Rabbis against swine flu

According to Haaretz, recently

Dozens of rabbis and Kabbalah mystics armed with ceremonial trumpets took to the skies over Israel on Monday to battle the swine flu virus. . . About 50 Jewish holy men chanted prayers and blew shofars (ritual rams’ horns) in an aircraft circling over the country in the hope of stopping the spread of the virus. . . “The aim of the flight was to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it,” Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying.

Read the full story.

For the vast majority of the human race, doing things like this is eminently reasonable. Yes, I know this, I try to keep up with the science that attempts to explain this, and I don’t even always mind this—it’s a reliable source of amusement to me. But in the back of my mind, I also can’t get entirely rid of of an aesthetic sense of disapproval of all the miracle and supernatural beliefs. Sigh.