Bad/Good Karma

Even the President’s fiercest critics were able—at least for the most part—to choke out at least some version of a get-well wish when the positive results of his COVID test were announced. But in most cases it didn’t take long for the writer (or speaker) to get to the real point.

There was Joe Biden’s wish for a “swift and successful” recovery for the President, followed by his acerbic observation that, of course, he wasn’t at all surprised that the President fell ill since he failed to follow the most elemental rules for fending off infection. Then there was the New York Times’ “Get Well, Mr. President” lead editorial in last Sunday’s paper, a wish the Editorial Board then felt the need to justify in twelve different ways lest anyone think they were motivated merely by sympathy for a sick person infected with a potentially deadly virus. Even better, at least in my opinion, was Bret Stephen’s column in Tuesday’s paper. (I admire Stephens and read his columns with great enthusiasm and interest, so I mention him in this context merely to illustrate a point.) He began by using a quote from John Donne (“Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankinde”) to explain his wish that the President have a “full and speedy recovery,” then, lest anyone think he actually had any actual sympathy for the actual patient, went on to justify his get-well wishes in as many ways as he could think of (including the remarkable thought that we should wish the President well because, should he die, Mike Pence would make an even worse President). Stephens’ wrap-up line said it all. We should wish the President well, he wrote, “because it’s the right thing to do.” I’d just love having someone visit me in the hospital—poo poo poo—and tell me they had come to wish me a speedy recovery “because it’s the right thing to do.” Hah!

As far as I can see, however, there lies a single concept at the core both of all the editorial pieces I read and all the late-night TV hosts’ hilarious comments regarding the President’s illness: the concept of karma. What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow. At least in the end, you get what you deserve. At the end of the meal you prepare, you eat your own just deserts!

The concept of karma derives from the Hindu notion of rebirth after death and in that context means that the circumstances of your next life will be a function of the way you have conducted yourself in this and previous lives. Most non-Hindus will find the concept of endless reincarnation at least unlikely, but the underlying principle that—one way or the other—you eventually get what you deserve remains resonant with the public. I’d certainly like to believe it myself! The President mocked his own advisors who called for the nation to wear face masks in public. The President made a public display of the degree to which he refused socially to distance himself from others. The President repeatedly encouraged people not to take the possibility of infection with the novel coronavirus too very seriously, including at White House receptions hosted by the President himself. And so the universe finally took matters into its own hands and baked the man the cake he surely earned.  The universe, according to this line of thought, does not like being mocked and has no problem addressing the issue forcefully and, if necessary, virally.

The President’s comment the other day that his infection was a kind of “blessing in disguise” would work well with this line of thinking if his point had been that now, having experienced the terror of infection and the relief of recovery, he had learned to take the pandemic very seriously and was encouraging precisely the correct kind of behavior that the experts feel could go miles towards reining this crisis in. But that isn’t at all what he meant.

You don’t have to embrace Hinduism to seize the concept here. A famous verse from Proverbs (22:8) reads “Those who plant injustice will harvest disaster.” That sounds clear enough. But the prophet Hosea is even clearer: “You have sown wickedness,” he says to his wayward countrymen, “and now you shall reap evil.” Lady Wisdom herself steps forward in the Book of Proverbs and sums the whole concept up in three Hebrew words: v’yokhlu mi-p’ri darkam, she declares: In this life, you eat the fruit of the trees you plant along the way. Much later on, the first-century Sage Hillel would offer his own version in a much-quoted lesson from Pirkei Avot (2:6). Seeing a human skull floating on the water of a nearby stream, Hillel addressed the skull directly: “Because you drowned someone else, you yourself have now been drowned. But not to worry—the people who drowned you will eventually be drowned themselves.” That’s how it works in the world, Hillel was teaching. You harvest what you plant. You reap what you sow. You eat the cake you bake. You become what you make yourself into. You don’t always get what you want…but you always—at least eventually—get what you deserve.

Arguing to the contrary are all those people who smoke for decades and don’t end up with any of the various diseases associated with smoking cigarettes. And what about the righteous who suffer grievously in the course of their lives—if karma is such a thing, then why doesn’t the universe grant them the boons they deserve for living decently and behaving justly? And the corollary question also bears asking: if those who sow badness reap the disastrous consequences of self-made bad karma, then why does there seem to be now obvious correlation between moral bearing and wealth or, even more to the point, between moral bearing and good health? If karma is a thing, then how can decent people ever meet bitter, miserable ends? Maybe the Hindus are right that this only works in the very long run.

It’s a bit amusing to be pondering these thoughts with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur so close in the rearview mirror: if one single idea underlies both holidays, it is that human beings are judged with respect to their ethical bearing, moral rectitude and fortitude, and commitment to justice and decency…and then, if found worthy, are granted another year of life suffused with God’s blessings. We sing it out with great gusto (or did in a pre-pandemic world), but we certainly don’t take it to the point of really thinking that the people who die in any given year were personally responsible for their own demises because of the bad karma they brought personally to their own life stories!

In the end, the President didn’t get COVID because of bad karma or because the universe wished to make an example out of him. He tested positive because he failed to observe the most elemental rules of safe conduct in this pandemic age we are living through and ended up hoist with his own petard.

When the psalmist wrote, “I was a lad and now have become old, yet I have never seen a righteous person abandoned or the child of such a person begging for bread,” he was giving into the same urge to believe that we are the authors of our own karma and then either reap the benefits or suffer the consequences in the context of our lifetimes. That line, familiar to all traditionally minded Jewish people because it concludes the Grace after Meals, is surely the most famous expression of the idea in the context of Jewish liturgy. Less well known—although invariably observed by myself—is the custom, also quite old, of reciting those words sotto voce, thereby nodding to their supreme logic at the same time we accept as obvious the fact that they are not literally true.

In the end, we are the masters of our destiny and fragile, brittle things that suffer in all sorts of ways that we have specifically not brought upon ourselves. Our own tradition lives with that paradox, with that discrepancy between what we believe and what we know. We say that the fate of all is written up in the great Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah and the judgment sealed on Yom Kippur—but we also know that people die between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which should be impossible if their verdicts are only made final on Yom Kippur!

In the end, we live our lives seeking to control our own destiny through the creation of good karma and submitting to the will of God and knowing that in the fragility of human life inheres the arbitrariness of our personal destinies. Still, why tempt fate? If wearing a face mask is responsible behavior and socially distancing myself from others is the sign of decency and conscientiousness, then I will do those things to keep myself and others safe. I won’t say no to good karma. But I also drop my voice at the end of Birkat Hamazon lest I hear myself saying something that sounds vaguely pious but which is ultimately not a truth I can actually discern in the world.