Testing Positive

“We are all being tested now,” my rav commented to me after a recent Shacharis. The immediate trigger for the comment was tension caused by enforcement of the government requirements with respect to the number of people allowed in shuls.

As Israel’s new coronavirus czar, Dr. Ronnie Gamzu admitted recently, the requirement of no more than ten people in any enclosed space, without any consideration of the overall area, makes no sense. In my shul, for instance, ten people are also allowed in the ezras nashim, which is about one-quarter the area of the shul downstairs. I have been motioned to go upstairs several times while standing in an unoccupied quadrant of the shul, without a single person within six meters of me. (The counterargument is that ten and no more is a clear rule, whereas relying on adequate distancing and masks, even where both rules are obviously being observed, will generate too many interpretive debates.)

On the morning in question, I had been asked to move from my seat by the window by the fellow a row behind me sitting on the aisle, even though I had been one of the first ten in the minyan. My seat, he pointed out, was not marked with green masking tape — a holdover from an earlier period when we were trying to maintain a two-meter separation between all those davening.

I went to stand at the back of the shul — albeit not without a bit of grumbling. But as I noted later, the seat immediately behind me, in the same row as the fellow who asked me to move, was marked with green tape. I don’t remember much from high school geometry, but I am pretty sure that the hypotenuse of a right triangle is longer than either of the other two sides.