[Avodah] Response to Japan's Troubles

[Micha Berger]

On Areivim, someone speculated about "how long before some people start
saying that the natural disaster in Japan is a direct result of their
persecution of the innocent bochurim..."

And this gets into the usual questions about G-d's accountant, blaming
the victim, etc...


As the world was reeling after the earthquake in Haiti R' Avi Shafran
(I couldn't find his source) wrote an Am Echas editorial about the
CC's response
<http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2010/01/22/the-earth-trembles>:
    To any early 20th century Polish Jew, Japan could as well have
    been Neptune.

    The distance between the shtetl and the Far East was measurable
    not merely in physical miles but in cultural and religious distance
    no less. Yet when, on September 1, 1923, a powerful earthquake hit
    Japan's Kanto plain, laying waste to Tokyo, Yokohama and surrounding
    cities, killing well over 100,000 people, news of the disaster
    reached even the Polish town of Radin. That was the home of the
    "Chofetz Chaim," Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan, the sainted Jewish
    scholar renowned around the world even then for his scholarship,
    honesty and modest life.

    Informed of the mass deaths in Japan, the 85-year-old rabbinic leader
    was visibly shaken, immediately undertook to fast and insisted that
    the news should spur all Jews to repentance.

    Yes, Jews to repentance. Jewish religious sources maintain that
    catastrophes, even when they do not directly affect Jews, are
    nevertheless messages for them, wake-up calls to change for the
    better. Insurers call such occurrences "Acts of G-d." For Jews, the
    phrase is apt, and every such lamentable event demands a personal
    response.

    It is, to be sure, a very particularist idea, placing Jews at the
    center of humankind. But, while Judaism considers all of humanity
    to possess seeds of holiness, Judaism does in fact cast Jews as a
    people chosen -- to embrace special laws, to be aware of and serve
    G-d constantly and, amid much else, to perceive Divine messages in
    humankind's trials.

And from another (longer) version of that essay
<http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Judaism/2005/01/Repentance-After-Disaster.aspx>
    And so that is an additional layer to the Chofetz Chaim's reaction,
    the conviction that the distinctive nature of the Jew demanded a
    meaningful Jewish response to the catastrophe that had occurred.
...
    A revered contemporary Jewish sage in Israel, Rabbi Aharon Leib
    Steinman, was reported to have remarked shortly after the recent
    devastation in Asia: "Everyone sits in his own home and feels good --
    'Where I am everything is fine, it's over there that people are dying'
    -- ... we have to learn [from such tragedies] the extent of what sin
    causes, and it is up to us to analyze and learn... [so that we will]
    repent."

    That repentance goes far beyond donations to relief agencies. What
    the Jewish sources teach is that tragic events like the one we have
    just witnessed must spur us to not only address global events but to
    focus on the microcosm that is the self. To work, in other words,
    on our interactions with those around us; on -- as the Chofetz Chaim
    taught -- our responsibility to use the power of speech carefully
    and properly; on being more observant of the Sabbath and holidays,
    of kashrut and all the laws of the Torah; on dedicating more time
    to its study.

    That is the secret of how we can create a better world and vanquish
    evil -- the source of all tragedy -- at its very roots.

    For when we do such things, the seeming tiny quanta of our collective
    merits can combine and swell, no less than drops of water that make
    up an ocean, into a tidal wave of goodness, ushering in the day when,
    as the prophet Isaiah (11:9) foretold, "the earth will be filled
    with knowledge of G-d, like the water that covers the oceans."

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The waste of time is the most extravagant
micha at aishdas.org        of all expense.
http://www.aishdas.org                           -Theophrastus
Fax: (270) 514-1507