The truth is that "personal responsibility" is not a workable response to a pandemic of contagious disease. We are all connected to each other, and our health is bound up with each other's health. Furthermore, one-way masking is unfortunately insufficient to protect high-risk people effectively from covid.

The problem is that high-risk people often will not feel safe coming to in-person communal spaces at all when community covid rates are high, and they also won't feel safe coming when rates are lower if there is no mask requirement at those times. Your "loosening up" will likely end up excluding many high-risk people from communal environments entirely.

First, let's reframe the language of "subjecting" people to covid precautions. For one thing, everyone is at risk for Long Covid, so therefore everyone benefits from covid protections. Furthermore, rabbis and community lay leaders can provide important moral leadership by helping the community understand why it's crucial to make sure high-risk people, who are already experiencing huge ongoing trauma in this pandemic, don't get effectively locked out of communal spaces because those spaces are unsafe.

Most importantly, while everyone does have needs, balancing needs doesn't mean that everyone's needs exist on the same order of magnitude. While it's understandable that many people in your community may feel a need for "normalcy," this need simply isn't on the same level as high-risk people's need to be able to access community safely. Perhaps you, or your organization's spiritual leader, can provide compassionate pastoral support to people who are struggling with their feelings around adapting to a "new normal."

This is such an important question.

The first thing that's important to say is that addressing conflicting access needs starts with the specifics of your individual situation and the people and needs involved. At JCRN, we have lots of experience coming up with creative solutions to access problems, and we have some availability for paid consultation on your specific situation, if that's something you'd like to reach out for.

Another very important point to remember is that things often go wrong in situations of conflicting access needs when decision-makers with power -- likely unintentionally! -- pit different groups of disabled people against each other. For example, a shul board may decide to end a shul's mask requirement and tell the community (and probably even themselves) that they need to do so because of the hearing-related access needs of some members -- when really, there were other creative solutions out there to be found, but the board members didn't seek them out because they actually, personally, wanted to end the mask requirement and felt relieved to have found a legitimate-feeling reason to do so.

That's why the best way to address an access conflict is likely to be facilitating productive, creative conversation between the disabled people involved -- and truly listening to that conversation.

With that said, just to get you started, here are a few possible responses to common access conflicts:

- If some people in your community can't mask because they are either too young or have other disabilities that make masking impossible, could you give a specific masking exemption to those people -- while keeping the mask requirement for everyone else -- and also maximize ventilation and ask anyone who isn't capable of masking to take a rapid antigen test before gatherings?

- If some people in the community need universal masking while others need to be able to read lips, can you (1) hold services outdoors as much as possible, and use a microphone to help counter outdoor noise, (2) maximize ventilation when services are indoors, (3) have the service leader(s) take an at-home rapid PCR test just before the service, which can make it safe for them to unmask, and (4) hold kiddush outdoors so that more people can safely unmask? In meetings with multiple speakers, could you provide live-captioning (likely a better access solution for lip-readers anyway)?

- If you have a Hebrew school class with one child who needs to read lips and other children from high-risk households or who are high-risk themselves, could you split the class into two groups, one of which masks and the other of which doesn't mask (but uses rapid antigen tests and great ventilation)?