Rabbi Shmuley Boteach slammed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's restrictions on houses of worship in column at Breitbart.com Thursday, saying prayer is and "essential" service.
"What Cuomo failed to recognize is that faith is a vaccine for hopelessness and worship an antibody against despair," Boteach writes. "People need to believe that they're going to live."
Cuomo's "Cluster Initiative" issued on Oct. 6 was struck down just before Thanksgiving by the U.S. Supreme Court. Cuomo had exempted certain "essential services" such as bicycle shops, liquor stores and acupuncture clinics from the 10-25 person limit, but not houses of worship.
Boteach argued that even the news media should be allowed to have larger numbers of people to operate their studios "in order to broadcast the admittedly grim news about the virus" because the "public needs to know. It’s essential."
By the same token, parents telling their frightened children that there is hope is essential, he said, so "Why would we think that rabbis, priests, or imams are any different?"
And, he added, it might have been science and medicine that has brought a vaccine to the horizon, "But why did our doctors work on a vaccine in the first place? How did they know the disease could be conquered?"
Humanity, he argues, "searches for a cure based not on historical precedent but on prophecies in the Hebrew Bible which promised nearly three thousand years ago that pestilence – along with war and killing – will one day be banished from the earth."
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