Measles, Memory, and the Jewish Obligation to Protect Life

Last Shabbat after services, increasingly concerned by reports of measles outbreaks around the country, I asked a retired pediatrician in my congregation how we had arrived here. His answer was immediate. “This didn’t begin now,” he told me. “This has been building for decades.” He had practiced medicine long enough to remember a world in which childhood diseases were not abstractions. Parents feared them because they had seen what they could do. Physicians did not need to persuade families that measles, polio, or whooping cough were worth preventing. The evidence was sometimes living next door.

Then medicine became extraordinarily successful. Before the measles vaccine became widely available, millions of Americans contracted the disease each year. Tens of thousands were hospitalized. Hundreds died. Others suffered pneumonia, encephalitis, and permanent complications. Vaccination changed that landscape so dramatically that in 2000 measles was declared eliminated in the United States. And therein lies one of the great paradoxes of prevention: Success erased its own evidence.

A generation of parents grew up never seeing a child seriously ill with measles. Another generation followed. The vaccine remained visible, with its needle, its possible side effects, and the controversies surrounding vaccination. The disease it prevented largely disappeared from view. Eventually, some began asking why the vaccine was necessary at all.

This week, as I thought about that conversation, I found myself returning to one of the Torah’s most troubling commandments: Zachor et asher asah lecha Amalek.........

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