Coronavirus: The Eleventh Plague Or the Lightning-Flash of Justice? Part 2
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Dear friends of The Shalom Center —
In those three pages of Dancing in God's Earthquake that I transmuted from blankness to print, what did I hope we could learn and teach from the Coronavirus Crisis? Here is what I wrote in March 2020 and later, after the murder of George Floyd.
1. We really are one planet. Even prohibitions on “foreign” travel have mostly been too late to prevent transnational contagion. This is true even when human travel is the carrier. Can we translate that knowledge to even stronger cases, like the unity of our dangerously and recklessly overheated atmosphere and oceans affecting the whole planet?
2. Governments, businesses, and families can move swiftly for profound change when sufficiently motivated. Many of them at first respond antidemocratically, with silence and lies. They may take serious action only when public outcry cannot be silenced and their own power becomes precarious.
3. We can respond to the Climate Crisis, as we did to the Coronavirus Crisis, most effectively by engaging more people in active political struggle. For examples: More effort to fill our activism itself with love, celebration, and community. More engagement by the religious communities, especially each year as we approach Passover and Holy Week. New forms of interconnection, like solar co-ops and change-insistent groups that celebrate together (on-line and in person). Increasing our direct challenge to governments that they will lose power if they don’t respond to the Climate Plagues as vigorously as they have to the Coronavirus Plague.
4. Protection for the most vulnerable has become a political issue but not yet a political given. (How do the homeless “self- isolate” without homes? How do hourly-paid workers choose to stay home and keep themselves and others safe and healthy, if they have no paid sick leave and no health insurance? How do children whose only daily bread is a school lunch eat when schools are closed? How do asylum-seekers stay healthy when they are packed into filthy detention centers or forced into jammed vehicles and sent back to tent cities? And prisoners and guards in way-overcrowded prisons?)
5. Perhaps the most obvious lesson of all: We must have universal health care. There are many different ways to get there, as many different countries have found. Get there we must.
6. We must make sure that special government and other aid goes also to those displaced and disemployed people who are worst affected by the Corona Crisis and by the Carbon Corporate poisoning of air and water, and most hurt by sudden great shifts in the economy.
7. “Social distancing” in this crisis must go on long enough to make sure that medical tests and equipment, medical spaces, and trained medical workers are in place, and that the process of contagion has been halted. Any future crisis must be met with thorough healing.
8. Then, as soon as possible, we must make sure that we do not make “social distance” or some other cramping of our lives into a habit. The isolation of our bodies from each other is dangerous to our souls and to the soul of democracy. The open society has to take place in open workplaces, open homes of prayer and Spirit, open visits to open government offices, open vigils and protest rallies, open hugs and handshakes.
9. Long before a crisis, long-view imagination and planning is necessary. Starving an agency so that it can barely meet immediate needs – as much of our public-health system was starved – leaves it helpless to address an unplanned, unexpected emergency.
10. When deep change does happen, along with death and danger it may swiftly bring forth its own unexpected rewards. The sky above Wuhan, dirty and smoggy for decades, has become blue again during the Great Pause. The waters of Venice, long impenetrably muddy, have become once again transparent during the Great Pause. Though the first motive for the Pause was fear, many people are reporting that the social responses are filled with love and a desire to strengthen community even as “social distancing” strains it. Having once again tasted these joyful values, we can try to bring them delicious to our tables beyond the crisis.
11. By the time this book is in your hands, you will know how many of us have so far learned these lessons. Writing in March 2020, I can’t know now. But I know this much: We can make this Great Pause a restful, just, and joyful Shabbat – even perhaps a Several Sabbatical Months.
12. And somewhere, somewhen, as with the weekly and the seventh-year Shabbat, we must take up the joy and justice-seeking of honorable work for good lives and livelihoods, in physical communities of work as well as celebration. We must integrate into the fullness of our ongoing lives what we have learned from this moment.
13. What did we learn? That all Earth and all Humanity are intertwined, a Grand Ecosystem connected by the Breath of Life and tinged with Divinity. And that efforts by any part to subjugate the rest will destroy us all.
Still later, I went back to Robert Ellsberg with one final ask: As a nation-wide multiracial movement against racism emerged in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, could I have one single page to write about that too? It was, after all, another earthquake, more benign – the first such national upheaval against not only segregation but all aspects of racism. Or the first since the Union Army took the field against slavery.
He said Yes, and I wrote how Floyd’s “I can’t breathe!” as the police choked him to death was not only an outcry against racism but also an uncanny prophetic speak-out for all Humanity, for Earth as a whole, and even for God.
For all Humanity. As he was being choked, so the Corona Pandemic was attacking the lungs, the Breathing, of millions of the human specie. Globally, as of May 31, 2023, there were 767,364,883 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,938,353 deaths, reported to the World Health Organization. There have been many unreported cases and unreported deaths.
Floyd’s death was an intersection between the racism bred into much of America’s “criminal justice” system and the racism bred into even the medical system. For death rates from Coronavirus among Black Americans were consistently higher than death rates among whites, even when incomes and wealth were taken into account. And globally, Big Pharma’s greed for corporate profits made it much harder to get the most effective vaccines into the bloodstreams of people in “continents of color” than in Europe and North America.
For all Earth: Earth’s constant Interbreath is the flow of Oxygen and CO2 between plants and animals. The modern Corporate Carbon Pharaohs have by burning fossil fuels flooded Earth’s air and oceans with more CO2 than all Earth’s trees and bushes and grasses can soak up and transmute to Oxygen. Since CO2 is a heat-trapping gas, it overheats the planet, producing modern Plagues of fire, flood, famine, fatal asthma, and cancer.
For God: The ancient biblical Name of God – YHWH – is “unpronounceable” precisely because if you try to pronounce that Name with no vowels, it is just a Breath. The Breath of Life. Just imagine God as Breath of Life, not Lord or King. Just imagine that God, that Breath of Life, choked by every act of tyranny and subjugation.
If this reprise from Dancing in God's Earthquake draws you toward a prophetically ecological reinterpretation of the Bible and our society, check out the book with Orbis at
https://orbisbooks.com/products/dancing-in-gods-earthquake.
Next: Now that the Pandemic is officially over, what did I get wrong at the start, what did we and I learn that still seems right, where do we go from here?
May we all share the blessing of awareness that each moment is a moment of “This!” – ready to start anew.
— Arthur