COVID-19 and the Theological Challenge of the Arbitrary

Religion's use and interpretation of natural phenomena and catastrophes as indications of divine favor or wrath has a long history.¹ We need look no further than the first ten chapters of Genesis to see two natural phenomena, the flood and the rainbow, as illustrations.

Looking more deeply into the Hebrew Bible, we are confronted with two other natural phenomena, famine and plagues, as turning points in Israelite history.² A famine caused Abraham and then Jacob to travel to Egypt, and plagues mark a transition whereby God intervenes directly to liberate the Israelites from slavery.³ A famine initiated what would become Israelite exile, and a series of plagues initiated the Israelites' redemption from Egypt. In the Hebrew Bible, and in the ancient world more generally, plagues and famine are major occurrences that initiate demographic shifts. In the Bible and other religious texts, there is often a direct correlation between God and natural phenomena. The ancient's view of famine was quite comprehensible, as there was an empirical connection between drought and famine. They knew how famines occurred, even if they did not know why, although the assumption was that they were punishments for human sin.

Famines constitute a good portion of the mishnaic tractate Ta'anit, and are viewed in the Mishnah largely as a divine punishment. Thus, the Mishnah mandates fasting and repentance to nullify the decree. The famous story of the first century tanna (teacher), Honi Ha-me'agel drawing a circle in which he sat and prayed for rain personifies the notion that famine was viewed as a consequence of human wrongdoing and thus required human correction.⁴

Plagues were much more ambiguous. The plagues in Egypt had a clear and explicit teleological function: to break the will of the Egyptians in order to convince Pharaoh to free the Jews. These plagues are described in the exegetical tradition as targeted—only affecting the Egyptians—with the plague of the first born being the culminating, and explicit, example. In short, these phenomena fit neatly into a world where God intervenes in nature to achieve certain ends.⁵

Plagues as described in the Babylonian Talmud, however, seem to suggest something different. There is one talmudic sugya (passage from the Gemarah) devoted to plagues (dever), b. Bava Kama 60b, that is almost entirely concerned with ways to best protect oneself from contagion.⁶ There is no mention there of praying, repenting, fasting, or engaging in other devotional acts to ward off the disease. Medieval commentators on this sugya mostly reflect on the arbitrariness of a plague, which does not seem to be something that can be undone by devotional acts and contrition.⁷

Below, I argue that the Babylonian Talmud's extended discussion of plagues in b. Bava Kama 60b resists the notion of collapsing plagues into covenantal categories, whereby we can see them as acts of divine intervention to punish evildoers, Jews or non-Jews. Rather, as we will see in several glosses to the talmudic sugya, plagues seem to be arbitrary occurrences, indiscriminate, and thus impervious to human devotional intervention. In this sense, they are extra-covenantal occurrences challenging rabbinic convention that natural disasters are in some way divine intervention to punish or facilitate a response.

Plagues present an interesting case of what I am calling a "covenantal exception" that is both problematic and necessary. While the arbitrary poses certain theological challenges to covenantal reciprocity (if plagues are arbitrary, what are the limits of the arbitrary?), the arbitrary also serves a crucial function as exception. Without the notion of the arbitrary as extra-covenantal, Judaism becomes vulnerable to making all disasters, even those that equally affect non-Jews, the fault of the Jews, which could easily, and understandably, evoke negative reactions. Plague as the exception thus enables Jews to understand natural disasters outside the paradigm of reward and punishment.

There is a distinction I want to draw here between arbitrariness and uncertainty (safek), the latter being a major category of halakhic discourse.⁸ In his recent book The Birth of Doubt, Moshe Halbertal gives us two operative...