There’s the baseline chosen – Jews like me, I guess – and there’s the SOOOOper chosen among Jews, the ultraorthodox, whose existence founds itself on two things: Denying spiritual legitimacy to all non-ultraorthodox so-called Jews, and adhering to the very, very highest of heavenly standards every second of their day and night. This religious elite strenuously attempts to please God with every breath…

So why aren’t they able to breathe? Why has covid decimated them, tearing through much of their rabbinate and many of their non-rabbinic tremblers before the Almighty?

This article, into whose theological whirlpool we will now plunge, reviews the explanations for this incredibly sad turn of events that these same people are now providing for themselves and for the world.

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Yes, let us eke go, as Stephen’s friend Lynch says; let us embark on the idiocy and the oddity of ultraorthodox theodicy.

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For why would the being we propitiate with every cell in our body blast those cells with a fatal cytokine storm? What have we done to deserve this?

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But first: lunch! UD needs to fortify herself for this faith journey.

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Hokay. Let’s start with this:

“The Torah protects us. We don’t need to do anything,” one yeshiva student [said].

Indeed the entire ultraorthodox response, for a lethal length of time, was to double down on large gatherings of daveners, this constituting the only immune response that mattered: Entreaty to the divine.

Aryeh “Longest Rap Sheet Among the Elect” Deri was one of the first u-o leaders to wonder why, despite his in-group’s exemplary behavior, the Lord was leaving profane people alone and slaughtering the sacred.

“We need to do very deep soul-searching,” the ultra-Orthodox politician said, asserting that God was “telling us something.”

Yeah but like man like what.

First explanation: God is telling us that we are great. The best.

Secular Jews [aren’t] as prone to divine retribution as the religious, whose sins are judged more harshly by God.

Ya bum! Go walk around hatless and fuck your brains out! You’re not worth killing! … Now this guy, this guy over here, him I can choke to death on a ventilator.

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Him? Did I say him? If you want to know why God punishes his most beloved, look no further than the hopelessly whorish among us.

“Horrifying discovery: Corona epidemic = lack of modesty,” [a] poster seen in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem announced, using gematria, or Jewish numerology, which ascribes a numerical value to letters and words and draws significance from words or expressions with equal values.

According to the poster, both “corona epidemic” and “lack of modesty” have a numerical value of 900, indicating a conceptual link.

Using an analytical method made famous by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, some of the Lord’s designated coronavirus sufferers blame their women for it all. We’ve tried killing them off through contempt and overwork, but if you do the math, they’re killing us.

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Or is it something higher? God’s had it up to here with Jean-Francois Lyotard and thinks killing haredim because people like UD find postmodernism interesting is a good idea.

[T]he disease could be a divine response to “moral relativism or postmodernism…“

God’s elect are called upon to sacrifice themselves so that Verso and Routledge will publish fewer books with the word meta-narrative in their titles.

Let’s see. Anything else?

So much else. God is quarantining us to bring families closer… But when you live in a hovel with ten kids, four in-laws, and a set of parents, you’re already pretty close! God hates our materialism. But we don’t have any money or any material, so his motives are pretty obscure … God is issuing a “wake-up call” for Jews who don’t want to live in Israel… by… making several regions of Israel horrifying corona hotspots…? The virus forces naughty us into much-needed meditation on our sins and … then the … rapid shutting down of all of our vital systems…?

Of course the most dearly held theory of all is that everyone’s dying, the whole world’s dying, the messiah’s finally on the chimney tops. This is the one; this is the one that’s finally going to blow this fucking place to smithereens. Geloybt gat. Bend down and kiss your ass goodbye.