Last Rosh Hashanah, when you heard the familiar Unetaneh Tokef liturgy about who will live and who will die, especially the part of “who by plague,” did it occur to you that in the coming year a pandemic might kill hundreds of thousands of people and turn our entire world upside down?

Most of the world was caught by surprise by the pandemic. Not that the threat was unimaginable; after all there have been countless warnings and scares and no less science fictions movies about a global pandemic. It’s just that our brains have the “bias of the immediate” and we mostly occupy ourselves with the urgent. And following that pattern, when the current crisis hit, we justifiably focused on providing urgent assistance to individuals and organizations affected by the pandemic and its accompanying economic recession.

Read the rest of this article, by JFN President and CEO Andrés Spokoiny and Sigal Yaniv Feller, director of advisory services of JFN Israel, in eJewish Philanthropy.