When this is all over, we’ll need a new festival - The Jewish Chronicle

I could have written about other matters Jewish, about Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, or about the uncanny survivability of Binyamin Netanyahu. But now those feel like ancient, far-off concerns. I even toyed with telling you of my observations when walking through the deserted locked-down streets of Golders Green and Hampstead Garden Suburb, but I feared the reaction of the Derbyshire police and local vigilantes.

But as it happens it was on one of those lonely walks that I had a thought. When this is all over we must celebrate it being over. And then commemorate it.

But how? And by “we” I don’t mean just Jews, I mean everybody. We will all have lost something. A few of us will have lost relatives, more will have lost jobs and livelihoods, most will have lost peace of mind and time with people we love. Or, at least, quite like. When we get the vaccine and this is done, I feel we need to mark this time, and not just once, but in the future.

As some readers know, my upbringing was so secular that until my deep adulthood I didn’t know much about Jewish customs and less about Jewish holidays. If it hadn’t been for Jack Rosenthal I would have hit 25 not knowing what happened at a bar mitzvah.

What I have learned since has convinced me that one thing the Jews have got absolutely spot-on is the matter of festivals and commemoration. Looked at objectively they are rather wonderful. Whereas most Christians run out after Christmas and Easter, and the secular world only just manages the abstraction of May Day and the developing allegorical commemoration on what used to be Armistice Day, Jews have this extraordinary panoply of events. And not only do they specify and recall particular historical or mythical happenings which act as markers for a people’s development, they even offer food and drink or build a shelter to remind everyone of a tribulation here, or a triumph there. Delivery from slavery, struggle against imperial oppression, the handing over of the Ten Commandments. And in modern times the Shoah and the foundation of Israel.

You know all this, of course. But I’m saying it because we should think about how these components might work for a Yom Korona, marking our gratitude for coming through an almost unique trial. It will have been as big a fight as taking on Antiochus Epiphanes or wicked old Haman. And it will be something humanity has been through together and will have survived and will want to work towards never happening again.

You think I’m joking? You think it’s a matter of a paragraph or two before I suggest that on Yom Korona we all build little outdoor hospitals, engage in ritual hand-washing, don face masks and give gifts of toilet paper and paracetamol. But I’m serious.

Of course such a festival should be able to be secular, humanist or have a religious component. I imagine that there are rabbis and scholars, gurus, imams and priests who could create new prayers to accompany the festivities. But the whole point would be its universal quality —because the one thing that the virus cared about was a human host, not that host’s sex, religion, nationality or age.

I think we should hold Yom Korona on the last day of each Olympic Games, marking both the fact that in the year of the pandemic these had to be postponed and that they have been resumed. The closing ceremony could mark its beginning. The festival could especially celebrate the role in all our societies of health workers, from the professors of epidemiology to the cleaner on the ICU ward, and also public administrators struggling to do the best for the people in their care. It could remind everyone of the perpetual desire of human beings to understand our scientific world, and the battle against disease. It could tell future generations, if they need telling, of our inescapable interdependence.

I’d like to see it, in best Jewish tradition, including both a family meal and also public hospitality. It would be a day for allowing that “social distancing” was never what human beings were designed for, and that touch and proximity and kindness are essential parts of what it is to be human.

All holidays, all festivities, all commemorations that mean anything started somewhere. Sometimes millennia ago, sometimes a few decades. And of course my details may all be wrong, but I don’t think the idea is. So what do you say?

David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times