(JTA) — For the second year, COVID-19 has made it so Jews who want to attend High Holidays services must undergo a complicated risk calculation.

Is it safe to go to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? Should I bring my children? Is the shofar — the horn whose blasts punctuate the holy days — a potential vector of disease?

Last year, five months into the global pandemic that has killed more than 4.5 million people globally, the answers were fairly straightforward, if dispiriting: Stay home, or at least stay masked and very far apart. Anyone could be carrying the disease, and...