NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS
OR SEEMS WHAT IT IS:
Post Purim Thoughts On Dealing With, And
Overcoming, The Corona Virus Crisis
It's early 2020 and the world is in turmoil, it is
facing a perilous existential threat, or so it seems. For the Jewish People, and for humanity at large, this is
nothing new, in spite of the Corona virus being called
"novel".
I had some thoughts this past Purim as the Megillah
of Esther was being read and as my mind inevitably tied the events of the past
with current events. And it struck me that nothing is ever what it seems nor
does it seem what it is, and how this applies to the present Corona virus crisis
and how to frame it and hopefully freeze it once and for all.
The Megillah of Esther records how two and a half
millennia ago, after the Jews from the Kingdom of Judah were conquered by the
Babylonians they found themselves in Galut, in bitter exile in an alien land.
Things seemed very bleak for the Jews, former citizens of Judah. Soon though,
Babylonia fell and the new empire of Persia
arose and took over with a new king, Achashverosh known as Ahasueres or Xerxes
in English, who at the pinnacle of his power decided to, what else, throw
massive banquets and balls to enthrall all, gentile and Jew alike, with booze
galore. The king and his exceedingly beautiful queen, Vashti were needless to
say full of vigor, passion and love, and intoxicated with both drink and power
and each other. It seemed that nothing could go wrong.
King Achashverosh then got it into his head to demand
of queen Vashti to come and display her physical beauty in all its raw power,
but she adamantly refused. The king was outraged, humiliated and flabbergasted,
and it cost Vashti her head. So this is what all the wild partying resulted in,
the beheading of the queen, which in turn sent the king into depression and
spasms of withdrawal symptoms regretting his hasty punitive actions against his
late beloved executed queen. What a turnaround indeed.
The next step was to organize an empire-wide search
for a new queen based on a beauty pageant. This impacts Esther and Mordechai a
Jewish couple who were living a quiet domestic life somewhere in the Persian
exile, as Esther is kidnapped to appear in the imperial beauty pageant. As fate
would have it it is the inscrutable Esther, her name is related to the word
HESTER in Hebrew, which means "hidden" appropriately enough, who is chosen as a
new wife for King Achashverosh and hence as the new Royal Highness Queen of the
mighty Persian Empire. Yet she kept her mouth shut through all of this and did
not reveal her Jewish nationality so that truly nothing seemed what it is. What
a terrific turnaround of fortune!
Then we have the evil Machiavellian Haman and his
equally scheming wife the cursed Zeresh who are driven crazy by the brazen
Jewish pride and defiance of Mordechai the Jew, or Mordechai HaYehudi as he is
known in Hebrew, and by their visceral hatred of all Jews and everything Jewish.
For Mordechai the leader of the Jews they prepare a gallows in their yard but it
will be Haman's neck that will hang from that tree. This is not the way it
seemed to Haman and Zeresh at the time they were conniving to harm world Jewry,
then centered in Shushan the Persian capital.
You also have the Amalakite Haman and the indifferent
FDRoosevelt Achashverosh, like a Himmler-Hitler duo, plotting the entrapment and
genocide of all Jews in the Persian empire. Oh, they were so jolly as they
sealed their pact to annihilate the Jews with a drink. Ho, ho, ho, and ha, ha,
ha, and bottoms up, you can just hear them chuckling as they cook up their own
Final Solution to the infernal eternal Jewish Question. But their planned-for
Holocaust was not to be because it was not as it seemed, evidently fate, or
better yet, God had other plans! Mordechai's wisdom and Esther's smarts outwits
Haman's schemes while Esther asks the Jews to pray and fast for her success as
she then turns a supposed banquet into a tribunal sealing Haman's fate when she
pivot's Achashverosh's love for her, and in the process revealing her true
nationality as a Jew, inducing Achashverosh to override his prior decrees
against the Jews and sending Haman to the gallows. And so a day fated to be a
day of gloom and doom turned around to become a festival of light and life for
the Jews, celebrated as Purim to this day. Absolutely nothing seemed what it
is.
Incidentally, in the actual Megillah of Esther the
name of God is not explicitly mentioned in the narrative. Yet all the while, the
intelligent, informed and faithful reader, in the literal sense, knows that God
is pulling all the strings as the Divine Puppeteer guiding each individual and
the world to its unavoidable destiny and denouement fulfilling His Master Plan
as nothing remains what it seems and nothing seems what it is in a kaleidoscope
of changing and cascading scenarios, as scene after scene, act after act, play
after play transforms, transmutates and transcends until the world comes to the
climax and crescendo that God Almighty wants it to arrive at in spite of all
efforts and appearances to the contrary.
This may be a good
point to just stop and think about the Holocaust during World War Two during
1939-1945 when six million Jews were
massacred by a latter day real life Haman Hitler and his Nazi hordes and
co-conspirators, relying on an indifferent latter day what-me-worry Achashverosh
FDRoosevelt. One out of every three Jews in the world was murdered during
the Holocaust, and about 75-85 million people in the world died, all as victims
of one crazed sub-human's desire for an Endlossing, a Final Solution to the
Jewish Question. So many times, before, during and after that bitter
conflagration nothing seemed what it is, nor was what it
seemed.
Yet, still and all, humanity survived and came out
the better for it. The Jewish people revived in the New World especially in
America and then in Israel, and the growth continues. The world too saw a new
age of abundance, technology and the dawn of both the Information and Leisure
Age, that is now imperiled by an invisible viral threat. But as we should know
by now, nothing ever remains the way it seems. The one constant is change, and
no matter how many changes there are much remains constant. A true paradox if
ever there was one.
After Purim comes Pesach, Passover, another era when
nothing seemed what it is. From the highs of Jewish freedom and comfort in
ancient Egypt during the reign of Viceroy Joseph, to the turnaround of slave
bondage under later Pharaohs to a reversal of fortunes under the leadership of
Moshe, Moses, sent by God to redeem the enslaved Children of Israel by hitting
ancient Egypt with Ten Plagues, then splitting the Red Sea, with miracle after
miracle making what seemed impossible yesterday to be the new reality of
tomorrow so many times over to the point where from the lowest rungs of impurity
the Children of Israel rose to heights of immortality at the Revelation of God
and the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. But what seemed
ineluctable and inevitable was also overturned as in frustration the Children of
Israel sinned by worshipping a Golden Calf and their world, and ours by
continuous extension came crashing down.
But what comes down, must rise yet again, and ever
since the Sin of the Golden Calf, echoing the Sin of Adam and Eve eating from
the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, humankind is fated and tugged, pulled
and pushed by Divine Forces onwards, sometimes falling seven or seven umpteen
times over, to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and try all over and over and over again and again and
again...
Coming back to PURIM,
it is connected to YOM KIPPUR, or Yom HaKipurim in Hebrew, "Ke-Purim" means
"like Purim" in Hebrew. In what way is Yom Kippur "like" Purim? The Jewish Sages
explain that Purim so to speak clarifies the decrees and choices of Yom Kippur.
How so? On Yom Kippur the Torah instructs the priests to take two identical
goats and by means of a lottery (another connection to the "lots" drawn by
Haman) whereby one goat will be offered up on the altar of the Jewish Temple as
a sacrificial offering to God, while the other goat will be chosen to be tossed
over a cliff as an appeasement to Azazel, aka Beelzebub.
In the greater
historical scheme of things it is symbolically decided on Purim who comes out on
top so to speak. Will the forces of light and life or the forces of darkness and
death triumph? Who wins, Haman or Mordechai? Will the Jews succumb to the forces
of death or will they be enveloped in life-saving salvation from
God?
Purim is the historical
paradigm of an answer to these questions, and more than that. Since it is never
what it seems, even though the situation looked hopeless in the face of Haman's
machinations coming out of the palace of Achashverosh, just as the situation
looked hopeless for the Children of Israel 3,300+ years ago under the evil yoke
of the Pharaohs, and as bad as it looked for world Jewry at the height of the
Holocaust as Hitler's insatiable appetite for gobbling up country after country
mounted to an insane frenzy, and as Russia and China marched to paint the world
Red under Communism until Chernobyl and Covid entangled them in their own
snares. The hunters who laid traps for others became the hunted. Nothing that
once seemed like a reality to them turns out to be what it really
is.
So now we face a Corona
virus crisis. This too shall pass, or as they say in Hebrew, Gam Zu Yaavor (or
as another idiom states: Gam Zu LETOVAH, this too is for the GOOD) but at what
cost? We do not know. It might pass us over like the Angel of Death PASSED OVER
hence PASSOVER, the houses of the Children of Israel during the plague killing
the first born of the Egyptians, or will it be like the plague of darkness where
the rabbis interpret that four fifths of the Israelites died resulting in only
one in five Israelites leaving Egypt alive? Or will it be like the European
Holocaust that saw the extinction of one out of every three Jews and a huge
chunk of humanity go down the tubes? No one knows how the Corona virus plague
will play out in the world.
Only a few months ago,
China seemed on such a roll, they had become a global superpower armed with
mountains of money and thermonuclear weapons. Who knows what they could have
been plotting to do with all their financial and nuclear power? World
domination? Regional conquest? Colonization of the globe? Imperial ambitions
they had plenty. They forgot what happened at places like Dresden, Stalingrad,
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima. Drunk with power and flush with cash
they were on a roll. But no more. Now they are the COVID-19 nation. Stuck in the
mud and defeated by the proverbial "General Winter"! Trouble is they are
dragging everyone down with them, so that everyone is now getting a good
spanking.
By the way,
paradoxically enough the word "COVID" means "honor" in Hebrew. Funny how names
for plagues are the opposite of what they mean nowadays, such as AIDS (what and
who does it "aid" exactly?) which should really be called PLAGUES, and GAY (who
and what are they so "gay" about?) which should really be called ABOMINATION,
and on it goes with these crazy pseudonyms, intended or unintended. Nothing is
what it seems, ever.
Who knows what God is
saving us from? A Chinese inspired World War 3? He sent the HIV virus but nobody
paid attention. Maybe God doesn't like Gays after all, he said homosexuality is
an "abomination" Toeiva in Hebrew, in the Torah. Now with Covid, people are
perking up. Let them grapple with a virus and develop some real COVID-real HONOR
for mankind and God instead. A nuclear war launched by an arrogant China? where
instead of all of us running for cover from Made in China hydrogen bombs as
mushroom clouds spiral skyward and radioactive clouds shower humanity with ashen
radioactive fallout, instead nations now scramble to find a vaccine to cure the
Corona virus. We cannot know if we are privileged to be treated to the lesser of
two evils by God who is saving us from an even worse fate. Since nothing is what
it seems, this could be the tough-love medicine needed to avoid an even worse
crisis and outcome.
On the High Holy Days,
we beg God that with Teshuva, Tefilla, Tzedaka, with Repentance, Prayer,
Charity, the evil decree(s) are overcome. This is so clear, it speaks for
itself. Teshuva-Repentance means change at least one negative trait into a
positive way of acting, Tefilla-Prayer means say a little prayer, just thank God
that you are alive and healthy and if not so healthy that God should cure you,
He is the Rofeh Cholim, the Healer-Doctor of the Sick, and Tzedaka means give
Charity, as liberally as possible by you to a worthy Jewish cause. Another set
of interpretations is Teshuva-Return, return to your good roots and to God
Himself, Tefilla-Connect to yourself to a greater humanity and to God Himself, and Tzedaka-Righteousness, become a more
righteous person, you are created in the Image of God, Tzelem Elokim, the world
is built on Chesed, Loving-Kindness, show more Ahavas Yisroel, love of your
fellow Jews and Ahavas HaBrios love of all Humankind. The Corona virus, like
Nazism does not differentiate between people. In the end Hitler's hatreds
consumed everyone and destroyed Germany as well. China's greed and hubris has
made it into its own victim and into an international
pariah.
In Hebrew we say
Chazak, Chazak, Venitchazek when concluding one of the Books of the Torah. It
means: Be Strong, Be Strong and Let Us Be Strengthened!
In the meantime, as
they say in Yiddish, ZAI GEZUNT, be well, and stay healthy and
safe
