On March 3, Eric Cohen took his daughter to school only to find that it had been closed—one of the very first in the nation to be shuttered due to the coronavirus. Soon his daughter was diagnosed with the disease; not long thereafter his father-in-law suffered a heart attack and, as no visitors were allowed, had to be left alone in the hospital. (Both, thankfully, have since then recovered.)
Having experienced the pandemic up close, Cohen reflects on its consequences for America’s national life, beginning with the fundamental question it poses:
Naked and vulnerable in the face of nature’s latest incomprehensible assassin—a pathogen we could precisely classify but not yet control—we instinctively looked to those expert in the ways of nature to protect us, to fight back against nature using nature as their instrument, to re-assert our life-seeking humanity against the plague’s blind inhumanity. Perhaps it should not amaze us that the medical experts take their mandate to preserve human health so seriously. Saving every human life—standing up against death—that is their calling. And perhaps in a moment of crisis, when doctors and nurses are stepping up as heroes and so much is riding on scientific breakthroughs, it would be rude to ask our modern medical experts a deeper question: why do they care so much about one infected person, one elderly patient dying in a nursing home, one individual in a large, silent cosmos who needs a respirator that we do not have?
The most orthodox Darwinians do not have a very satisfying answer to this question. For many years, they have tried to convince us that human beings are merely gene-spreading vessels like every other animal, that life and death are simply fascinating phenomena with no special human meaning. But most normal people do not buy this argument; they certainly do not act as though Darwinian metaphysics is true.
During the pandemic, Cohen fell into the habit of the daily recitation of shaḥarit, the morning prayer, and found some better answers for these questions in one particular segment of the liturgy that asks, “What are we? What are our lives? What is our loving-kindness? What is our righteousness? . . . Are not all the mighty like nothing before You, . . . for their many works are in vain, and the days of their lives like a fleeting breath before You?”
But the prayer then continues: “Yet we are Your people, the children of Your covenant, the children of Abraham, Your beloved, to whom you made a promise on Mount Moriah.” These words lead us not to the crisis of death, but toward the triumph of God’s covenant.
In the concreteness of this prayer, a deeper lesson is revealed: Just as we hope God cares about his chosen people—“the congregation of Jacob, your firstborn son”—so should we care about those entrusted to us—our families, our patients, our communities, our nations. Our redemption begins not in any sort of abstract or universal promise of redemption; it begins when we tend to our particular commitments, our unique web of obligations.
Read more on National Affairs: https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-american-soul-in-a-time-of-plague