“Upon an enemy who attacks you, sound the trumpets.” (Bemidbar 10:9) This is to say about everything that pains you such as…a plague, cry out about them…and this is the path of repentance…that everyone will know it’s because of their bad deeds that this evil is upon them…and this will cause them to remove the evil from themselves.” Rambam Hilchot Taanit 1:1-2
“It (the pain paradigmatized by the Shoah) renders impossible and odious every proposal and every thought that would explain it by the sins of those who have suffered or are dead.” Emmanuel Levinas, Useless Suffering
So, weekly, I read some cleric’s opinion about the people who are now dying; what they must have done wrong in this life or a previous one, or some suggestion that this magefah represents a punishment for some social crime the author is able to discern. I read posts along the lines of “Everything happens for a reason,” and “God never gives you more than you can handle,” and, in solitude, I rage. All aboard the theodicy rollercoaster.
Usually, I take comfort in the God of Isaiah 45:7— “I form light and I create darkness; I make peace and I create evil…” The prophet says, in God’s name, that we are not meant or able to understand. I find a kind of equanimity in that. Decoding some divine plan is way above my pay grade. For some reason, the Infinite chose to create a finite and imperfect world. For some reason, we’ve been given our Torah, a way of life that demands our participation in creation, in making that world kinder and more just.
From that standpoint, we may as well take the Rambam’s advice now that we have time on our hands. Without imputing any guilt to those who suffer, we can assess our own behavior and see if we can’t make it any better.
In the essay quoted above, Useless Suffering, Levinas suggests that our neighbor’s suffering does have one message for us—it constitutes a summons. God calls from the face of the suffering other who commands us with her weakness, her need that mirrors our own.
We can weigh our behavior, as individuals and as members of communities and polities, considering that appeal. We know that, while none of us brought on this corona virus, as a country, we are causing and enduring (some more causing, some more enduring) unnecessary suffering as consequences of how we live. Because we have no universal healthcare system, but a welter of insurance plans, for-profit companies that set their own prices and priorities, and government systems forced to compete with one another, we do not have enough tests to measure the extent of the pandemic, nor do we have enough medical equipment to treat everyone who is falling sick. Because of an extreme concentration of wealth by the very rich, we are divided between people who can afford to retreat to the countryside and those who are forced to take public transportation to get to the jobs from which they cannot afford to take leave. We are divided between those who can connect with loved ones and colleagues online and those whose computers, if they have them, don’t support communications platforms. We are divided, because African American and Latinx people, who disproportionately live in communities where freeways and polluting enterprises have been inserted, have higher rates of diseases like asthma and heart problems than those who live in gentrified neighborhoods or suburbs. We are divided, because Native peoples who live on reservations learned about the need for social distancing weeks after people who had access to the power grid learned of these things and were able to order groceries, to be delivered by those people who cannot afford time off work.
That situation is not the fault of the suffering or the will of God to whom we pray as the One who heals the sick, helps the poor, and uplifts the fallen. How does God do those things? As Levinas teaches, God acts through human hands.
How will we, per the Rambam, “remove the evil?”
Certainly, by person-to-person acts of kindness. By checking on our neighbors who are old and infirm, reaching out to friends who live alone so that they know they are loved, posting silly cat gifs to make each other laugh. Also, by looking at the power arrangements created by human beings and seeing what we can do to rectify them.
