The Virus in the Age of Madness by Bernard-Henri Levy

Author:Bernard-Henri Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

LIFE, THEY SAY

But my mind returns to the caregivers.

The other night, like everyone else, I found myself hypnotized by the nonstop images of admirable men and women battling disease and saving lives. What came back to me at that moment was a strange saying from the Talmud that I heard long ago from the lips of Emmanuel Levinas on one of the last visits I paid to him: “The best of doctors are destined for hell.”

I found the original text.

It is in the Mishnah Kiddushin 82a.

Rabbi Yehuda is speaking in the name of Abba Gurya.

And at the end of a dizzyingly subtle dialogue rich in paradoxes resolved and with humor, as so often in the Talmud, the rabbi says, “the best of doctors, to Geihinom.”

What could that mean?

How could a master of the Talmud say such a strange, shocking thing?

Was it irony?

Provocation?

When one grasps how many great physicians the Jewish people have given to humanity (thanks particularly to Judaism’s quintessential emphasis on study); when one remembers that Maimonides was the court physician to the sultan of Egypt, and that Ovadia Sforno, the rabbi of the Italian Renaissance known for his commentaries on the books of Jonas, Job, and Ecclesiastes, was a physician in Rome; when one realizes that Alexander Borgia and Julius II entrusted their papal and royal bodies to none other than Rabbi Samuel Sarfati; when one thinks back on Francis I of France, the prisoner of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, wasted by syphilis, nearing death, and demanding a Jewish physician (and then another, because the first was a Marrano)—how can we, equipped as we are with our modern ears, possibly understand such a counterintuitive, nearly unintelligible, and scandalous phrase?

I looked in Rashi: every physician, he says, commits errors and abuses his power. That he should be the “best” makes these offenses even more inexcusable. So, to hell you go.

In Meiri, the thirteenth-century Catalan rabbi and enlightened friend of the sciences: the best sometimes operate without being sure that the intervention is necessary. In so doing, they abuse their knowledge. So, again, to hell they go.

In Maimonides, the consummate Talmudist: the same doctor, using the same treatment, can kill one patient and cure another. Another reason he should go to hell.

I happened on this commentary by Jacob Ben Asher, a fourteenth-century legal scholar and pillar of rabbinic wisdom: He who goes to hell is the one who was made to be the best doctor in the world but who shirked his mission in favor of another career. Hell, once again.

But it was in the Maharal of Prague that I found the most thorough and ultimately the most edifying clarification of this bizarre phrase: (1) the best doctor is the one who, with unbounded passion, gives himself over to the body’s examination, hygiene, and cure; (2) that body, the body alone, the body organic, the body, healthy or ill, formed, lest we forget, by a bolt of lightning from the spirit, is nothing more than a bundle of

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