No, God Didn't 'Send' the Coronavirus

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg shows how to find additional meaning this year in the story of Passover.

A still from the Rugrats Passover episode (which, by the way, was nominated for an Emmy).

A couple weeks ago, I got one of those encouraging, out-of-the-blue “How are you?” texts that have quickly become the highlights of my day. I know “How are you?” can be a loaded question these days, but I happen to love any unexpected message from my friends far and wide. This particular inquiry was from a relatively new friend, JP Brammer, who is also the author of my favorite Substack, ¡Hola Papi! JP followed my response with, “Is any of this feeling a little...Catholic to you?” 

In fact, yes it was. Catholicism is a truly unique religion in that it borrows social conservatism and puritanical ideals that are typical of evangelism, and blends them with a flair for mysticism. Catholics believe in fire and brimstone, but we also believe that God communicates directly to us through symbols, signs, and apparitions. Coronavirus sounded an awful lot like an Old Testament plague and, thus, had all the trappings of a God-sent disaster. JP and I commiserate in this perpetual guilt: No matter how hard one tries, nobody is really an ex-Catholic. We braced ourselves for the wrath.

Shedding Catholicism and unlearning the harm it’s taught me was a big part of my 2020 mission. Before my eventual wedding, I hoped to realign my life and values, prompted by some significant job upheaval. I announced that I’d be doing a podcast called Unholier Than Thou in concert with Crooked Media—then, production was postponed due to coronavirus. 

In an effort to keep the faith alive (hah!), I’m going to remain steadfast in my commitment to understanding God in a new light by writing about spirituality here. And luckily, just as I was contemplating the End of Times and the Book of Revelations, I was sent a sign (sort of) via a Twitter thread by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. 

This week marks the beginning of Passover, the observance of which begins tomorrow, April 8th. The story of Passover famously contains a series of plagues that were, in fact, sent by God. (I remember this, I divulged to the rabbi, because I watched the cartoon Rugrats, where Tommy Pickles portrays the story of Moses.)

But, Rabbi Danya cautions, comparisons of the 10 plagues to the coronavirus would be misguided (if not a little naïve). We don’t find meaning in the suffering, she urges. Rather, God lies in how we help heal. Check out the rest of our conversation below. 

PP: Thank you for taking the time to chat today. I was very moved by the thread that you posted, where you explained this belief that seems to be somewhat pervasive. Many think that somehow, coronavirus is a message or a sign from God. So I guess to start us off, can you tell me where in the text of your faith does this concept of plagues as a direct punishment from God come up?

RD: The famous original place where we see this in the Hebrew Bible is what [Christians] know as the Old Testament. It's the story of the exodus from Egypt. God sends ten plagues to coerce Pharaoh into divesting himself of the enslaved workforce that he's built up, and Pharaoh keeps saying, "No, no, no." So the stakes keep getting higher. There are a lot of ways to understand what's happening there, but there's a lot of precedents—particularly in sort of pre-modern, pre-scientific thinking—about thinking of plagues as being sent from God, because where else could they be from?

It's a strong line in theology. And yet, if you want to take a textual counter-example, you've got the Book of Job. There, Job is suffering and suffering and saying, "Why?" And his friends are like, "I don't know. Maybe you did this wrong, maybe it's your fault, maybe you weren't nice enough." So Job basically spends the whole Book of Job asking, "Why?" until, at some point, God comes out of the whirlwind and says, "Hey, did you make giraffes? No, you did not. Did you put the stars in the sky? No, I don't think you did. Did you make trees? Uh-uh (negative). So why, puny little humans, do you think you have any right to be making theories about how all of this works? You just don't know. You do not have access to divine mind. Have a little bit of humility. You don't have all the answers. Sit down."

PP: Ok, God!

RD: God kind of eviscerates him—it's pretty hardcore. So I mean, this is theology saying that mystery is a thing and we just don't know. We don't have access to the divine mind. 

Personally, my theology is not that God is a dude in the sky with a beard and a set of dice thinking, "I'm going to give Sadie cancer and I'm going to give Max a parking ticket and Andrew is going to get the job because Andrew has been good this year." God is not Santa Claus. This idea that we're either going to get either coal or presents in our stockings because we've been good or bad is just terrible theology.  I don't think God is a person. God is definitely not an angry, vindictive person, and we need to practice humility in order to understand that we don't get to know how this works.

But we do have science, so we do know some things. We know that new coronavirus, for example, is a disease that spun out of control because our leadership failed. That's information we have. There's some terrible uses of freewill that are definitely part of the story—but the idea that it's because we deserve to get zapped? I just don't go there.

PP: In certain parts of the country, there were a lot of pastors telling their followers that prayer would save them, and that church was still safe to go to. A lot of places of worship were sending contradictory messages, which ties into this idea of faith as a mystical force, right? I wonder what you make of that.

RD: We're starting to see the fallout. We had churches that are saying, "No, no, it's fine to come to choir practice," and now people are coming and turning up sick. 

You know, there's that story of the guy on a desert island who's praying and praying for God to save him, and a boat comes by and he says, "No, I'm praying for God to save me." And then a helicopter comes by and he says, "No, I'm praying for God to save me." And he keeps praying, and eventually God's like, "Dude. I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter." And we have science! It’s a great and wonderful gift of human development. We have medical best practices, we have doctors, we have experts—and the arrogance of people who are not experts in immunology and epidemiology to say that they know the mind of God and that if you just show up, you'll be okay? It’s clearly false. 

In Judaism, we say that preserving life is the most important thing, and you're allowed to break pretty much any commandment in order to preserve life. So you can break the Sabbath and go do something that you're not supposed to do on Shabbat if somebody has a medical need. In a lot of the Jewish world, people are issuing statements saying we can use technology in ways that aren’t typical of our faith, because this is a time of distress. It's an urgent time. So even on the Sabbath, you can use Zoom as part of your Passover Seder—fine! We're going to be more relaxed about keeping Passover this year because our job is to keep everybody safe. Our job on this earth is to take care of each other. Willfully getting people sick due to a preventable disease is not how we serve God.

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“God is in every single person who shows up to help their neighbor get their groceries. God is in all of the essential workers who are exhausting themselves to take care of everybody. God is in all of the doctors and nurses who are working without sufficient protection. Our moral obligation is to use this as a chance to learn about how we can make our society more just for everybody.”

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PP: One of the things that I think of when I hear the Passover story is how the plagues affected the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh's keepers, because it felt like God was sending a clear message to the people in power that they were abusing their power. Meanwhile, what COVID-19 is laying bare are the flaws in our medical and political systems, since the virus is going to affect the most marginalized of our communities. So even if God were to send a plague and be the man in the sky with the dice, to use your metaphor, why would He choose to send that message by killing the people who the Old Testament and the Bible say are the dearest to His heart, the ones who hold the proverbial keys to heaven?

RD: Correct. And I mean, maybe there's a cause and effect, right? If you set up unjust systems, then there will be suffering—and that's what we're seeing now: there are unjust systems where people are suffering, and people in power are making money instead of paying the price. But the whole point of Torah as far as I can tell is standing up to tyranny and fighting for justice, and when you have power, you're obligated to use it responsibly. You were strangers in the land of Egypt, therefore, you take care of the widow, you take care of the orphan, you take care of the stranger! That's your job.

And that's all of our jobs now—to take care. Our job is always to take care of each other. And our job is always to take care of the people who are most vulnerable. And it's tied back to the experience of knowing that, for us, the master story is that you were strangers in Egypt. And if you can't even learn from that, go home.

PP: There's also this element that's been talked about, which is that we have something to learn from COVID-19, and this idea that COVID-19 is teaching us something, that we should be slowing down, that we should be reassessing our values, and maybe this is here to teach us a lesson. And that's not necessarily divinely inspired, but still, it's raised a lot of flags for a lot of the reasons we've talked about already, which is that it does imply that there's some higher purpose involved, right? That we need to suffer this much in order to come to this awakening?

RD: I think there are two different things. There is: is my suffering here for a purpose? I really feel strongly that suffering is not for a purpose, that God isn't giving you cancer to teach you that you needed to be nicer to that person when you cut them in line. I don't believe that suffering has a reason.

However, I do think there are things we can learn from. I think you can learn and grow from times of intense pain and suffering, even if there isn't somebody in the universe who's like, "Here's why we're giving you this." This is an opportunity to see all of the ways in which our society is profoundly dysfunctional, in terms of worker exploitation as Amazon and Instacart strikes can show us, in terms of expectations about work-life balance, in terms of expectations about the kind of society we've built, obviously in terms of healthcare and who has access to it, whose life matters, and whose life is ventilator worthy. 

But that doesn't mean it has some divinely ordained meaning. If we go through this and we haven't figured out how to be better, then we're missing something. I think we will have failed some sort of spiritual test, even if there's nobody giving us a test. But this is an opportunity to be better, and we have a moral obligation to grow from it.

PP: So in other words, we're not being tested by God, but if our moral response is not to learn from this experience, we will have failed on a spiritual level.

RD: Right. 

PP: It's hard to parse those two things out, and therefore, I think it's easy for Religion to exploit this in a way that scares people into thinking that this was divinely sent. But really, I guess what you're saying is we should find God in how we behave towards each other as humans in the midst of this crisis.

RD: Absolutely. God is in every single person who shows up to help their neighbor get their groceries. God is in all of the people who are the essential workers who are exhausting themselves to take care of everybody. God is in all of the doctors and nurses who are working without sufficient protection. I mean, that's where I think God is and our moral obligation is to use this as a chance to learn about how we can make our society more just for everybody.

PP: You mentioned Passover earlier in this conversation and my understanding is that Passover is one of the most significant holidays that Judaism celebrates every year. Would you say that's accurate?

RD: Yes.

PP: So, what does a traditional Passover Seder usually consist of?

RD: It’s a meal. Before we get to the food part, there's a really powerful ritual retelling of the Exodus from Egypt, and it uses symbolic foods, and there are symbolic actions, and there are certain kinds of questions and songs that are part of the Seder. The foods have all sorts of symbols—there's salt water for the tears and there's herbs to remind us of the bitterness of slavery, and so on. We lie luxuriously on pillows because we're free people who can recline. There's this sense of trying to not just have an intellectual experience, but a fully embodied one that impacts all of your senses. That’s a Seder.

PP: So, I imagine this must be really hard to be celebrating while socially distancing?

RD: Yes. This is a big deal for people. This is the big family meal. This is a time with family and friends and people usually spend at least a week cooking and cleaning and preparing. So, people are trying to figure it out.

PP: What have you heard that people are doing to celebrate while social distancing?

RD: The big thing is that people that are going to be doing a lot of Seders on Zoom, where they're either with their family and I'm in my apartment, you're in your apartment, and we're going to read through the Haggadah, the story of the Seder, together. Or they'll log into a synagogue community that's hosting a Seder. And there have even been some very prominent orthodox rabbis who have talked about using technology. Usually when it's a Holy day, we turn off technology and there are people who are prominent [arbiters] of Jewish law who are like, "You know what? Turn on Zoom before the holiday starts. Be on Zoom. It's important."

So it's a big deal that people are engaging technology in this way. It's normally a time to put your phones away and be face to face with people, but we can't. And obviously, the whole cooking the Seder meal is going to be just a much more restrained affair because you're cooking for one, you're cooking for five, not more than that, not 35. Nobody's moving their sofa out of the living room so that they can make room for the table for the 35 people.

PP: I can only imagine how many millennials are going to learn to cook some of these famous foods finally.

RD: I know. Totally FaceTiming with mom, there's going to be a lot of that.

PP: Yes. I'm sure. And I guess it's an interesting way of keeping tradition alive but also passing tradition on. I have to say, my mom and I have been FaceTiming a lot just to learn how to cook things like Italian wedding soup or eggplant parmesan, because these are things that I never took the time to do with her before. So it is interesting how this is becoming a moment to honor tradition. 

RD: I hope this will be empowering for people, for people who never felt like they could be the one to lead the Seder because Grandpa always does—that they now feel like they can do it. They'll do it this one year and then they'll be like, "Oh yeah, now I know how to do that."

PP: I wonder if, in closing, you have a prayer or any last words of wisdom you’d like to offer.

RD: I think this is a time when everybody needs to double down on their spiritual practice—whether that's prayer or meditation or making art or long walks or any of that—this is a time when everybody needs to be drawing from all of the resources they have and the ones to keep them grounded and the ones to keep them connected to the big Bigness out there. That can be God or the universe or whatever. This is a good time to try to figure out how to engage those parts of ourselves, because this is going to be a long, hard haul and we need as many people to try to be getting through this as whole as possible.