a shul in every backyard

One of the interpretations Rashi offers of "lo taasun kein l'Hashem Elokeichem" is that we should not be like the aku"m who have a multitude of forms of worship -- mizbechot, metzeivit, asheirot, etc.  We have one G-d and serve Him in one place, the Beit HaMikdash. 

It struck me how relevant this Rashi is to our times.  Just a few weeks ago I was invited to a simcha on Shabbos and the Friday night davening was in a tent in someone's backyard, Shabbos davening was going to be in someone's house, and this was considered normal.  Just like in the old days where everyone could set up their own bamah or asehirah/matzeivah/mizbeiach in their own backyard, these days you can now do the same, thanks to policies set in place as an overreaction to Covid.  

This is a tragedy. 

On 3/26/2020, day #2 of NY entering lockdown, and I wrote:

Step aleph: What confronts us is not a choice of whether to lock down our cities in order to save some unknown % of people, but rather a choice of whether to lock down our cities to save some unknown % of people AT THE EXPENSE of the cost IN LIVES (literally) of some other unknown % of people.  In other words, this a large scale version of the trolley problem, except here you don't know how many lives it will cost to save how many other lives.

Maybe I am wrong, but I think doctors in particular have a hard time wrapping their heads around this.

In an interview with the Spectator, Rishi Sunak, a top candidate for British PM, gives us a behind the scenes look at the thinking in England at that time:

Imperial stressed it did ‘not consider the wider social and economic costs of suppression, which will be high’.  This was the crux: no one really did. A cost-benefit calculation – a basic requirement for pretty much every public health intervention – was never made. ‘I wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off,’ says Sunak. Ministers were briefed by No. 10 on how to handle questions about the side-effects of lockdown. ‘The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy.’

If frank discussion was being suppressed externally, Sunak thought it all the more important that it took place internally. But that was not his experience. ‘I felt like no one talked,’ he says. ‘We didn’t talk at all about missed [doctor’s] appointments, or the backlog building in the NHS in a massive way. That was never part of it.’ When he did try to raise concerns, he met a brick wall.

It was the same brick wall that was put up here in the US, where, for example, doctors who signed the Great Barrington Declaration were isolated, dismissed, banned from social media.  Anyone who disagreed, and to this day, anyone who disagrees with the "official" policy, is branded as "anti-science" and dismissed as a quack.  Meanwhile, millions of people have lost jobs, children's education has been set back irreparably, depression and other mental illness is at an all time high, and general public health as suffered due to missed cancer screenings, surgeries, even missed common vaccinations for kids.  

And the effect on religious life?  

You can now have a shul in every backyard.