As the world responds to the outbreak of coronavirus, Jeremy Brown recalls an East European Jewish rite, known as the “black wedding,” once thought to stem the tide of plagues:

The ceremony was simple: a man and a woman, each unmarried and either impoverished, orphaned, or disabled (sometimes all three) were married to one another under a ḥuppah—in a cemetery. The couple’s new home was established with donations by the community. With this collective act of charity and lovingkindness, it was hoped that the plague would be averted.

For example, one such ceremony took place 101 years ago as the Jews of Philadelphia gathered in a cemetery with the goal of defeating the deadly influenza outbreak. By the time it was finally over, the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919 claimed 50-100 million lives worldwide. In the U.S. over 670,000 people died, and the dead were piling up in the city of Philadelphia.

Although its origins are entirely unknown, the black wedding had been imported from Eastern Europe, where it had been practiced since the 18th century. The earliest recorded black wedding was performed in 1785 in the presence of one of the great early leaders of Ḥasidism, Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk. It took place in response to an outbreak of cholera. The bride was a thirty-six-year-old villager and the groom a thirty-year-old water carrier; . . . the wedding was attended by other ḥasidic leaders including the famed Seer of Lublin.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.