Volume 67, Issue 3

Re-Reading The Plague: A Religious Perspective

by Rabbi Shalom Carmy

One definition of a classic is a work that can profitably be read more than once. When I first read The Plague, as a young teenager, my education had hardly begun; my religious convictions were not yet settled. I reunite with the novel over thirty years later, with a great deal of life, study and, one would hope, growth in yirat Shamayim behind me. I have changed, and so has the book.

Among other things I was discovering, as an adolescent, the virtual impossibility of genuinely communicating either suffering or joy. The halakhot of mourning recognize the barrier, which is why the grieving individual initiates conversation in a house of mourning. Camus’s depiction of the evasions and diversions and superstitions to which people resort because they are unable to express, or listen to, what most desperately concerns them, rang true to me, then and now. Then I was not much shocked by the failure of characters to communicate authentically their terror and their loss. That was life. The gestures of tough guy bonding, the fugitive happiness of Rieux’s swim with Tarrou, were all one could hope for in a hard-boiled, hard-hearted universe. The touching, almost silent scene, after the plague has ebbed, where Rieux and his mother absorb the death of his wife, escaped me then, moves me now. One wonders if this rare moment of sensitive honesty is connected to the fact, remarked on by Rabbi Blau, that in this work women are conspicuous by their absence.

After a generation of silence, the Holocaust had become a popular topic by the late 1960's. Literary works in which a pious person loses faith in the presence of horrific suffering were as common as the weddings that Victorian fiction. With an atheist author, and an atheist narrator, Father Paneloux sounded like a stereotypical cardboard clergyman, fated to break at the deathbed of an innocent child. If his second sermon and his death don’t make much sense, one suspected, it was because the author planned it that way. I now find his response more complex. Camus is less interested in the problem of theodicy than in the division between those who respond actively to evil and those who are passive. By this standard Paneloux is one of those who feels responsibility and is not averse to hard work and endless days. He becomes incomprehensible to Rieux because his ultimate form of action is passion. Far from losing his Christian faith, he takes

it to the limit, taking upon himself the suffering and death that he cannot prevent.

In Rieux’s closing roster of reminiscence, Paneloux’s name is missing. Unlike Camus’s secular saints, the priest insists on shaping his life and death according to a heroic religious scenario that remains under his control. Tarrou, Rieux and their spiritual kin devote their lives to saving others without the conviction that their actions accomplish anything, and they do so without belief in a transcendent source of ethics. Like Sisyphus, about whom Camus had already written his famous essay, they choose to push the absurd boulder up the mountain, in full awareness that they will have to do the same thing tomorrow. Paneloux’s way is not Camus’s, nor is vicarious suffering a prominent feature of Jewish religious experience. Yet the strange logic of identifying with the suffering of the victims retains its fascination. It is worth considering whether we can learn something from it.

When the novel came out, and when it reached me some twenty years later, writers and intellectuals, especially in France, were much admired for being “engaged” in the great social and political questions of the day. This was partially an outgrowth of the extremities of the German occupation and the conviction that the post-war situation provided the intellectuals with a golden opportunity to create an ideal society conforming to their ideas. Tarrou is a former Communist. The commitment he has outgrown is traced to his passion for justice, but also to his resentment of his father. For real life inveterate leftists, like Camus’s sometime colleague and later detractor, the philosopher-writer Jean-Paul Sartre, the desire to scandalize the adults, and the yearning to experience solidarity with the downtrodden masses, never departed. Camus was excommunicated by the left for rejecting apologies for Stalinist terror. Years later, the Algerian crisis made the headlines. When Camus, who unlike his more voluble fellow intellectuals had spent much of his life in Algeria, refrained from political pronouncements, he invited further denunciation. Four decades dead, however, it is Camus who comes across as the fundamentally decent man, who kept silent when he thought he had nothing of value to say. It is his sophisticated opponents who look like fools or worse. “Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything”: the words are Camus’s; the sentiment is the one he gave to the disillusioned Tarrou.

Camus’s literary and political critics made light of the novel’s philosophical pretensions because evil, in this book, is represented by an impersonal epidemic, whereas in the real world of the 1940s, the evil we must resist usually comes from other people. Interestingly, as one of my colleagues observed, it would have been easy, and natural, to display an enraged mob hunting for others to blame for the plague: the filthy underclass, for example, the Arabs who harbor more than their share of rats. Perhaps Camus has no villains because, during the years he worked on

The Plague, contemporary French attitudes made him increasingly uneasy. The left hoped to solidify support, and to deflect attention from its many members who had not behaved in an exemplary fashion, by portraying its opponents as collaborators with the Nazi occupation. General de Gaulle, for his part, was interested in perpetuating a myth of heroic France, manfully resisting, except for the demonized few. The result was a hasty, violent purge that soon hardened into an evasive consensus that justice had been done and that whoever had not been imprisoned or killed was innocent. Historical background may elucidate what is otherwise a puzzling omission from the world of the novel.

In this novel, as in life, choice is intricately connected to the tension between abstraction and concreteness. Modern secular ethical systems are grounded in obligation to general principles more than to the particular people one loves and cares about. To be with the woman he loves seems, to Rambert, more important than any putative notion of responsibility for the people of Oran; for a long time he cannot bear to cast his lot with his temporary neighbors. Rieux, at times, wonders whether his scientific vocation, with its inherent orientation to impersonal ideas and procedures, lacks authenticity. Neither the desire for the encompassing experience of love nor dedication to the welfare of the community offers a truly satisfactory basis for choice. The ethical dilemmas into which we are cast because of the conflict between the imperatives of abstraction and the deep existential claim of the particular are insoluble. When we are fortunate they are overcome in experience: what once appeared abstract and impersonal becomes concrete and vivid to us. Thus Rambert decides that his place, for the duration, is in the stricken city.

The search for a life that is both right and worth living much agitated me once, and continues to concern me now. In wrestling with these questions I had many mentors; Camus’s influence on my thinking was minor, at most. Commitment to Halakha, as a vocation transcending legal abstraction, ultimately grounded in a personal connection to the Ribbono shel Olam is,

of course, a conclusion quite distant from his sensibility. Yet the questions that trouble the characters in this novel, about how to live, and how to die, remain my questions, both as an individual who has chosen his life, but still has to live it, and as a teacher and friend to those

for whom the journey has just begun.

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