The Leap to Explain: Coronavirus as a Metaphor
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place...Illness is not a metaphor, and the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Disease has always been a powerful conduit for people's fears - worries that can quickly morph into prejudices and hateful actions. Whatever is inherent in us before the onset of "the plague"-- xenophobia/fear of the other, messianic yearnings, the need for instant spiritual solutions--quickly accelerates amidst the horrifying spectre of contagion. Sickness, within this frame, is not just a natural and even inevitable development; it is a way of explaining the world.
As soon as it became clear that the Coronavirus was a serious global health hazard, the industry of explanation began to establish and hold fast to its fashionable turf, offering the weary and the vulnerable a way to deflect the awful physicality of it all. Weighing in from the four corners of a diverse set of cultures, the virus was seen as everything from a domestic political ploy to a foreign prelude to invasion, a signal of the Messianic coming or a fearful presage of the ultimate war of all against all. That it could simply be a parasitical bug, blindly making its way into the heart of the earth's body politic, an unknowing and uncaring invader that could neither be explained with a grand narrative nor bought or shrugged off, was simply unthinkable for the forces of justification.
Religion is the greatest employer of a larger, often metaphorical scheme. By definition, metaphysical ideas always operate on the level of metaphor, as the unseen and unknown can only be accessed by linking the physical world to it through a secret sign system which points the way to God. It is debatable whom the great code breakers of this enterprise really are. Who can tell us with authority what historical events mean in the grand heavenly scheme of things? To do so is to embrace a prophetic role with dynamic conviction and little or no self-consciousness, but apparently there are many contemporary candidates for the job.
Leading off the Coronavirus interpretations is a retread from the era of AIDS - plague as divine punishment. And so, in Israel, Rabbi Meir Mazuz connected the virus to the annual Gay Pride event, opining that such a display was "a parade against nature, and when someone goes against nature, the one who created nature takes revenge on him.”
Yet the illness metaphor is remarkably supple, and can also be used for a worldview of redemption as opposed to doom. Hence, as the pandemic has grown and gained universal proportions, the discourse of certain rabbis and Evangelical preachers angled inexorably towards prediction of a messianic age, where a new world order would arise from the rubble of the stricken and the fallen.
Of course, it is not just within that religious domain that illness becomes symbolic. A British journalist wrote that Coronavirus is a metaphor for the country's risk of a security breach through the tech giant Huawei; another columnist saw it as "a metaphor for everything from the failures of globalisation to the menace of foreigners.” Military imagery abounds in this fantasizing about the germ, epitomized by this headline in an English paper: “Army on standby as Boris declares war on coronavirus with battle plan to kill the deadly virus”. And not to be outdone, a Wall Street Journal pundit insisted that "The Wuhan coronavirus is a metaphor for two political ideas that are incompatible with the realities of the modern world: The Communist Party of China and American isolationism." And of the virus's catalytic effect of closing synagogues and cancelling out Jewish public prayer, often associated with men, one writer extended the metaphor to gender: "We're all women now."
As I write these words, I am currently in the second week of self-quarantine. I feel healthy. I have no symptoms at all, but am complying with a public order that mandated 14 days of self quarantine for all Israeli nationals flying back from anywhere in the world to Israel. I returned from Toronto only 12 hours after the government announcement was made. I have no resentment or ill will regarding my confinement. Indeed, I support the policy that demanded it. If anything, it has given me a new vantage point from which to view the world. I realize that so much of my life is grounded in motion or the potential for movement. We are always going somewhere.
Nietzsche saw our seemingly endless flurry of activities as a way of trying to flee the one thing from which it may be impossible to escape: " Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself." The strange beauty of quarantine is in the way it reverses our desperate need to seem as if we are progressing, of "getting somewhere." In Zen Buddhism, the path to wisdom is a kind of daily quarantine, encapsulated by the Zen saying " Sometimes, simply by sitting, the soul collects wisdom."
But even quarantine--at least the word-- comes with its own brand of optimism. It stems from the Italian "quaranta," or "forty," signifying the number of days that ships suspected of carrying disease would have to wait to unload passengers and cargo in the event of plague. The time limit of forty days suggests that this plight would finally come to an end. To paraphrase Rush, diseases are not permanent, but disease is.
And so, with unexpected time on my hands, I have managed to sit and read certain books. In one of them, Daniel Defoe's Journal of The Plague Year, a classic account of bubonic contamination which struck London in 1665, I found myself drawn to the following, in which Defoe cautions the reader to "keep his eye upon the particular providences which occur at that time, and look upon them complexly, as they regard one another, and as all together regard the question before him: and then, I think, he may safely take them for intimations from Heaven of what is his unquestioned duty to do in such a case; I mean as to going away from or staying in the place where we dwell, when visited with an infectious distemper."
What an interesting conversation could be had between the 17th century English novelist and the contemporary Haredi authority, Rav Chaim Kanievsky, about how to discern the hand of providence. In a recent public letter, Rav Kanievsky put forth an iron clad guarantee to those who are careful not to gossip, and furthermore aspire to humility: " Whoever strengthens himself in these, the merit will protect him and his family members that not one of them will be sick [(from coronavirus]." Striking in this letter is the virtual dismissing of any kind of scientific basis for disease, as if discretion can defeat infection, and germs will defer to humility 100% of the time. In this reading of reality, which has multiple precedents in Jewish texts, the overriding of physical laws by spiritual principles is complete. That which for Defoe must be considered "complexly," is for Rabbi Kanievsky about trust in the unchanging nature of spiritual axioms.
What the poet Robert Browning called "the grand Perhaps" is the very basis of being alive. We reach and we scratch and we claw, we twist and turn and beg for the answers that we hope will bring us to an understanding. Speaking personally, the more the “experts” try to assure me they have resolutions to my perplexity about the purpose and meaning of it all--be it disease or my more permanent unease--the more bewildered I feel. Sometimes this bewilderment manifests in a fear of being left behind by a world that seems to move much too fast for me, of technologies with which I will never feel truly comfortable. It’s like learning a foreign language as an adult, using a different part—the wrong part-- of your brain.
But this bewilderment at the localized source of confusion is just the gateway to the permanent bewilderment that comes with never quite knowing why I am here and what I am doing. For me bewilderment is not a temporary way station, but the house into which you are born and grow up in and never fully leave behind. The irony of all this is that when I do anything well as a teacher, at the times when I manage to harness intensity and intelligence together, it is my bewilderment that is the root cause of that success. It is bewilderment that fuels my questions, my relentless seeking for something of which I am only vaguely aware, this quest for meaning, for the desire to find out if there is a there, there. A center, an answer, a ground beneath my feet. I used to think it was youth that was the essence of turbulence, but it turns out that aging created only more uncertainty. It is very late in the game to suddenly realize that you might not have figured out anything at all.
This contagion will pass, like they all do. In its place, what will we find? A return to the furious party of modern diversions? An unsettling anticipation of the next round? Will we take a moment to be still, to assess and even celebrate the fragility of our condition, considering the fate that awaits us all?
The American essayist Susan Sontag, in her brilliant works Illness as Metaphor and Aids and its Metaphors, is particularly adept at drawing out the compulsion towards the symbolic that accompanies people's understanding of disease:: "Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one...Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging.”
Sontag also reminds us of our tragic tendency to convert these outbreaks as a premise to yet again blame the outsider, to formulate a picture of the dreaded other: "One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "`French pox' to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese... There is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.”
Chinese, gays, trans people, Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, Palestinians, men, women, Jews, Gentiles - the world is filled with available targets upon which to heap our scorn and trepidation. Better, I think, the silence of bewilderment and unknowing to the all too assured pronouncements of judgment. Perhaps "all you need is love" is a bit hyperbolic, but I prefer the hyperbole of compassion and tolerance to the easy and intellectually lazy maneuver of scapegoating. For Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the goal is to be "guilty" of groundless love, a sin that we can all dream of embracing in these uncertain and still unfolding times.