Jews are not unfamiliar with pain and suffering. We memorialize national calamity with holidays, rituals and remembrances, as we do today on Holocaust Remembrance Day. We have highly scripted rituals of mourning and remembrance. Even amid the joy of a wedding, the groom smashes a glass to recall the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem centuries ago. Most recently, the Holocaust forced us to confront a stark existential question: How can a supposedly benevolent G-d allow such a terrible thing to happen?
In the face of the global suffering inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, we are faced with an eerily similar question.
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