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Last Sunday evening Shira and I were in Lakewood, New Jersey for a wedding.\xa0 Lakewood is the capital of the charedi, or ultra-Orthodox, world in America.\xa0 Lakewood boasts a world-famous charedi yeshiva called Beth Medrash Govoha which is the second largest yeshiva in the world, second only to the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem.\xa0 The wedding was charedi.\xa0 Men and women sat separately during the wedding.\xa0 Men and women danced separately after the wedding. There was a thick wall separating the men and women dancing.\xa0 And a strong majority of the men wore black hats.\xa0 It was the first black hat wedding we had ever attended.

Being at this wedding called to mind, for me, a famous story about Dr. Paul Farmer in Tracy Kidder\u2019s biography called Mountains Beyond Mountains.\xa0\xa0 Paul Farmer would go to impoverished third world nations and provide modern health care to people who otherwise did not have access to modern medicine.\xa0 One day Paul Farmer is in Haiti where there had been a tuberculosis outbreak. \xa0Many locals believed that tuberculosis is caused by sorcery, by an enemy casting a spell upon them, the response to which was to ask a Voodoo priest to cast a curse upon your enemy in retaliation for causing your illness.\xa0 Paul Farmer tries to make the case that tuberculosis is a disease caused by germs, not an illness caused by curses; and that the most helpful response is antibiotics, not mobilizing a Voodoo priest to cast a counter curse.\xa0 Paul Farmer meets a woman afflicted by tuberculosis who is persuaded to take medication.\xa0 She recovers.\xa0 Afterwards she tells Paul Farmer, \u201cI know TB is caused by germs.\u201d\xa0 And she also says I know which enemy cursed me so I asked my Voodoo priest to get revenge.\xa0 Paul Farmer responded, \xa0if you believe it was an enemy that cast a curse upon you, why then did you take the antibiotics?\xa0 To which this Haitian woman responded: \u201cHoney, are you incapable of complexity?"