In her essay "Wedding in a Cemetery: Judaism, Terror, and Pandemic" (The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere), Religion Professor Susannah Heschel discusses the wedding in a cemetery - shvartze chasene, in Yiddish - that East European Jews sometimes organized when cholera, typhus, influenza, and other epidemics would strike. The lesson Professor Heschel takes from this tradition? "All the rational advice of doctors, epidemiologists, and virologists is not sufficient. Racial terror and the terror of mass death are also epidemics needing our attention. There is one cure for the epidemic of fear: justice, the assurance that we live in a society rooted in moral values, that health is the concern of all, that everyone's family is secure and will never be abandoned, but always cared for, and that all human beings are equally precious."
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Mayer Kirshenblatt (1919–2009), "The Black Wedding in the Cemetery," circa 1892 Acrylic on canvas, 1996 From Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, University of California Press, 2007