guinea pigs of governmental policies that must balance between widespread severe economic pain and the potential loss of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives around the globe. While the choice of life over bankrupt businesses may seem an obvious one, Guido Calabresi, one of America’s preeminent legal scholars, points out in Tragic Choices that life does not trump all, or at least not always.
For instance, the United States could reduce traffic fatalities by tens of thousands each year by reducing the speed limit to 25 mph and enforcing it with lengthy prison terms for violators. Yet the public would never tolerate such a life-saving measure because of the dramatic inconvenience and societal disruption it would inflict.
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