Reformulating a Plague Theology
Introduction: The Historian’s View
Reform Judaism often lends itself—or more accurately, appears to lend itself—to a kind of religious slippage. It spends much of its rhetorical and communal capital on matters of secular concern, and it adopts positions at odds with traditional religiosity. Almost half (47%) of self-identified American Reform Jews expressed only tepid belief in God (claiming to “believe, but less certain”), according to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 “Portrait of Jewish Americans.”[1] Still, Reform Judaism represents a vibrant and large synagogue-going community, and as an ideology, it holds fast to its identity as a religious endeavor anchored in the Hebrew Bible and the postbiblical tradition.
As such, Reform Judaism finds itself, like all monotheistic systems, vulnerable to the moral chaos imposed by the irony of grand calamities, ruefully but aptly termed “Acts of God.” Earthquakes, floods, and wildfires risk making a mockery of the idea of Divine compassion and inverting the principle of God’s justice, favoring instead God’s raw, destructive and haphazard power. And for Jews, no Act of God embodies this terrifying prospect more ironically than plague. Once the vehicle of our freedom from Egypt, contemporary plague follows a maddening and shameful pattern: It attacks all humans, but also manages to exacerbate society’s worst, most discriminatory tendencies, by disproportionately harming the infirm, aged, and those who lack access to health care or the financial wherewithal to weather the economic fallout.
How do these random and cruel acts of plague and other catastrophes reflect on God, their source, who is nevertheless presumed to be just and good? And how might Reform Judaism wrestle with that problem?
It is an old question and hardly unique to Judaism, but the Reform variety offers a distinctive approach to finding meaning in it. This approach, at the outset, emerges from Judaism’s deep-seated qualities of variety and flexibility. Judaism claims that God created the Universe and developed a unique and mutually binding Covenant with the People Israel. Additionally, Jewish thinkers have generally agreed that God acts with justice and compassion—even though one comes at the expense of the other. But beyond these basic tenets, Jewish traditions across the spectrum of time and ideology have more accurately presented a motley sense of God, rather than developed a proper, ordered divine system of God, or theology. Jewish religious literature reveals little that Jews can agree on in terms of God’s character or makeup, such as Christianity, by contrast, has so thoroughly refined. For example, Jewish scholars have disagreed about something so basic as the degree to which God has some kind of embodied presence in the universe. In the words of Rabbinic scholar David Weiss Halivni, Judaism is “irrepressibly—almost systematically—individualistic” in its sense of God, and it offers no theological system to speak of.[2]
Thus, we might narrow question to this: How can Reform Judaism deploy our civilization’s doctrinal, cultural and religious variety, in order to square our general sense of Divine goodness and justice with the persistent problem of Acts of God, which we experience as neither good nor just?
“Reform Judaism… legitimates this bold project through the self-conscious study of Jewish history as a mirror in which we glimpse not only ourselves but also the past in which we are situated.”
By evaluating and selecting from the landscape of Jewish ideas, Reform Judaism dares to revisit precisely such difficult religious challenges. It legitimates this bold project through the self-conscious study of Jewish history as a mirror in which we glimpse not only ourselves but also the past in which we are situated. That is to say, Reform thinkers and scholars follow the threads of actual events, literature, and spirituality across Jewish time. From these varied sources, they weave a tapestry of belief based on what Jews experienced, professed, and challenged, both within the Rabbinic system but also outside it and even against it. Pointedly, this analysis forces choices upon us—to reject some perspectives and adopt others—in order to make sense of the world as we experience it, a responsibility that Reform Judaism does not shirk.
Our sources for this project, as applied to the religious problem of Acts of God, start at the beginning. Torah itself struggles with the problem of Divine justice. Early on, God reverses his wholesale destruction of the Flood, and soon thereafter Abraham admonishes the Holy One to act compassionately on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah’s innocent few, even though the reprieve would also benefit those who, by rights, deserve punishment. Later, the story of Job revisits the problem of justice on an individual level, by recounting Job’s terrible personal suffering at the hand of God’s cruel whim. These and other stories seem both to resign themselves to mystery and also to confront God with a kind of religious courage, not unlike that of Abraham himself.
The Rabbis continue this tradition, even blaming God for the destruction wrought on the Jews. This outrage finds its most distilled voice in the Rabbinic interpretations of the Book of Lamentations, associated with the Destruction of the Temple in 70 c.e. These postbiblical readings were compiled in the classical midrash called Lamentations Rabbah, which sometimes goes so far as to cast aspersions on the basic principle of God’s goodness and justice. The midrashic Abraham, still God’s conscience, complains of God’s failure to defend Israel. Then, the angels accuse God of malfeasance in the words of the Prophet Isaiah: “He broke the covenant.”[3]
Remarkably, however, despite its capacity to entertain daring theological attitudes and famously diverse perspectives, Rabbinic literature largely settles on one approach to Divine justice. This perspective would prevail for millennia as the dominant Jewish interpretation of Acts of God. Ultimately the Rabbis defend God and preserve the principle of Divine justice, from which it follows that Jews (and non-Jews, as well) deserve their troubles, including Acts of God such as plague.
A Reform-minded excavation of this ancient and enduring attitude of self-blame, for all the disquietude it provokes, uncovers an unexpected vein of solace and promise, also ancient and enduring. When viewed in its historical context, then distilled and divested of its element of blame, and finally reformulated for contemporary Judaism, this predominant and difficult approach to Acts of God affords us the raw materials for a “plague theology” with which we can live. It promotes a sense of agency and connection, especially during this unprecedented moment of aporia and enforced, collective separation.
History of Traditional Plague Theology
To the monotheistic mindset, Acts of God such as plague pose a basic problem: They contradict, or at least reveal cracks in, the Divine “personality.” Natural catastrophes pit God’s attribute of omnipotence against that of benevolence, and their havoc and arbitrariness belie the principle of Divine justice. Broadly, Rabbinic traditions resolve this theological conundrum with uncharacteristically preponderant opinion: They excuse God altogether. When Acts of God strike, humanity in general, and the Jewish people in particular, deserve it as a consequence of their sins.
The most distilled and personal version of plague-as-punishment appears in the Babylonian Talmud, with the great sage Rabbi Akiva (second century ce). He interprets Ecclesiastes 11:6: “In the morning sow your seed, but do not take a break in the evening, because you never know which [planting] shall prosper….” There is no rest for the weary, Akiva explains. One must “plant” students of Torah morning and evening, because, as Ecclesiastes indicates, one never knows who among them will survive to propagate the tradition. Sure enough, as if to justify Akiva’s fears, a plague besets his disciples “from Gevat to Antipatris” in the North, depriving the world of Torah “until Rabbi Akiva came to our Rabbis in the South and taught them.”[4]
Presumably, this Talmudic anecdote bears a purpose—a moral of sorts. And if so, it triggers a deeply disturbing question: Would God punish scholars and diminish Torah in the world, simply to vindicate Akiva’s admonition to produce ever more Torah scholars?
No, Talmud reassures us. God killed the scholars off with plague, because they “did not treat each other with respect.” In other words, students of Torah betrayed a sacred ethic, and God punished them—deservedly, as the story would have it—with death by plague. And with this moral, the Rabbinic tradition solidifies a vindication of Acts of God that will last an epoch. God does not send deadly plagues simply to prove a point of interpretation; God does so because the afflicted deserve it. In other words, Acts of God do not challenge the principle of Divine justice; they affirm it.
A second story transports us a thousand years and a thousand miles to medieval Spain, during the Black Plague in 1349. Headstones of victims from Toledo, Spain (mostly lost to us today but serendipitously copied by sixteenth-century tourists), bear witness to the Jewish reaction to the world’s worst contagion. These rarest of testimonies intimate a plague theology of sorts and a version of the traditional justification for plague-as-punishment. Unlike Akiva’s experience, however, these lives are not rendered into legend and enshrined in Talmud; they took place in recorded history and merited commemoration by actual people at the mercy of a mysterious and unstoppable force majeure. In these poignant headstones, we catch a glimpse of the emotional complexity embedded in eulogizing beloved and respected people, whose horrible, divinely ordained deaths presumably made sense.
“In these poignant headstones, we catch a glimpse of the emotional complexity embedded in eulogizing beloved and respected people, whose horrible, divinely ordained deaths presumably made sense.”
We meet Miriam, a granddaughter of one of Europe’s greatest rabbinic authorities, Asher ben Yeḥiel. She had married her uncle Judah, also memorialized on her epitaph. Glowing at first, the inscription describes looming disaster, as “God grew angry with Judah and Israel, and uncovered Judah, and God’s people were left to stray, like sheep that have no shepherd.”[5] Other epitaphs depict honored men and women who stood “in the breach for God’s people”—pious souls who implicitly bore the brunt of their collective sin but failed, apparently, to dull God’s anger.[6] Contemporary poet Emanuel ben Joseph supplicates God to “purify their hearts and straighten their path; wipe out their debt and take away [their] sins.”[7] Raw and ill resolved, the competing emotions of these mourners swell from headstones: Grief and admiration vie with abject pleas for mercy in the face of nameless-but-palpable sinfulness.
In the end, all these testimonies rest on a foundational worldview that, for all its pain, confusion and even resistance, ultimately resigns itself to faith in God’s justice. Professor Susan Einbinder, who analyzed the Toledo headstones, points out that these sentiments represent an utterly standard understanding of misfortune. Amidst the kaleidoscopic variety of medieval Judaism’s psychological and spiritual understanding of God, Jews routinely articulated a plague theology of punishment, as “merited by their many sins.”[8] Everyone seems to have unquestioningly accepted a plague theology that incriminates them all.
This uncommon consistency of belief persists into the modern period. Glueckl of Hameln (1646-1724), a middle-class widow and diarist, also seeks strength from God who punishes her family with hardship, loss, and yet again, sickness. She begs “the great and righteous King” for patience, to “count it all as an atonement for my sins.”[9]
Later, by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this kind of theodicy lost favor, and became almost entirely discredited by the Holocaust. But it persisted in parts of the ultra-Orthodox world. Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum explains his view that collective sin caused the disastrous murder of European Jewry, in a conflagration that consumed the innocent together with the guilty:
Because of our sinfulness we have suffered greatly…. The heretics have… lured the majority of the Jewish people into awful heresy.... And so, it is no wonder that the Lord has lashed out in anger.... And there were also righteous people who perished because of the iniquity of the sinners and corrupters….”[10]
As shocking as it is to read, Rabbi Teitelbaum’s position comports with the posture of Jews throughout history, in both theory and practice, all the way back to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Until very recently, this Jewish consensus has reigned. Acts of God, including indiscriminate plagues and man-made cataclysms like the Holocaust, vindicate rather than test God’s unerring justice.
Understanding God’s Justice in the Context of Jewish History
The dogged consistency of this Jewish theodicy makes for a coherent historical narrative, but it presents Reform Judaism with a challenge. If, as Rabbi David Ellenson has long argued, Reform Jewish theology resides in the study of history, then our cherished sense of flexibility depends on being able to choose from a diversity of streams of religious thought and feeling over time.
And such variety exists, such as Lamentations Rabbah, which accuses God of acting “not in accordance with the Law.”[11] In the end, however, the Rabbinic authors themselves remain conflicted about these midrashim, lest they lead to their logical conclusion, namely, “a rejection of God or a rejection of the covenant with God.”[12] In sum, Reform Judaism may well might find compelling material with which to think about Acts of God, but history nevertheless confronts us with an apparent consensus to the contrary.
Less intuitively but compellingly, Reform analysis might also undertake the challenge of investigating the more prevalent Jewish tendency to blame the victim of Acts of God. Understood and analyzed on its own historical terms, this counterintuitive perspective may yet offer an edifying and relevant message.
In fact, the traditional plague theology made compelling sense in its premodern context and, even more than that, afforded solace in the face of suffering and catastrophe. The logic goes something like this: God’s Covenant with Israel, the Torah, stipulates both blessings and curses, rewards and punishments, corresponding to Israel’s faithfulness to their side of the bargain. “If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands… the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth.” Alternatively, “if you do not obey the Lord your God…, all these curses will come on you and overtake you” (Deut. 28:1, 15). Enforcement of these stipulations, for better or worse, reaffirms the contractual foundation of Covenant, indicating both that it remains in force and that the Jewish people remain a party to it.
In this admittedly pious and literalist light, it is better to have deserved punishment than to have suffered in vain; better a strict, parental God than a capricious and indifferent one. No wonder then that, guided by this backhanded sense of purpose, Jews have long found the strength to persevere through all manner of calamity, not by shirking guilt but rather by embracing it. And therein, in that spirit of owning one’s destiny in a relationship of consequence, lies the opportunity for modern reinterpretation.
Conclusion: Reform Judaism Responds
We find ourselves heirs to a pious sense of plague-as-punishment that few, if any, contemporary Jews can adopt, on the face of it. We can, however, distill from it a religious sense of justice that might indeed speak to us. In fact, some refinement in this direction already appears in the Mishnah, the oldest layer of Rabbinic law. The rough contemporaries of Rabbi Akiva declare that “pestilence comes to the world for Torah’s capital sins, which have not been referred to a court.”[13] Granted, the Rabbis concede, we’re guilty; but punishment follows, not from guilt or sin itself but rather from our failure to remediate it through a system of justice. Divine justice solicits from us an urgent sense of agency—and hence responsibility—to exercise human justice, in order to “avert the harsh decree,” as mentioned in the Yom Kippur liturgy.
“While we do not accept blame for Acts of God—and in this we choose to reject some of the spirit of the traditional victim-blaming—we do assume responsibility to make the world we deserve.”
Here, Reform Judaism has something profound to say, particularly in its vigorous message of social justice as a Jewish value. While we do not accept blame for Acts of God—and in this we choose to reject some of the spirit of the traditional victim-blaming—we do assume responsibility to make the world we deserve. That is, Reform Judaism will not adopt a sense of guilt for natural disasters or plagues explained by science, but it actively pursues participation in the human endeavor of justice. And more pointedly, we also feel beholden to a religious sense of consequences, even in relation to Acts of God beyond our immediate control: We accept responsibility to curb their causes ahead of time, and to support recovery after the fact.
This sense of agency and responsibility entirely recasts the work of Reform communities, which superficially appears secular or only tangential to the religious experience. Reform Jews’ mild skepticism toward the idea of God now becomes a constructive protest against our failures to partner successfully with God for the betterment of the human condition. This perspective may not soften the blow of Acts of God, but it does elevate our response to them to a religious plane or higher purpose, even if that response is not necessarily clothed in the trappings of piety.
And more than that, perhaps this Reform “plague theology” may indeed offer a purely spiritual and religious form of solace, at least to some of us, independently of its imperative for improvement. Divesting it of its corrosive sense of guilt, this Reform plague theology can lead us, as it did our premodern forebears, to the conclusion that our fate matters to God.
The mere fact that God reacts to us at all implies our cosmic relevance. And if that relevance is evidently capable of bringing sorrow and punishment with it, the Rabbinic tradition offers an alternative, in which our importance to God becomes the embodiment of hope.
In the Song of Songs, the male figure celebrates his beloved’s beauty: “Behold, you are beautiful my love; behold you are beautiful.”[14] The Rabbis wonder: Why does male speaker repeat himself?
Allegorically correlating the male character to God and the woman character to the people Israel, the Rabbis answer their own question in the midrash Song of Songs Rabbah.
The first instance of “Behold you are beautiful” refers to Israel’s beauty derived from fulfilling the Commandments; the repetition refers to the beauty derived from acts of loving kindness…. The first instance refers to Israel’s beauty in This World; the repetition refers Israel’s beauty in the World to Come.[15]
[1] “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” Findings from a Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews, Oct. 2013, p. 74.
https://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/
[2] David Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash (Oxford University Press, 1991), 94.
[3] Lamentations Rabbah Pr. 24, on Isaiah 33:8.
[4] Yev. 62b
[5] Susan Einbinder, After the Black Death (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 151.
[6] Ibid., 149.
[7] Ibid., 40.
[8] Ibid., 42.
[9] The Memoirs of Glückl of Hameln, trans. Marvin Lowenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 227-28.
[10] Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), 124.
[11] Lamentations Rabbah 1:37b
[12]Adam Gregerman, Building on the Ruins of the Temple (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 223.
[13] Avot 5:8
[14] Song of Songs 4:1
[15] Song of Songs Rabbah 4:1
