• COVID-19 and the Theological Challenge of the Arbitrary
• Shaul Magid (bio)

Religion's use and interpretation of natural phenomena and catastrophes as indications of divine favor or wrath has a long history.¹ We need look no further than the first ten chapters of Genesis to see two natural phenomena, the flood and the rainbow, as illustrations.

Looking more deeply into the Hebrew Bible, we are confronted with two other natural phenomena, famine and plagues, as turning points in Israelite history.² A famine caused Abraham and then Jacob to travel to Egypt, and plagues mark a transition whereby God intervenes directly to liberate the Israelites from slavery.³ A famine initiated what would become Israelite exile, and a series of plagues initiated the Israelites' redemption from Egypt. In the Hebrew Bible, and in the ancient world more generally, plagues and famine are major occurrences that initiate demographic shifts. In the Bible and other religious texts, there is often a direct correlation between God and natural phenomena. The ancient's view of famine was quite comprehensible, as there was an empirical connection between drought and famine. They knew how famines occurred, even if they did not know why, although the assumption was that they were punishments for human sin.

Famines constitute a good portion of the mishnaic tractate Ta'anit, and are viewed in the Mishnah largely as a divine punishment. Thus, the Mishnah mandates fasting and repentance to nullify the decree. [End Page 33] The famous story of the first century tanna (teacher), Honi Ha-me'agel drawing a circle in which he sat and prayed for rain personifies the notion that famine was viewed as a consequence of human wrongdoing and thus required human correction.⁴

Plagues were much more ambiguous. The plagues in Egypt had a clear and explicit teleological function: to break the will of the Egyptians in order to convince Pharaoh to free the Jews. These plagues are described in the exegetical tradition as targeted—only affecting the Egyptians—with the plague of the first born being the culminating, and explicit, example. In short, these phenomena fit neatly into a world where God intervenes in nature to achieve certain ends.⁵

Plagues as described in the Babylonian Talmud, however, seem to suggest something different. There is one talmudic sugya (passage from the Gemarah) devoted to plagues (dever), b. Bava Kama 60b, that is almost entirely concerned with ways to best protect oneself from contagion.⁶ There is no mention there of praying, repenting, fasting, or engaging in other devotional acts to ward off the disease. Medieval commentators on this sugya mostly reflect on the arbitrariness of a plague, which does not seem to be something that can be undone by devotional acts and contrition.⁷

Below, I argue that the Babylonian Talmud's extended discussion of plagues in b. Bava Kama 60b resists the notion of collapsing plagues into covenantal categories, whereby we can see them as acts of divine intervention to punish evildoers, Jews or non-Jews. Rather, as we will see in several glosses to the talmudic sugya, plagues seem to be arbitrary occurrences, indiscriminate, and thus impervious to human devotional intervention. In this sense, they are extra-covenantal occurrences challenging rabbinic convention that natural disasters are in some way divine intervention to punish or facilitate a response.

Plagues present an interesting case of what I am calling a "covenantal exception" that is both problematic and necessary. While the arbitrary poses certain theological challenges to covenantal reciprocity (if plagues are arbitrary, what are the limits of the arbitrary?), the arbitrary also serves a crucial function as exception. Without the notion of the arbitrary as extra-covenantal, Judaism becomes vulnerable to making all disasters, even those that equally affect non-Jews, the fault of the Jews, which could easily, and understandably, evoke negative reactions. Plague as the exception thus enables Jews to understand natural disasters outside the paradigm of reward and punishment.

There is a distinction I want to draw here between arbitrariness and uncertainty (safek), the latter being a major category of halakhic [End Page 34] discourse.⁸ In his recent book The Birth of Doubt, Moshe Halbertal gives us two operative...

• COVID-19与任意神学挑战
• 肖尔·马吉德（生物）

宗教对自然现象和灾难的使用和解释是神圣的宠爱或愤怒的征兆，历史悠久。¹我们只需要看《创世纪》的前十章，就可以看到两个自然现象，如洪水和彩虹。

更深入地看《希伯来圣经》，我们面临着另外两种自然现象，即饥荒和瘟疫，这是以色列历史的转折点。²一场饥荒导致亚伯拉罕，然后雅各布前往埃及，瘟疫标志着过渡，上帝直接干预以使以色列人摆脱奴隶制。³一场饥荒引发了后来成为以色列人的流放，一系列瘟疫引发了以色列人从埃及的救赎。在希伯来圣经中以及更广泛的古代世界中，瘟疫和饥荒是引发人口变化的主要事件。在圣经和其他宗教文献中，上帝与自然现象之间通常存在直接的关联。古代人对饥荒的看法是可以理解的，因为干旱和饥荒之间存在经验联系。即使他们不知道为什么，他们也知道饥荒是如何发生的，尽管人们以为他们是对人类罪的惩罚。

饥荒在密西西比语的塔阿尼特语中占了很大一部分，在密西拿语中，饥荒在很大程度上被视为一种神圣的惩罚。因此，Mishnah要求禁食和re悔使该法令无效。[尾页33]一世纪的著名的故事塔纳岛（教师），并因此需要霍尼哈me'agel画中，他坐在那里，祈求雨化身饥荒被认为是人类的不道德行为的后果的概念，一个圆人为纠正。⁴

瘟疫更加模棱两可。埃及的瘟疫具有明确和明确的目的功能：破坏埃及人的意志，以说服法老王释放犹太人。这些瘟疫在训ege传统中被描述为有针对性的，仅影响埃及人，而长子的瘟疫是最明显的例子。简而言之，这些现象恰好适合上帝干预大自然以达到某些目的的世界。⁵

然而，巴比伦塔木德中描述的鼠疫似乎暗示了一些不同的东西。b。有一个talugdic sugya（来自Gemarah的通道）专门用于瘟疫（dever）。Bava Kama 60b，这几乎是最有效地保护自己不受传染的方法。⁶这里没有提到祈祷，re悔，禁食或进行其他奉献的行为来抵御疾病。在这个中世纪的评论家sugya大多反映瘟疫，这似乎并没有被什么东西可以通过虔诚的行为和痛悔撤消的随意性。⁷

在下面，我认为巴比伦的塔木德在b中扩展了对瘟疫的讨论。巴瓦·卡玛（Bava Kama）60b拒绝将瘟疫倒塌归类为盟约类别，因此我们可以将其视为惩罚邪恶者，犹太人或非犹太人的神圣干预行为。相反，正如我们将在滑石猴身上看到的几句话中所看到的那样，瘟疫似乎是任意发生的，不加区分的，因此不受人类奉献精神的干预。从这个意义上讲，它们是契约外的事件，对拉比的传统提出了挑战，即自然灾害在某种程度上是神圣的干预，以惩罚或促进应对。

瘟疫给我带来了一个有趣的案例，我称之为“契约例外”，既有问题，也有必要。尽管任意主义对立约互惠提出了某些神学挑战（如果瘟疫是任意的，那么任意主义的局限性是什么？），但任意主义也起着至关重要的作用，作为例外。如果没有任意的约定，犹太教就容易遭受所有灾难的影响，即使那些同样影响非犹太人的灾难，犹太人的过错也很容易引起人们的负面反应，这是可以理解的。因此，瘟疫是一种例外，使犹太人能够理解奖励和惩罚范式之外的自然灾害。

在这里，我想在专横性和不确定性（safek）之间进行区分，后者是halakhic [End Page 34]话语的主要类别。⁸莫西·霍尔伯特（Moshe Halbertal）在他的最新著作《怀疑的诞生》中给了我们两个实施方法...