Preaching Goes Viral

Israel/Corona

Silver lining: Blessed, grateful, or upbeat about the pandemic

The first day in the corona hotel looked as one might expect: people ate their meals and generally spent time with people from their own “group.” But one day, a young Muslim woman, Aysha Abu Shhab, noticed this and decided to break the trend: she sat with Amram and Gina Maman, visibly observant Israeli Jews. In an interview she later said, “they were laughing all the time, so I chose them.” Over the next few days, the group at the corona hotel started bonding and crossing barriers. Aysha, a Muslim Bedouin woman, helped an Orthodox Jew while he was having an asthma attack (paramedics were not able to access him easily as they spent several minutes putting on protective gear). She wondered afterward whether she was allowed to touch him, causing her to ask her new friends about Jewish customs and laws in a way that she never had before. An Israeli couple provided a young Bedouin woman with some life advice and counseling as she was contemplating her next steps and wondering whether or not she wanted to study to become a nurse. Both admitted that they previously had limited interactions with a person of the other group until that moment, and it opened their eyes up respectively to Jewish and Bedouin culture

2022-12-13

Rabbie Mark

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