Faith: We see God’s presence during coronavirus in the good, valiant work being done

Where is God in times of death and disaster?

A few decades ago, in the aftermath of a major Los Angeles earthquake, the late, great Rabbi Harold Schulweis invited questions from his Hebrew school students and their parents. One came up repeatedly: Where was God? Why did God let this happen to us?

As we wrestle with the often-grim challenges of life in this season of COVID-19, people of faith continue to raise this age-old query. The wide array of attempted “answers” reveals a little bit about the Holy One — and a great deal more about the values and world views of those doing the asking.

A few on the fringe deny that the crisis even exists. Consider the likes of Republican state Rep. Heather Scott, who had the gall to compare Gov. Brad Little to Hitler, proclaiming his public health-minded stay-at-home order to be “no different than Nazi Germany.” Rep. Scott’s abhorrent abuse of history — during the week of Holocaust Remembrance Day, no less — is a sure sign of where God isn’t.

For a much larger and more mainstream segment of the religious community, catastrophe is a form of divine punishment. These believers blame victims — often including themselves — for moral failings that bring down God’s wrath. Others see humanity’s struggles as trials of faith. God allows — or even creates — suffering to test our conviction. Both of these explanations offer their advocates some solace, insofar as they reassure the believer that “everything happens for a reason.” This theology provides a sense of control over our fate, and the promise that in the end, all will be well.

But I don’t believe that’s true. Sometimes things do not end well at all.

I’d like, then, to suggest an alternative view, in which so-called “acts of God” are not divine at all. For if I really believed that the immense suffering wrought through natural and human disasters was the work of God, then I would reject such a God as a malevolent monster, utterly unworthy of our worship.

I stand with Rabbi Schulweis, who offered his community a far more compassionate answer in their time of trouble. He wrote:

Where was God? In the energies and talents of God’s divinity as imaged in people. We are to imitate the attributes of God. As God clothes the naked, feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, visits the sick, comforts the mourners, buries the dead, so faith in God within and between us mandates us to emulate God’s qualities.

The Jewish answer to the question, “Where is God in the earthquake?” is typically another question: “Where are we in the earthquake?” What have we done to alleviate the suffering of its victims, to calm the frightened, shelter and feed those made homeless? What have we done and what will we do to anticipate and mitigate the effects of the turbulence?

So, too, with this virus and the havoc that it is wreaking. Where is God? In the loving and courageous presence of nurses, doctors, chaplains, first responders, and all of the other caregivers who use their knowledge and skills in pursuit of healing. In the far less heralded but no less brave persistence of those who risk their health to provide us with food, ring up our purchases and provide for our essential needs, often for woefully inadequate recompense.

God is with those who are feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, sheltering victims of domestic violence, and otherwise laboring on behalf of our society’s most vulnerable members, who suffer disproportionately in every crisis, including this one.

To paraphrase a Hasidic teaching: Where is God? Wherever we let God in.