Smoke, Fire, & Coronavirus: Plagues 13, 12, 11 …. Or the Lightning-Flash of Justice? Part 3

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Dear friends of The Shalom Center,

For Parts 1 and 2 of this review of what we learned and failed to learn from the Coronavirus 11th Plague, see:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UQRyP7SJTHCas2AYNppC9aeWLk3JtGE5/view

In my previous post, I reviewed what I tried to learn at the beginning of the Eleventh Plague. Here, I want to underline where I think I got the learning right, acknowledge my mistakes, and learn again.

But just as the Coronavirus Plague “intruded” on my book as one of the earthquakes in Dancing in God's Earthquake, so yesterday’s news “intrudes” into today’s planned letter:

Smoky dangerous air blowing from Canadian wildfires into huge areas of US turf and population.

The wildfires and the smoke are caused by the heating, the scorching, the broiling of Earth by the CO2 that modern Corporate Carbon Pharaohs are pouring into air and ocean. Planetary plagues – in other places, floods, famines, lethal asthma, lethal cancers, mass extinctions. All for the sake of Hyper-profits. Greed destroying Love and the sacred Interbreathing of all Earth, encapsulated in the Breath of life as YHWH.

Can we apply what we tried to learn from the Coronavirus Crisis to the Climate Crisis?

The Pandemic lasted much longer than the world’s governments (or I!) imagined, and for many many people what they learned from it was a sour and angry attitude toward governmental and other efforts to deal with the Pandemic itself and with many other problems.

The Trump Administration used that simmering supercharged atmosphere of the Pandemic to encourage a sour and angry attitude to bounce back and forth from the White House to many American streets, and then back from the streets to the White House.

That sourness made it much harder to learn how hopeful creativity and unprecedented solutions could be seen, learned, and embodied during the Coronavirus lightning-flash.

I did not expect any US government, even the Trump regime, to poison hope so effectively in a third of the country. For that third, the “learning” from Coronavirus was rage against “elites” like scientists and physicians, and “globalists” who believed the Virus showed how all Earth is an interwoven ecosystem.

One less broad yet still important error in my essay in Dancing in God's Earthquake was, in Learning #5, my emphasis only on universal health insurance.

That should have been an important part of the learning, but only part of a major upgrading in public-health readiness. We humans have crowded into the globe, leaving little room between us and other animals. Some of them harbor viruses that through evolutionary epochs they have grown used to – but to us humans, those viruses are still lethal. There will be more Pandemics.

So we humans should pioneer new vaccines, share them in stockpiles everywhere, establish Emergency Public Health Action Centers all over the country and the world, prepare economic plans to meet the needs of those whose jobs will vanish like smoke, make sure that all humanity is ready in preparation for the likely new pandemics.

This, plus universal health insurance, should be the most obvious and urgent learning/ doing. But instead, with the “end” of the Pandemic, some states have cut people from the Medicaid rolls who were added during the Pandemic. In some places, sourness and anger.

“Social distancing” and the closing of many schools and workplaces not only created major economic disasters for many who could not work from home but major emotional and mental-health disasters, especially but not only for children and adolescents.

So planning for future Pandemics and other Plagues must include planning for small, decentralized, Resilience Groups for teaching-learning, social interaction, etc., with ready-to-go money for groups that get to trust each other before the emergency.

And our planning must include what we learned again from the Eleventh Plague: The poor, the Black, the excluded of every kind, will suffer most and must receive special aid. Aid tuned to their memories, their traumas.

Not “above all” but infused in all, surrounding all, is the interbreathing ecological sense of world that George Floyd called us to. Not racism or any of the other perverted versions of hierarchy, but the great jigsaw puzzle in which every part is different, every part is sacred, no part subjugates another, every part fits with other parts to make a sacred Whole.

Many of my suggested learnings have grown in many – but not yet enough – parts of the US public. I include all the “global-oriented” learnings. We learned that in a real emergency we can quickly persuade or force governments and major corporations, universities, labor unions, etc. to change their behavior. If we keep that learning alive, we can use it to face the very real intertwined emergencies of the Climate Crisis and the Democracy Crisis.

Resilience Groups must start to gather and to act now – not only to help people caught in Plagues already burning, flooding – but to stop the broiling that destroys us.

It may seem paradoxical for thick dark smoke to become a lightning flash of Truth. But that is where we are. The burning of our universal Temple Earth must call us to use the grief of Tisha B’Av’s remembrance of ancient Temples burned by imperial armies. This is no time for sour muttering. We cannot heal the past; we must use our grief in action to heal the future.

May our learnings help us to bring new strength and blessing to the Breath of Life!

— Arthur