The meaning of death in the shadow of the coronavirus
Rabbi Shalom.
The public’s reaction to the coronavirus victims among the older population (80 and over) raised two related questions in me, one psychological-sociological and the other philosophical.
1. Is the attitude towards death in this age range, say the average death range in Israel, exaggerated due to the circumstances? That is to say – if we suppose there were a mysterious extreme increase in the number of deaths in the third age group (without the existence of an illness), would this receive the same alarming response? We are not asking sarcastically.
2. Is the death of a person of average age of death, due to a viral disease, more serious/worse/more deserving of being mourned, than the death of a person of average age of death due to normative circumstances?
Thanks in advance.
T\’
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- I assume there was a similar hysteria, or perhaps more, because then they wouldn’t have known what the cause was and what to do about it. But these are psychological questions, not values.
- It is not defined. Death from any cause is sad. A person who dies from corona is assumed to have not died without it. So what difference does it make whether his age is average or not? And that a person who dies after the suggested age does not make us sad? You need to distinguish between the question of the death of a specific person and the phenomenon of the death of many people. And the same is true between sadness over a person who died and sadness over the phenomenon of the death of people in general.
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