Love your neighbour: Islam, Judaism and Christianity come together over COVID-19

The COVID-19 global pandemic requires an immediate, whole-of society approach to prevent the transmission of the virus. During this time of uncertainty, faith leaders such as ourselves have turned to our religious texts and theology to find comfort for the community and encourage safe practices.

We have seen fellow prominent faith leaders from Christianity, Judaism and Islam issuing opinions, guidance documents – and even fatwas – to their communities that re-analyse religious practices and provide theological opinions on how faith practices or rituals can be adapted to meet the response of COVID-19 and implement social distancing.

To slow the spread of the virus, we’ve taken to media, email and radio to conduct daily prayers and worship, mobilize individual volunteers to serve the elderly and at risk. We’ve engaged in discussions surrounding personal well-being and found new ways to communicate to our communities the importance of listening to the safety guidelines promoted by governments and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“The ability to go to your church or synagogue or mosque in a hard time is really important to people,” empathized Rabbi Sharon Brous in the LA Times. Nevertheless, she practised social distancing and engaged with her community via virtual platforms, as recommended by medical and government authorities. She exhorted her synagogue members to find “resilience and level-headedness and kindness and cooperation precisely in their moment of greatest vulnerability”.

Lessons from the Abrahamic faiths

As some individuals may be wary of following the preventative messages pertaining to COVID-19 by government and international organizations, faith actors should utilize religious teachings to reiterate the importance of these measures for the safety of the community. The Abrahamic faiths all have teachings that profess the importance of taking action to assist others and save lives.

• – The Bible encourages followers to “show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works”.
• – The Quran tells us: “If anyone saved a life it would be as if he saved the life of the whole humanity.”
• – In Judaism, the preservation of human life takes precedence over all other commandments, as emphasized in the Talmud.

In understanding how these teachings emphasize the importance of taking action, communities can be encouraged to follow government-implemented measures and practice social distancing in order to protect themselves.

‘Cooperate to combat the disease’

Muslim clerics have emphasized regulations issued by governments by creating fatwas calling for a halt in organized religious gatherings and encourage communities to adhere to government calls of social distancing and self-isolating. Prominent Muslim scholar Shaykh Bin Abdullah Bin Bayyah, Chairman of the United Arab Emirates Council for Fatwa and President of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, issued a fatwa calling on the community to obey the directives and instruction of governments in order, “to cooperate to combat the disease and halt its dissemination”.

Pope Francis has urged Christians everywhere to unite in shared moments of prayer, adding: “Let us remain united. Let us make our closeness felt toward those persons who are the most lonely and tried.” Russell Moore, of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, responding to ignoring the plight of the elderly in the pandemic, said in the New York Times: “Each human life is more significant than a trillion-dollar gross national product. Stocks and bonds are important, yes, but human beings are created in the image of God.”

This article was published by the World Economic Forum.