An Edah Editorial
By Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the spiritual leader of Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem
in Montreal, Quebec, and is a member of Edah's editorial board. This editorial ran in the Jerusalem Post on Monday, Sept. 5th.
What God Wants Us to Learn From Katrina
The images of suffering are overwhelming. Watching TV coverage
of Hurricane Katrina, you can feel the anguish of the victims of this awful
disaster. An unpredictable confluence of circumstances brought about a "perfect
storm" that killed thousands and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Katrina
is a true human catastrophe.
As unpredictable as this hurricane may have been, the human
reactions to it are all too predictable. Immediately, there is finger pointing.
On the political front, President Bush is blamed for a variety of failures ranging
from a slow response to the disaster to having caused the global warming which
lead to the hurricane. Religious authorities with agendas of their own come
to speak in God's name and blame the catastrophe on their opponents. A group
called Repentance America said it was God's retribution for New Orleans being
a "sin city". Repentance America did not issue any explanation why
somehow, the hurricane managed to miss Las Vegas. On the Internet, a popular
Israeli Rabbi is sure that this catastrophe is retribution for American support
for the disengagement from Gaza. I found this opinion curious; the sobbing woman
I watched on CNN who lost her daughter and was searching for her missing sons
didn't strike me as a supporter of the disengagement. An of course, radical
Islam couldn't miss this opportunity to dump on America either. A high-ranking
Kuwaiti official, Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, said: "It is almost certain
that this is a wind of torment and evil that Allah has sent to this American
empire." This confident explanation was issued a day after hundreds of
Muslims were stampeded to death in Iraq.
These finger pointing explanations are not only deeply flawed,
they are also deeply insensitive. The Talmud says that anyone who gives a grieving
person an explanation that the victim's sins caused his own suffering has violated
the prohibition of verbal abuse. Many Jewish philosophers wrestle with the question
"Why bad things happen to good people? Some explanations do consider man's
culpability. However, what is misunderstood is that their explorations are meant
to defend God's goodness, not to torment victims of suffering by blaming them
for the crime.
In fact, even the entire project of defending God's goodness
is suspect. First of all, God does not need a defense attorney; He can make
a case for himself. And God continues to make a case for himself in every sunrise,
every leaf, every breath we take. Furthermore, any explanation we can offer
will seem meaningless to sufferers. Those who are suffering feel their pain
on a personal level, and abstract explanations will in no way alleviate their
pain.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik offers a very different view of
a Jewish response to suffering. He says the question, why bad things happen
to good people, is unfathomable. Even worse, any answer offered will imply that
we should passively accept our fate and assume that God did everything for the
best. Soloveitchik points out that on the contrary, Judaism actually refuses
to make peace with death and tragedy. When someone dies, Jewish law requires
that we mourn bitterly and tear our clothes. This is because Judaism demands
that we be enraged by tragedy. To R. Solovietchik, the real question that has
to be asked is: How do I respond to tragedy? Our obligation in the face of a
catastrophe is to act: to comfort and aid those who have suffered, and to use
human creativity to prevent future catastrophes. The only Jewish response to
tragedy is to restore human dignity and rebuild the world.
The response to this tragedy is to join hands in rebuilding
the world, rather than point fingers. The most important lesson of any large
scale disaster is the commonality of all human beings; we have all have the
same vulnerabilities and the same aspirations. Most importantly, we are all
created in the same image of God. It is up to us to learn how to live together
as brothers and sisters, and help each other with their burdens.
I am hopeful that besides the noisy finger pointers, most people
will respond properly to this catastrophe. In the past, I have witnessed how
disasters have the unique ability to unite anyone, even antagonists, in a common
cause. Last January, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists
gathered together in my Montreal synagogue for a service on behalf of the victims
of the Asian tsunami. Representatives of the warring Sinhalese and Tamil communities
both attended, and a representative of the largest Muslim country in the world,
Indonesia, thanked the Jewish community for their efforts on behalf of the disaster
victims. People who normally do not talk to each other joined together in common
cause. And just today, students at Montreal's Hebrew Academy, moved by the news
reports they have heard, have began mobilizing fundraising and letter writing
campaigns for people they have never met, the victims of Katrina.
I am too uncomfortable to issue prophetic statements. But if
I have to guess what God wants in the wake of Katrina, it is a recognition that
every human being shares God's image, and that every person, whether they live
in Indonesia or New Orleans or Kuwait or Israel, should learn how to join hands
in rebuilding the world rather than point fingers.
