The sunken eyes, bloody wounds and strange lumps and bruises that are part of Halloween costumes are tame compared to the huge boils and black blotches on the skin of those who were unfortunate enough to fall victim to bubonic plague in the mid-1300s.
It’s estimated that bubonic plague claimed up to 60% of Europe’s population. Boccaccio’s Decameron informs us that more than 100,000 people lost their lives in the city of Florence in the spring and summer of 1347. “One man shunned another, …” wrote Boccaccio, “brother was forsaken by brother, oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children to their fate.”
Most people believed that the Black Death could only be explained as divine punishment for sin.
Efforts to appease God’s wrath included long processions of barefoot, weeping penitents dressed in sackcloth who sprinkled themselves with ashes, prayed and tore their hair. When the plague didn’t abate, the processions moved from remorse to self-flagellation; stripped to the waist, the flagellants beat themselves with leather whips tipped with iron spikes until the blood flowed. When these strategies didn’t work, the mobs looked for a scapegoat.
They turned on the Jews.
Jews were dragged from their houses and thrown into bonfires. The 2,000 Jews of Strasbourg, France, were taken to the cemetery, where those who didn’t convert were burned at the stake.
In 1630-1631, the plague in northern Italy was the most devastating epidemic in the history of early modern Europe. Leon de Modena, a Jewish scholar born in Venice, wrote, “The hand of God weighed heavily throughout Italy, bringing war, famine, and plague.” Like everyone else, he understood the plague as “the hand of God” punishing people’s bad behavior.
In late 1918 and early 1919, the “Spanish flu” killed more people than all the casualties of the First World War. The Roman Catholic bishop of Trenton, N.J., wrote: “We, a God-fearing, God-loving people, should now raise up our minds to Almighty God and humbly beg Him with clean lips and confident hearts in fervent daily prayer, to stay and destroy this invading plague.”
The view that human suffering is somehow God’s will, sent to punish human wickedness, is still with us. Among some ultra-Orthodox Jews today, one hears the crazy notion that God sent the Holocaust to kill 6 million Jews because too many of us had been eating non-kosher food or violating the prohibitions of the Sabbath; or that the success of a terrorist raid or a missile strike is God’s punishment for permitting the presence of non-observant Jews in the so-called “Jewish state.”
In our own country, it was not uncommon to hear certain preachers proclaim that the AIDS epidemic was God’s punishment for homosexuality, or that same-sex marriage is to blame for the coronavirus.
Pastor Gerald O. Glenn, bishop of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield, Va., died on April 11 after defying warnings about the danger of gatherings during the pandemic. “I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus,” he proclaimed. I suspect that Pastor Glenn believed the promise of Psalm 91 literally: “I say of the Lord, my refuge and stronghold, My God in whom I trust, that He will save you from the fowler’s trap, from the destructive plague.”
Magical thinking is the belief that thoughts and wishes influence events in the physical world. The young child who is angry at his father — and then, sadly, the father suddenly dies — must be reassured again and again that his angry wishes did not cause his father’s death. The child who is abused by a parent often believes “It must be me. I must be bad.” Magical thinking is as old as the human race. The Book of Deuteronomy enshrines the principle that every good crop or military victory is the reward of a beneficent God for human fealty, and every crop failure or military defeat is the punishment of an angry God for human misbehavior.
Why good people sometimes suffer — what theologians call the problem of theodicy — is only a theological problem if we begin with a belief in a God who is intimately involved in every human action and doles out rewards and punishments. To take any two events that occur one after the other, and decide that Event A caused Event B, is magical thinking. Contiguity in time is not causality.
But so much does depend on us — the teams who do contact tracing to stem the spread of the virus, the scientists who work feverishly to find a cure and a vaccine, the medical personnel on the front lines who are constantly at risk, the people who deliver our food and fuel and mail, those who help others who have lost their jobs, the neighbors who look out for our well-being, the overwhelming proportion of people who understand that we are responsible for one another and who are willing to observe social distancing and to endure the minor discomfort of wearing a mask to protect others.
In the wake of the recent terrifying events in our beloved America, I cannot conclude without mentioning the plagues of homophobia, of racism, of anti-Semitism, of white supremacy, of poisonous conspiracy theories, of those who divide us from one another and heap suffering on an already suffering nation — and the plague of magical thinking.
More than 225,000 of our fellow Americans have died of the coronavirus. That’s a really scary story. Be safe. Be good. Do good. Be sure to vote. So much depends on each of us.
Dov Taylor is the rabbi at Chavurat Ki-tov: A Gathering for Jewish Life and Learning in Woodstock, and rabbi emeritus for Congregation Solel in Highland Park, Ill.