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.

… (Soltan was UD‘s father-in-law) includes a sketch in the style of Soltan in a collection of the student’s work.

Paysach Freedman, a Jerusalem-based Haredi rabbi who runs a crisis helpline, said that the reality in his community has been dire, but suggested that it should be kept in proportion. “There isn’t a feeling that there’s a plague with people dying on every street.”

Could be worse, man!

Without a coronavirus vaccine, we will never be able to live normally again. The only real exit strategy from this crisis is a vaccine that can be rolled out worldwide…

Today there’s also the paradox that some people who owe their lives to vaccines no longer want their children to be vaccinated. That could become a problem if we want to roll out a vaccine against the coronavirus, because if too many people refuse to join, we will never get the pandemic under control.

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Ignorant, belligerent anti-vax cults present a real, ongoing challenge to civilization.

We’ll boil our women to death yet.

… when you have finally, at a very advanced age, been hauled into a courtroom for decades of deeply evil activity, the thing to do to finish out your incarceration-free run is to plead dire physical debility. Judge, I’m an old man! Jail would kill me! Have mercy.

The ploy frequently works. You’re surprised? UD has blogged about people – not even very old people in some cases – whose lawyers successfully convince authorities that whoops their client was just about to curtail his atrocities himself cuz of the following twelve life-threatening diseases that have suddenly engulfed him. Here’s a note, your honor, from a real live doctor I know, attesting to every one of them, and then some.

In the case of Rabbi Eliezer Berland, flight was his initial – and remarkably picaresque (if you have a free afternoon, you might enjoy following his multi-national, violent, on-the-lam itinerary) – response to some earlier charges against him (he likes to rape people). Now he’s back in court, charged with

defrauding his sick and elderly followers out of millions of shekels with miracle cures, including the administering of [Mentos] to cancer patients…

[H]undreds of people filed a police complaint against him for selling prayers and “wonder drugs” to desperate members of his community, and for promising families of handicapped individuals that their loved ones would be able to walk and families of convicted felons that their loved ones would be freed from prison.

His lawyer’s poignant account of a man diseased and in no condition to go to prison drew the following response from the judge:

Give him a Mentos.

… coronavirus restrictions in a lawsuit against the state’s governor. This pious town, always in the news for endemic welfare theft, anti-vax militancy, failure to educate its children, and now of course failure to observe virus containment laws, has just had it. It’s just had enough of government meddling in its wonderful way of life. This is going all the way to the Supreme Court!

Lakewood: Proud to be One of New Jersey’s Coronavirus Hotspots!

… La Kid, of her covoid existence.

Israel’s criminally negligent health minister sits down for a chat. Excerpts.

I have a kosher, ‘stupid’ phone – not a smartphone. I have no TV at home and no internet connection. I don’t think that’s a problem. On the contrary – I’m not distracted by the smartphone so I have more time to handle urgent things... I’m proud of the fact that I’m technologically disconnected.

… Q: [M]aybe you decided to leave [your position] because of the growing criticism leveled at you.

I can’t comment on all the lies in the media. Like the story about IKEA being allowed to reopen stores, which some claimed I approved because the owner is a Gerrer Hasid so he’s a Gerrer donor. It’s nonsense. I’ve had no dealing with him and he’s not a Gerrer Hasid. Besides, how would I know if he’s a Gerrer Hasid? It had nothing to do with me.

Q: So why were they allowed to open stores so early in the lockdown exit process?

The Finance Ministry pressured the Health Ministry – but not me personally. I knew nothing about it and no one asked me. No one even talked to me about it.

Q: How is it possible that the health minister knows nothing about it?

The media has to decide, once and for all, if they want me to listen to the professional advisers [in the ministry]. When I don’t – they [the media] criticize me. If I do – they also criticize me. Enough! I knew nothing about the IKEA opening yet some newspapers made it their headline. Why? To mud-sling. If I weren’t Haredi no one would care.

Q: So the criticism is because you’re Haredi?

Without a doubt. The moment I became popular – I was named one of the most popular ministers in the government – they began coming after me.

… What about the criticism that in the press conferences with Netanyahu and Health Ministry Director Moshe Bar Siman-Tov the reporters could barely hear you, that you were stuttering and quoting the Torah instead of talking about the virus?

There are anti-Semites who saw me with a shtreimel [ultraorthodox hat] and that’s what bothered them... Some reporters are anti-Semites. They can’t stand to see a Haredi minister succeed... Everywhere I go, people respect me and wish me well. It’s only the media that does the opposite.

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… [The health minister] maintains he still doesn’t know exactly how he [himself] became infected with the coronavirus.

“I assume it was at the office or in one of the meetings we held with various officials, but the reports that I violated directives for prayer services are false. I can’t really comment any further because there’s an ongoing lawsuit on the matter,” he said.

95% of haredi math teachers [in Israel] did not receive a math education.

Don’t worry – I’m sure it’s much better here in the States. 90%?

Anyway. Really not to worry. Math beyond fingers and toes isn’t taught in haredi schools. So they don’t need any teachers.

… lets his imagination run wild, and imagines an ultra-altered ultra-orthodoxy. Shouldn’t the fact of their decimating themselves via a vicious virus they – whoops! – didn’t hear about because they think the rest of the world stinks and they never listen to it… shouldn’t that lurid fact prompt some serious thought about their suicidal folkways?

[Perhaps they might reconsider their monolithic] tendency to trust elderly rabbis on questions regarding which they have no clue…

This is a time when there is no external enemy, social trend or abusive regime harassing the community. The Charedi way of life is the enemy.

… The ultra-Orthodox are used to getting odd looks and to having a negative image. But they’re not used to their customs being the enemy. Who is that enemy? The rabbi that irresponsibly dismissed the orders of state officials. The tzadik who insisted on having a minyan of 10 at the synagogue. The funny guy who belittled strange laws of distant government men in suits.

… [M]aybe when the plague is over, Charedi society will no longer be the same. Maybe the Coronavirus will be like the fall of the Charedi Berlin wall. In other words, the plague is a good reminder that the world can turn on a dime. Charedim live in the world, they are part of the world. Change is not beyond them.

But this ain’t the way they think. The enemy is the evil godless haredim, whose viral suffering is god’s punishment for their evil godless ways. God will stop punishing them when they double down.

Ultra-Orthodox people [unlike non-ultra-orthodox Jews] do know Jewish law and therefore when they transgress religious laws it is seen as an intentional act for which divine punishment is much more severe. “The ultra-Orthodox who sin do not do so unintentionally and therefore [God’s] attribute of justice harms the ultra-Orthodox much more,” reasoned [the highest-ranking ultraorthodox rabbi in Israel].

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The voice of the ultra-orthodox:

It’s scary, but it’s true:

So do what the Good Book tells you to!

… she has to admit that the class lawsuits now emerging from parents who understand what everyone with half a brain understands – online classes are distinctly inferior to in-person – have merit.

Of course, if you’ve been reading her Click-Thru U category for the last decade or so, you know that UD has been railing against the lazy cynical trend toward onlining more and more college (and high school) classes. It’s cheap, so universities tend to like it; you can cheat, so students tend to like it (once football schools got hold of the whole online course model, they went nuts); and you can do it from your Mexican palapa or even parcel most of the labor out to various faceless nameless drudges, so professors tend to like it…

But when many of the people (students; some teachers) involved in an expensive university course are basically phoning it in… or when (however hard participants are trying) the highly prized physical presence and social interaction of enthusiastic, charismatic experts is absolutely gone, parents tend to notice.

Everyone knows the peculiar pressurized circumstances of current nationwide online education; even granting that, however, one can ask whether a discount should apply.

… but it has a pop-pop-popping arts scene, and get a load of their city council conferences!

All day long, amazing moments in UD‘s woods.

Early this morning, raking some paths, I watched the red fox with the enormous tail glide by behind the honeysuckle bushes.

This afternoon, I discovered bear corn under some old logs. Here it is.

This evening, back at the top of the property to finish clearing paths, I watched a pileated woodpecker go at one of our dead upright trees. It took its time, letting me stand ten feet away gawking while its powerful beak easily tossed off large chunks of bark. The moment was much like this, except this woodpecker works on deepening a hole, while my woodpecker (what a big bird!) moved from one area of sheared trunk to another, gulping bugs as it went.

Oh, and then I found a large deer antler – not an unusual event around here. I tossed it to the dog, who added her teeth marks to the many already on it.

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Update: Who knew the woodpecker’s tree was called a “snag”? The New York Times pats UD on the back for keeping lots of dead trees around.

Yes, Sudan has just criminalized female genital mutilation. But Egypt criminalized it in 2008, and declitification continues there (and in many other places) with real gusto. UD is afraid it’s just too satisfying to castrate, disfigure, and torture us.