An Oasis from Politics

Iknew from the start that I would enjoy writing about the MITZVA Cohort, featured elsewhere in these pages. If I have one recurrent message, it is the need to maintain a kiddush Hashem consciousness. The project’s initiators — a group of yeshivah guys from Brooklyn who were pre-med students together at Brooklyn College and have gone on to distinguished careers at clinicians and researchers — quite self-consciously set out to create a kiddush Hashem, and thereby counter the negative publicity directed at the Torah community during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And they did so not by looking for public relations gimmicks, but by figuring out a way to marshal the strengths of the Torah community to make a significant contribution to scientific research on COVID-19.

What I did not anticipate, however, was how much I would enjoy interviewing the prominent scientists whose research benefited from the MITZVA Cohort. Speaking to them, I felt like I had entered an oasis from the obsession with politics and ideology that characterizes so much of contemporary American intellectual life. No chanting “Trump — yeah” or “Trump — boo.”

The human immune system itself is a fascinating topic, and its complexity a wonderful portal to the niflaos haBorei. All of the scientific researchers to whom I spoke were eager to make their research as accessible as possible to a one-time dropout from high school AP Biology because he could never see anything under a microscope.