Can the Zoom Seder Foster Faith?

I will not address the technical halakhic issues raised by the Zoom seder. Those who rule on such weighty matters, and particularly those who do so in the public spotlight, should be individuals who have earned their halakhic spurs through many years of intellectual work and whose authority derives from a solid track record of dealing with a wide variety of questions in Jewish law. Apart from erudition and experience they must also have insight about the situations and persons their decisions are likely to affect. Lastly, as Chaim Saiman demonstrates in his essay “In Rejecting the Zoom Seder, What Did Orthodox Jews Affirm?”, we have a large specialized literature devoted to the use of electricity, and anyone contributing to it needs to understand the technological mechanisms involved, some of which evolve quickly. As a student and teacher of Torah, I am at best a rabbinic “general practitioner,” and if I have learned anything in the past month from my medical friends it is that good doctors know when to defer to superior expertise.

As Saiman notes, the rabbis endorsing the Zoom seder have two available rationales. One is the overriding obligation to save lives (pikuaḥ nefesh). The implication of this argument is that denying isolated people Zoom contact with family constitutes a danger to their lives. This argument is not prominent in the ruling of the Maghrebi rabbis, perhaps because it seems exaggerated.

I do not mean that the psychological burden of social isolation is negligible. Rabbis and doctors who have spoken to me are painfully aware of the baleful effects on the elderly of emergency regulations that prevent them from having visitors. It is even worse for those who are infected, for they can lose their will to live. Nor do I wish to minimize the importance of family gatherings, not only as an arena of religious education, but as occasions to grow in knowledge and experience love.