Decency, I don’t know where you live, but here in the red zone, from around a week after shavuous until just before Yom Kippur, the majority of frum Jews acted like they were only dimly aware that a pandemic was happening somewhere else. If it wasn’t exactly back to normal, that was only because it was harder to book a hall for a 600 person wedding.
If you’re going to claim that the frum community has in fact complied with the law all along then you must be saying that there has been an resurgence of infections in spite of such compliance. If that is true, then how does it makes sense for the governor to anything but order further restrictions. That in a nutshell was the self defeating argument submitted to a federal judge last week. But of course none of it was true. There are a few shuls that comply, including at least one of the plaintiff shuls, but those are exceptions and we all know it. Despite that, we’ll attack the governor for becoming an overnight anti semite instead of following health guidelines.
Perhaps if the approach had been to acknowledge lax compliance with existing laws and presented a plan going forward, the state would have given it a shot. For all I know, agudah tried it. But the kicker is that so many of us are so sold on ridiculous conspiracy theories, on the notion of our personal rights obliterating any moral responsibility, that we can’t even commit to following laws. From what I observed, compliance ticked up just before Yom Kippur but had already waned just after first days of yom tov, even before the governor announced plans about zones.
The fact that yeshivas are closed and tinokos shel beis rabbah are sitting at home or struggling to learn on zoom, is a direct result of our community’s misplaced priorities and our willingness to embrace politics and conspiracy theories over derech eretz and common sense.