NOT A PARABLE

The present pandemic has taught us some things about viruses, and about infection, that are perhaps not without pertinence to the life of the soul. It gives us, not so much a parable as a controlling metaphor of great power. 

            Let us imagine (this is how great metaphors begin) that humanity suffers from a slow but certain viral pandemic. We nowadays but rarely believe that it began with one man; and yet we have learnt that a whole planet can be halted in its activities because one man ate an undercooked and dubious pangolin. The pandemic of our metaphor we will call SIN. And if we think we know all about it, we are as wrong as we were with the coronavirus. Its varieties; its mutations; its rate and direction of spread; the pattern of its victims; about all these, if we consider it in this new manner and context, we will have learnt a vast new humility. But since this pandemic has been with us for a very long time and is currently in its nth wave, there are things we know about its behaviour and about ways to combat it.

            Of its earliest attacks we know very little, because few notes were kept, and it is possible that a kind of rough herd immunity was attained. There was as yet no treatment, and of course no vaccine; but by trial and error a sort of method was produced that made it possible to avoid or to contain infection. If you acted in certain ways, by yourself or toward others; if you more or less avoided certain types of behaviour; if your group or clan or tribe abstained from some doings; you, or most of you, would probably escape infection.

            Gradually, though, the virus became both more virulent and more specific, and concentrated its spread on one dozen tribes, who formed one people, Israel. But as the crisis increased, research also became more focused, and at one point a treatment was discovered. The treatment was called TRH (LAW in English) and was quickly made available throughout the infection area. As often happens, those making it available considered it to have complete efficacy – as long as it was made mandatory. And so it was. 

            Like all such treatments, it was not perfect. Its main failing was that it was complex and demanding: its efficacy depended on an intricate pattern of actions and avoidances that took little notice of human fallibility and even, on occasion, produced a problematic side-effect known as Pride. But it was a treatment; nobody had a better one; and it was on the whole seen to work. How much at its best it was appreciated can be seen from a famous text that was written in its honour, which is still extant under the title Psalm 119. 

            For a long time, then, that was the situation. The virus continued to circulate; the treatment was applied with varying degrees of strictness and success. The various bodies of Doctors did what they could to refine and popularise the treatment. However, there were always those who were unsatisfied, who thought the authorities were too lax and who argued stridently for stricter application and even for modification of the theoretical base (usually in the direction of something simpler but more profoundly invasive). These last were known as Prophets and, as usual, got most of the publicity while often unsuccessful in achieving their specific aims. 

            And then came the huge breakthrough. At an unlooked-for moment, from an absolutely unexpected corner, a provincial backwater, there appeared a vaccine. Not a treatment: a vaccine. Its coming had been predicted, but with no certainty whatever as to its nature, time or place; people knew what its name was – Meshiach – but nobody knew for sure if, or how, it would work. And when it arrived it surprised everybody. Most – not all – of the treatment specialists didn’t like it: it seemed too simple. The public, however, went for it in a big way. In part, this was because its basics were so simple. Unlike TRH, it involved just one complete immersion and a simple series of formulas and concentrations. (The complete theory and practice was not fully understood till later, but essentially consisted of an absolute love on one side that depended for its efficacy on an absolute transfer of trust and power on the other. The synthesis, the union, of those two elements created a vaccine that at its best blocked the virus completely.) Once one had gone through that, the vaccine began working and could be stimulated and perfected with relative simplicity by the patients themselves. 

            Meshiach was extraordinary. Not only did it attract crowds from the start, it began to spread beyond the borders and was seen, surprisingly, to block similar viruses in other places as well. Mind you, the Establishment of treatment specialists felt threatened by it and opposed it tooth and nail; and a number of people who felt either blithely unthreatened or too sophisticated and/or too suspicious for the necessary transfer of trust formed, then as since, a hard core of incurable anti-vaccinators. And when the Establishment managed to get the original and sole deployer (the son of the creator) of the vaccine assassinated, it seemed that the virus was henceforth and forever out of control. 

            However, it soon appeared that both the vaccine and its originator were indestructible. Both came back, and now in a form that could no longer be suppressed. Moreover, a Standing Meshiach Committee for virus control had been created that had been given the originator’s licence to dispense and apply it everywhere. 

            And since then? you may ask. Since then the virus has not, alas, been suppressed entirely, and in recent centuries the anti-vaccinators have, like many of their anti-reasonable kind, been in the ascendant. But they have not been able to suppress the vaccine, and it remains available just about everywhere, though not, in some hideous and war-torn lands, always as easily as it should be. Like the coronavirus, the SIN-virus is spread by the deniers, the self-righteous, the irresponsible, and the morally foolish. But the Standing Meshiach Committee is still active worldwide, and neither the Xi nor the Trump has been able to stop it. 

P.S. The image is of course not a virus, but a praying mantis looking unusually diabolic. Added as a reminder that the SIN virus, we are told, did not happen by accident.