Both Sides of the Coin 

What distinguishes a chacham, a truly wise man, is the ability to view a situation from various perspectives and fully ascertain all sides of an issue — sometimes even conflicting and contradictory aspects of a single situation. One who has the ability to see but one side of the question “lo chacham yikarei,” is not termed a wise man. His vision is limited.

In the reality that we have now endured for almost a full year, we are confronted with contrasting and even opposing outlooks and angles.

We are undergoing a situation that is unprecedented in the history of the world. Before the development of rapid travel, people — and disease — could not get around very quickly. In the time of Rabi Akiva Eiger there was an epidemic, but back then it took several days to travel two hundred miles east from Posen to Warsaw, or two hundred miles west to Berlin. If an infected individual left Posen, by the time he arrived at his destination — if in fact he even arrived — chances are good that he was no longer contagious.

A few decades later saw another epidemic, during the time of Rav Yisrael Salanter. The advent of train travel meant that one could get from Salant to Vilna or Grodno within a day or two. This made it possible for an epidemic to infect over a million people in the course of a year. Nevertheless, disease could not move quickly and when it did spread, it was not really a pandemic; it was rather a rolling epidemic that moved from place to place slowly over the course of more than twenty years.