By Rabbis Moshe Rosenberg and Gidon Rothstein

This year’s natural calamities – Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami – have prompted religious leaders of all stripes to voice their opinion about the religious significance, if any, of such events.

Below, Torah Currents presents two responses to such tragedies that speak from an Orthodox Jewish perspective. On the one hand, both distance themselves sharply from statements (made by R. Ovadia Yosef and others) that identified specific sins for which G-d was exacting punishment. In the opposite direction and unlike statements from secular quarters and some liberal clergymen, they both forcefully assert G-d’s ongoing role in His creation, including natural disasters.

Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg’s shorter piece was written in Spring, 2005, principally in response to the tsunami in Asia. Rabbi Dr. Gidon Rothstein’s lengthier piece was written in September, 2005, principally in response to Hurricane Katrina. Rabbi Rothstein, an editor of Torah Currents, also presents a model of a constructive way to respond to certain personal tragedies.

Towards a Jewish Response to Natural Disaster, by Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg

The Challenge
The earthquake and tsunami which devastated coastal areas of the Indian Ocean Basin earlier this year, killing tens of thousands, and ripping away any pretense of man’s control over his own fate, left religious people of all stripes groping for meaning on personal, practical and theological levels. The recent hurricane, Katrina, which destroyed New Orleans has raised similar questions, as well. In their wake, we need to consider how to fathom the unfathomable: How should we feel? What should we do? And how does a faithful Jew relate to G-d in the wake of such events? What follows is both a critique of inappropriate approaches, and a statement of a response to natural disaster which I feel best incorporates the requirements and ideals of Jewish law and tradition.

Destructive Approaches

Attempts by leaders of any religion to attribute this cataclysmic event to a specific sin are deplorable. Such attempts are unprovable and insensitive at best, self-serving and dishonest at worst. While using catastrophe as a spur for repentance has a long history in Jewish thought, pointing omnisciently to another’s fatal sin does not. It is one thing to counsel teshuva for ourselves in the aftermath of such a demonstration of G-d’s might; it is quite another to blame the victims for their misfortune.

Theologically Unsound Approaches

We must resist the temptation to disassociate God from terrible acts of nature. Whether overwhelmed by close proximity to the events or driven by a philosophical need to defend God’s goodness, a number of religious figures have denied that the hand of God could be involved in the death of innocents. In effect they sought to salvage Divine benevolence at the expense of Divine omnipotence, and were left with a “senile benevolence” C.S. Lewis would call “Our grandfather in heaven.” A God reduced to the proportions of human comprehension is surely not a worthy object of worship, nor does he correspond to the God of the Written and Oral Law. The vast preponderance of Jewish thought has taken for granted a God who is both loving and immediately involved in His Creation.

A possible exception to this principle would be the view of Maimonides on the extent of God’s personal supervision of the world and its inhabitants, but even that position posits a God who chose to run His world by the rules of nature, not One who was powerless to contravene them.

Toward a Traditional Approach

The beginning of a religious approach, one which is faithful to the souls of the dead and the living, and which refuses to reimagine God to suit our limitations, is a recognition of the tzelem elokim – the image of God – in every human being, Jew or non-Jew. That recognition must properly lead to searing pain at witnessing so many of His creatures obliterated. While not ignoring the stream in Jewish philosophy that sees an essential difference between the souls of Jew and non-Jew, we nonetheless think it proper to focus on those sources which highlight the essential bond of all humanity as God’s handiwork. When a Jew feels himself beleaguered or in pain, he prays, and so this element includes the imperative of prayer.

The second necessary element is context. We must remember that similar occurrences in the past – such as the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755, adduced by Chief Rabbi Sacks of Great Britain – challenged religious faith, but did not vanquish it. In this category, as well, may fall the many Biblical, Talmudic and Midrashic sources which reveal the other side of the coin – how, on a daily basis, G-d sets limits to the destructive forces of nature, not allowing them to vent their full force on humanity. Such context, while not answering the unanswerable, can relieve the panic and aloneness that threaten the religious soul.

The third piece is what Rav Aharon Lichtenstein has termed the “shock of humility,” which teaches that stunned silence is more eloquent than effervescent nonsense. It is not a cop-out to admit that the ways of God remain mysterious to man.

Fourthly comes the need to validate the very real questions of faith in the minds of some. Jews must remember that is permissible to question the ways of God, if one does so in sincere search for truth, and from within the community of faith. His petition for the wicked of Sodom denied, Abraham arose the next morning, beheld the smoke rising from the smoldering ruins of the city God refused to save, and prayed the morning prayer to the G-d whose ways eluded him. Those who have challenged God’s justice through the ages, from Abraham to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev to Rav Klonimus Kalman Shapiro of the Warsaw Ghetto, have innately understood the words of Ibn Gabirol: Mimkha Elekha—I flee from You into Your arms. The God whom we question is also the source of our comfort, and we are the child flailing our fists in tantrum at a parent, while calling to that very parent for an embrace of consolation.

Fifth, some of us may want to inculcate the sensitivity addressed by Sarah Shapiro, who expressed ambivalence at the quasi-voyeuristic nature of imbibing the media glut of photos of victims and their suffering. Surely this relates to the words of Pirkei Avot: “And do not seek to see your friend at the time of his misfortune.”

Sixth, but perhaps first in importance, we Jews must join people of good will of all faiths in providing financial and moral support for survivors of the disaster who are trying to rebuild their lives. Such acts are certainly a sanctification of G-d’s name, but they are more. As Maimonides notes in recommending charity be given even to idolators, they are a form of emulating the ways of G-d himself, regarding Whom Tehillim 145:9 states: “His mercy extends to all his creatures.”

When all is said and done, this approach fails to set one’s mind at ease, but that is how it should be. It is unsatisfying to grieve for the pain of thousands of innocents without being able to either attach it to their responsibility or detach it from God’s. But neither extreme rings true. We are left in pain but resisting facile explanations that impute to us knowledge of God’s motives, or to Him an image pared down to our size. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik once ascribed a similar state of mind to Moses himself. At the burning bush, Moses hid his face, refusing, the Talmud says, God’s offer of a revelation that would put him in possession of all the mysteries of how God runs His world. Understanding why the innocent suffer, Moses feared, would diminish his empathy for their plight. Better a thousand questions than one complacent moment of comprehension at the expense of another.

I might add: Better the nobility of the struggle with unanswered questions than the reinterpretation of God to suit our preferences.

Can a Reasonable Person See the Hand of God in Cataclysmic World Events?, by Rabbi Dr. Gidon Rothstein

The detective who resided at 222B Baker Street often told his partner in investigations to eliminate the impossible; whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the truth. R. Ovadya Yosef’s recent claim that God visited Katrina upon Louisiana and Mississippi as punishment for the American support for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and for the failure of Americans, particularly blacks, to study Torah, served for many as confirmation that attributing such tragedies to God is itself one of those impossibilities that should be taken off the table for reasonable people. If that is the God you believe in, many people say, He either does not exist or is not worth worshiping.

Since the weight of Jewish tradition assumes that God’s Ways should be at least somewhat accessible to human beings, this conclusion is particularly distressing, sentencing those who accept it to a life lived in ignorance of the messages of God’s Providence. Our challenge is to see whether we can articulate a strategy for such investigations that will be authentic and yet not produce the kind of simplistic statements that so often pass for the party line as to how to understand God’s impact on the world.

If (and it may be a big if, as we will see) God wants us to learn lessons from hard times and easy, from challenging and simple times, from tragedy and joy, from adversity and success, there should be some reasonable way to access those lessons; to me, the idea of a God who leaves us to grope blindly towards an understanding of His Will is at least as difficult to swallow as one Who communicates in sometimes extremely painful ways. I believe that Jewish tradition agrees, and offers us significant insight into how we might learn the lessons that Nature may be trying to teach us.

Calling such events lessons is a calculated choice on my part, as I am trying to raise the possibility that these are not meant as punishments, but as calls for change. Seeking to understand punishment almost always leads to a sense that the victim is being blamed, but since most such tragedies are ongoing (even death: when a close relative dies, the story has ended for the deceased, but those who survive have a long process to endure, survive, or experience), our reactions to them can often alter their very nature. We will give examples later, but stressing that this is about formulating the best possible responses, either to short-circuit the tragedy, minimize it, or avoid other such in the future, is a vital element of this whole endeavor.

Emphasizing exactly what we are and are not trying to do is so important because stepping wrong can have such negative impact, either by giving the sense that we are interested in blame, or by giving so simplistic an answer that people come to reject the whole idea of a God Who acts in history.

It has been said that Rabbi Soloveitchik, zt”l, understood the gemara’s call for fishfush be-ma`asav, for investigating one’s own actions in the face of suffering, as a general statement that such times should be made meaningful by turning them into opportunities to grow in one’s service of God. Certainly so close to the Holocaust, it seems likely that he saw no productive way, no matter how gingerly one approached the issue, to productively see God in such large and terrifying events.

That may still be true, but it leaves us, as I said before, bereft of any access to messages God may be sending us, dooming us to walk blindly, perhaps to further and worse troubles. Especially given the gemara’s repeated stress that God punishes (and rewards, but we will not be discussing that here) middah ke-neged middah, with the punishment fitting the crime, I believe we have some indication of how one can profitably “interpret” world events with an eye towards where God might be having an impact.

Fraught with danger as it is, attempting to advance ever so slightly in our appreciation of Hashem and His ways—an appreciation that might help us understand where and how to change ourselves so as to do the most we can to usher in a pain-free future for as many people as possible—seems to me to demand that we try, to the best of our abilities, to find as much meaning as we can in the events themselves.

Before beginning, we should stress the humility required in any attempt to divine the messages Nature is sending us on behalf of her Creator, a humility that entails at least three characteristics. First, as my teacher R. Aharon Lichtenstein is fond of stressing, we should remember the disdain in which the gemara holds Bilam for, among other things, claiming to be yode`a da`at elyon, one who knows the mind of the Highest One. As Berachot 7a points out, a man who did not know what his own ass was thinking could assume he knows what God is thinking?

Translated to us, we must recognize repeatedly and loudly that any ideas we or others suggest for why events occur can be no more than reasonable possibilities, never certainties. The mind of God is unfathomably greater and different than ours, and thus may have taken significant other factors into account than the ones we note. We attempt to understand difficult events as part of a religious attempt to come closer to God and as a way to do our best to change people’s lives for the better, but we can never be so arrogant as to assume we have seen all the way to the full truth of the matter.

A proper humility towards our capabilities will secondly lead us to recognize that we are not expecting or attempting to discover the whole truth of a matter. God operates in a system so sensitive to a multitude of factors that we can never delineate even a representative minority of them; we seek only to uncover a piece here and there within an impossibly large puzzle. We must always remain aware of how partial our insights, even correct ones, can be, while yet celebrating having come that far in developing an understanding of God’s ways in the world, the Attributes of Action we refer to as the Thirteen Middot, and hoping to use that understanding to foster a more positive outlook for ourselves and others.

Third, a humble investigator of God’s ways will remember that the point is not to blame, but to find helpful insight, for oneself and anyone who comes to accept that insight as valid. God’s anger at the friends of Job seems (to me) a reaction to their wrong choice in trying to show him why he must have deserved what he got. At that juncture, their responsibility was to comfort him, not educate him as to the meaning of his tragedy. (If, Job had asked for their help in a context where there was a possibility that suggesting he might react self-investigatingly would have had some productive purpose, that would have been another matter; then, perhaps, there would have been a way to raise useful questions that he, too, may have recognized as insightful).

So too in any of the natural disasters we might try to interpret; the victims, even if we think we know of actions of theirs that contributed to this outcome, deserve nothing but our sympathy and our attempt to comfort them (psychologically, physically, and financially) as fully as possible, as soon as possible.

As we seek insight into disturbing events, then, our goal must never be to show why the victims got what they deserved; the humble person must recognize that we all, to varying degrees, are flawed before God, that the standard of Divine Justice could find any of us wanting enough to “deserve” such punishments. Understanding others’ trials is not to distance ourselves from them, but to join them in experiencing God’s Will as a stimulus to self-improvement.

This is the correct reading of a comment by R. Nissim Gerondi (known as Ran) bandied about in the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia. Ran, in the sixth of his Sermons collected in a book called Derashot haRan, says that sometimes God will bring a tragedy to a faraway place to let the Jewish people know how they need to change and improve. People read that as meaning that God visited these disasters on those people in order to warn the Jews.

What an abhorrent idea, that the Creator would use some of his human creations—the ones whose destruction the Midrash depicts God as mourning at the Sea, leading Him to rebuke the angels for singing songs of praise when the Egyptians were drowning— as tools to enlighten others! What Ran meant, as should have been obvious, is that many people can “deserve” many kinds of punishments; seeing others be visited by Divine Justice, sometimes for reasons we cannot understand, should at least lead us to reconsider our own ways.

A final example of this type of humility stems from the varying interpretations of a metsora’s actions given by tradition. Vayikra 13:45 tells us that a metsora, one afflicted by the skin-lesions commonly called leprosy, must call before himself “tamei, tamei – impure, impure.” The gemara in several places, such as Shabbat 67a, understands his call to impel those who hear him to pray on his behalf.

Despite our confidence that tsara`at stems from sin—as Mishnaic sources already make clear, such as Avot de-Rabi Natan, chapter 9—we unequivocally require those who see such a person to pray for his or her healing. We balance both, understanding “why” God did something while yet reacting compassionately and empathetically to a fellow human’s suffering.

Aside from humility, God’s relationship with the world creates several inherent points of cloudiness in interpreting world events with an eye towards the Divine impact. Rambam claims, in the third section of the Guide, that the world necessarily entails some forms of degeneration, the price we pay for inhabiting a physical world. In his view, any natural disaster—volcanoes, illnesses, birth defects—may be an example of the imperfection of the physical world rather than Hashem’s direct hand.

Some tragedies, in this view, just happen. Need parents of a Down’s Syndrome child assume that it was a punishment or a challenge that they were chosen for by God? Not necessarily according to Rambam, who might say that this reflects an occasional error by the reproductive organs of one of the parents. So, too, viruses may, in some cases, be just a part of the physical world that are not directly “sent” by God at all. The weather may go through cycles of warmer and colder air, leading to fewer or stronger hurricanes. In each case, what we might be tempted to see as God’s chastisement may not be that at all, at least according to Rambam.

The Jewish belief in human freewill offers a third inherent source of uncertainty in any attempt to attribute tragedy to God. If human beings can make choices on their own, some of those choices will be bad or wrong ones, and may lead to highly undesirable outcomes. How and when God limits or circumvents that freewill to insure that His plan for the world plays out is itself a mystery, but seems to leave room for human choices that lead to extremely distressing times, having nothing to do with God.

Finally, the gemara’s belief that tragedy once unleashed does not differentiate between those who were ripe for punishment and those who are righteous adds another layer of difficulty in figuring out the meaning behind these events. I understand the gemara to mean that some righteous people can be dragged along with the majority of those who were being punished by this tragedy, not that one evildoer can pave the way for thousands of righteous people being killed by the freed Angel of Death. That should mean, then, that we can still focus on the broad outlines of the tragedy and find some meaning, while fully remembering that at least some of the people stricken could have been caught up in events that were neither their doing nor directed at them.

Accepting all those limitations, middah ke-neged middah still provides productive ways to focus our thinking about such events, whether or not we reach firm conclusions. Take two people, each of whom has cancer, God forbid. Their cancers will differ, the stages at which those cancers are discovered will differ, and the challenge of each course of treatment will differ; each difference offers an opportunity for insight and counsel.

To take a concrete example, we would counsel a person with an advanced stage of lung cancer differently than one with an early stage and highly treatable form of stomach cancer. I mention counseling, because we only would offer such ideas to one who seeks them; those who want to use spiritual tools in fighting their disease (along with physical ones) might wonder whether we can offer ideas on how to think about where to focus that spiritual response.

First, as always, we would need to register the caveats. This cancer, we would feel the need to say, might be simply physical. If the person with lung cancer had smoked, for example, it might be the physical outcome of that unfortunate freewill choice; it is not a punishment from God, it is a reflection of biology.

Second, we would have to remind ourselves and the patient that even if this comes from God, it may have multiple meanings, so that no one idea we reach is the answer.

Third and most importantly, we would stress that the point of the endeavor is not to find blame, but to see if we can find avenues for productive responses aside from the medical. The Midrash portrays Hizkiyahu as asking Yeshayahu why he had been sentenced to die, and Yeshayahu telling him that it was because he refused to have children. Hizkiyahu protests that he knew those children would worship idols, and Yeshayahu tells him that was not his decision to make. Accepting the point, Hizkiyahu not only prays generically to God, he promises to have children, and is given another fifteen years of life.

For us, too, the point of finding reasons for what is happening is to see where we can go best into the future. As long as a person is alive, there is a chance that whatever illness they have will be cured, or at least that they will gain precious years, months, or days of life. We hope to offer this counsel so that if there is a religious component to illness, the person can adopt effective strategies for that component, along with the ordinary (and also important) medical ones.

Given a lung cancer and stomach cancer patient and the idea of middah ke-neged middah, we would seem to be required to assume that the religious aspects of their illnesses differ. If God acts middah ke-neged middah, the source of His actions should be open to discovery; we should be able to walk back the cat to the flaw in ourselves that led us down this road, the key to getting ourselves onto a different one. If the details don’t matter, God could just give everyone stomach cancer, or stomach cancer, or kidney failure.

I would wonder aloud with this person (and for myself) whether the parts of the body affected offer significant clues. Could it be that the first person had acted in ways that his or her lungs (or the bodily functions the lungs perform) were an area of religious or spiritual weakness, while the other person’s use of her stomach was the area of challenge. Possibly not, but thinking this way might take us on the road to finding areas we can change and thus change our future.

The severity of the illness also seems relevant. A person whose prognosis is a 6-week course of antibiotics is faced with a different life challenge than one who is given six weeks to live; should they decide to investigate the religious aspects of those illnesses, the kinds of answers that are reasonable possibilities seem to differ. While the first person might decide that God was suggesting that they misuse time and therefore took away six weeks of their time by confining them to bed, the second would probably want to find a more serious and overarching life-issue (again, only to the extent that we identify the illness as having a message-from-God component).

As difficult as this is with individuals, the calculus becomes incalculably more difficult when applied to large social cataclysms, even ones that unfold over a relatively brief period of time. To take the tsunami in Southeast Asia or Hurricanes Katrina and Rita for examples, we would have to remember that any large-scale event is made up of millions of small ones, of individuals, each with their own stories and reasonings, their own accounts with God that might affect how they are or are not caught up in the larger occurrence.

That will be all that much more true of tragedies that unfold over several years, such as the Holocaust; we need not deny that God was playing a role in it to recognize that we may never come close to making a coherent statement that accounts for the Nazis’ freewill, the millions of individual stories that made up the larger tragedy, and the various societies, Jewish and not, that participated, each with their own stories and character.

Even so, societies’ characters and flaws can often be reasonably attributed to that society as a whole; considering those issues can point to productive places a city or nation might want to consider when faced with a tragedy. Too, natural disasters are not all of a piece; a hurricane with flooding differs from a fire, a blackout, or a plague (all traumatic, but in different ways).

Faced with a natural disaster that affects a broad swath of people, I think that after the first reaction to the events has occurred, after the needs of those displaced and hurt have been tended to, when the time comes for considering the future, useful questions can be asked. First, what was the tragedy, and what symbolism or messages does it seem to carry? Interestingly, floods are a kind of punishment that the gemara connects to numerous possible antecedent acts; the interested person could try to figure out which, if any, were applicable to the place inundated.

Beyond the message of Nature, each society would be well-advised to consider what aspects of its character might not be pleasing in the eyes of God. Were a particular city to be known as the local center of theft or vice (such as Sodom) and then to be destroyed by fire and brimstone, that city’s leaders might want to consider whether their actions played some role in what had happened to them, and whether changing them might serve to improve their future.

Imagine a city, a thriving metropolis, which gets advanced information of a terrible natural disaster heading its way in just a few days. What if, along with evacuation, the city’s leaders identified a set of sins they viewed themselves as having tolerated or participated in for far too long, and insisted be immediately and lastingly set aside? Today it seems utopian and silly to even suggest that it could change anything, but the book of Jonah reminds us otherwise, as we will read in just a few days.

I close with Nineveh to one last time emphasize the goal of any such considerations or investigations. When God sends us a message through Nature, it is not meant only as punishment, it is meant as a call to change. Unless we recognize that call, we can never grab the opportunity it means to provide us.

I offer these thoughts with some trepidation, as I have frequently been misunderstood on this issue in the past. I only take this step because the two extremes are so far apart and so distressing. On the one side, we have people offering explanations that make Hashem seem capricious, vengeful, or worse. On the other, we have those, including many religious Jews, who do not engage the endeavor at all.

I hope and pray that the middle road of humbly groping towards greater insight into the Attributes we invoke and rely upon as the bedrock of our national relationship with God will prove fruitful for us all, helping us better learn what Hashem is trying to tell us. In an era bereft of direct messengers, when it is only through Nature that we can hear Hashem at all, we can only hope for the day when once again human messengers will bring God’s Word, so we need not flail wildly in trying to hear what our Creator may be trying to tell us.

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