Coronavirus: The Eleventh Plague Or the Lightning-Flash of Justice? Part 1
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Dear friends of The Shalom Center —
In 2020, as America began shutting down, I called my publisher, Robert Ellsberg of Orbis Books. My book Dancing in God's Earthquake was about to go to press.
“Readers are going to think I’m crazy. This whole book is about impending earthquakes, and the word 'coronavirus' is nowhere in the book. Can you squeeze me out just three print pages, to say what it should teach us?"
Ellsberg said, “Three pages? Sure!” And those pages follow. Well-aimed arrows and uncorrected errors alike.
The US government has just proclaimed the almost-three-years Plague Pandemic officially ended. Time to measure: What did we learn, what did we not? After that three pages from the book, I will post my comments on the Plague as a Lightning-flash to light up Truth in our country, our world.
On November 13, 2019, I emailed the text of Dancing in God's Earthquake to Robert Ellsberg, the Publisher of Orbis Books. On December 4, I heard back: “Short answer: I love your book.”
In late December, 2019, the first reports began to reach the outside world of a troublesome new virus striking people in Wuhan, China.
I note this sequence of events to explain why the word “Coronavirus” is not mentioned in this book. And yet throughout the text, this specific “earthquake” among all the earthquakes in our lives – the life of all Humanity – is ever-present, even if invisible and inaudible.
The ancient rabbis taught that Torah was written not in black ink on white parchment but in black fire on white fire – and we must read the fiery “blank” white spaces by interpretation of the whole intent. This prefatory note is a tiny inky wakening of the in-between white spaces of this book. I invite you to read not only this, but whatever sparks of meaning rise for you from all the other white spaces that await you.
In the ancient biblical tradition, there comes a story of profound earthquake in the life of Am Yisrael – the people that chose to name itself the Godwrestlers. That is the story of the Exodus from slavery in the tight and narrow place we call in English “Egypt,” to a freely wandering, learning, growing journey in a Wilderness, seeking to become a loving and beloved community.
The Exodus is empowered by a series of Ten Plagues. They were brought on by the concentrated power and the arrogance, cruelty, and stubbornness of a Pharaoh whose subjugation of human beings soon became subjugation of Earth. Undrinkable water. Impossibly intrusive frogs (according to ancient rabbinic midrash, even inside human bodies). Boils. Mad cow disease. Hordes of locusts, swallowing up all food crops. Unprecedented hailstorms, flashes of fire kindling and burning trees in orchards and in forests. Darkness so thick that human beings became invisible to each other. Ultimately, the death of first-borns in every Egyptian family.
Though the ancient plagues were the horrifying results of Pharaoh’s cruelty, they became the instruments of liberation. Our own new plagues imposed by modern pharaohs are again horrifying and might-be liberating: Undrinkable water. Intrusive “forever plastics,” even inside human bodies. Famines. Floods. Fires. Human beings becoming unable to see each other through the darkness of fear. Ultimately, the dangerously impending death of the next generation of the human species – our own first- and second- and tenth-borns.
As was the case with the ancient Plagues, so too are the new Plagues sounding the death-knell of an old world order of Domination and Hierarchy. But at the same time we can hear them, act on them, as birth-cries of a new worldview of ecological interwovenness: seeing our communities of life as conscious interconnected ecosystems of biology, culture, and society--- rooted in love and flowering in life-affirming justice.
As I write, in late March 2020, we are suffering from The Eleventh Plague, the new Coronavirus. It is not the only plague that is afflicting all Humanity – and some of the others are afflicting not only Humankind but a million other species as well as the air and oceans of all Earth.
Today political “leaders” in a number of different nations are so addicted to their own power and glory, so much like the ancient Pharaoh, that at first they treated medical warnings about the new Coronavirus as “hoaxes.” They imposed hush and hesitation when they should have been calling, loud and urgent, for vigorous healing action.
Months-long official lies and pretense have already sentenced many Chinese, Italians, Iranians, and Americans to death by virus. Decades-long lies and refusals to respond to climate warnings have already sent thousands of people to their deaths by heat strokes in Europe, droughts in Syria and Central America, fires in Australia and California, floods in Central Africa and Puerto Rico, New Orleans and New York.
The delays in facing the Virus gave it a head start in America. Its head start led to swift viral spread, and as contagion grew and deaths multiplied, then to stringent prohibitions against physical presence at work or in community.
At just the precisely right and utterly uncanny moment, the Jewish calendar of Torah readings addressed how to deal with individuals or whole communities who could not be fully and physically present in the broader sacred community because they had been in contact with a human death. The Torah taught an intricate ritual of the “red heifer” to release them into rejoining the broader community.
In that passage (Numbers 19) the ritual of reconnection began with the burning of a red heifer – its red skin, red blood and red flesh all visible – in a red fire made still more red by casting into it a scarlet dye. The Hebrew word for “red” in this passage is “adumah.” It echoes the words adamah for earth and adam for human earthling. Both words also have “red” at their roots. In this story, from red clay were born the first humans – “redskins,” of course.
When human beings die – from earth we came, to earth we return. Adam melts back into the adamah: death is uncanny redness. To touch this death or to touch someone who has touched this death plunges us into this uncanny red amalgam. It takes a deep plunge into a similar but different redness, a fiery redness, to begin releasing us to life again.
And the plunge is not just verbal, a deadly serious pun. The Bible says this spectacle of redness was done “for the eyes of the priests.” Perhaps this hinted at the truth that if we stare into a red intensity and then blink, our closed eyes see a flash of green – the color of life growing. If we gaze into Death unflinching and only then transform the sight by blinking, our eyes will show us Life.
The ashes of the burnt red heifer were mixed into water; the living humans who had touched this death needed to plunge into this water on the third and seventh days afterward. Then they could reenter communal sacred space.
That passage came up for reading in mid-March 2020, just as “isolation” from communal gatherings was becoming the law of the land. On that Shabbat I led a Torah-study group that I have led for years, only this time at a distance, through Zoom. I found myself thinking that Zoom – followed by repeated washings – was our “red heifer,” allowing us to reenter loving and prayerful community, even when physically we can’t, overwhelmed as we are by our own contact with death.
When we do return to physical connection with our communities, God forbid that we simply rejoice in the passing of this crisis. And God forbid that we learn nothing, turning our eyes, our ears, our hearts, our heads away.
During the struggle to end the Vietnam War, Howard Zinn told me that for most of our lives, we walk in the dark. The jagged edges of our society may stab and bloody us, but we cannot see them. The war then became, and this moment now has become, a lightning-flash to light up our reality and its failings. Let us emblazon onto our brains what we saw in that moment, so that we can act to heal ourselves, not fall back into a fake nostalgia.
Next: The specific learnings I imagined we could draw from the Coronavirus Crisis and from the George Floyd Movement.
May you, our friends, take blessings and courage from the creativity of millions
— Arthur