Rabbinical blame game (Illustration)
צילום: גיל יוחנן
Rabbis, please shut up
Op-ed: Israeli rabbis should stop blaming tragedies, disasters on lack of faith among nation’s citizens
Like toxic mushrooms after radioactive rain, religious and haredi public figures emerge and respond in the wake of disasters and tragedies. Without an ounce of self-awareness, a hint of media understanding or minimal familiarity with Israel’s public sphere, those convinced that they are God’s representatives on earth insist on speaking up and explaining the backdrop of the various calamities.
As happened recently after eight family members were killed in a road accident, rabbis rushed to submit to interviews on haredi media outlets, saying that one cannot make sense of divine scores but adding that such difficult cases should prompt everyone to become more religious and change their ways.
In an interview with Radio Kol Chai, for example, Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar asserted that at this time God “plucks such pure souls because he sees that we are in a stupor, too preoccupied with trivialities and too busy with making a living and the financial matters.” Meanwhile, haredi-Lithuanian paper Yated Ne’eman reported that one rabbi urged his followers to remove the Internet from their homes.
This is of course not the first such case, and most certainly not the harshest one. Back in 1985, Rabbi Yitzhak Haim Peretz, the former Shas leader and interior minister, linked a train disaster that left 22 school children from Petach Tikva dead to Shabbat desecration in the city. At the time, a haredi magazine linked the children’s death to faulty mezuzot at their school. There are numerous other examples, but the idea is similar.
Embarrassing explanations
It’s important to note that in Judaism there are quite a few cases where an effort is made to find an explanation to everything that happens in the world, ranging from good to bad. Yet I’m taking this opportunity to urge all the spiritual leaders to stop bombarding us with the notion that some things only look bad on the outside, but are good in inner ways. Some things are better left without such embarrassing explanations.
The Talmud provides a wonderful example of our inability to understand the ways of the Creator. It tells of how Moses was shocked to discover, during a conversation with God, the terrible way in which the Romans will be killing Rabbi Akiva. Moses cried out: “Is this the Torah and is this its reward?” Yet the amazing response he received was “shut up, that’s what I came up with.” Over the years, several commentators attempted to explain this answer, but in the bottom line, even the greatest of prophets had to understand that at times there is no telling what prompts a disaster.
Of course, if a rabbi is privately asked by his student about doubts in one’s faith, he can try and explain why some righteous souls suffer or why the Holocaust happened. Yet in the public sphere, the futile attempts to explain the reason for disasters do not only fail to convince the faithful, they also cause a large segment of the population to feel contempt for the Torah and those who study it. In order to realize this, religious and haredi public figures and rabbis need to understand, for example, what happens on Facebook and in the public sphere.
Some members of the Shas party may have indeed achieved a higher spiritual level than Moses, yet here is some good advice I learned from a wise man, known as dad: “If you have nothing wise to say, it’s better to simply shut up.”
