There’s a paradox at the heart of cataclysmic events like last week’s storm and its aftermath. On the one hand our minds are staggered by the innumerable tzaros besetting both people we know and those we don’t and the incomparable outpouring of chesed those tzaros have triggered. But the preoccupation with the many details of these travails and triumphs of the spirit can also draw our attention away from the larger meaning that this ruach se’arah osah devaro is surely intended to convey to us.
It’s de rigueur in our community for people to come up with all manner of hints for momentous current events often from obscure Torah sources. This current event is no exception. One striking example to which my brother-in-law Reb Avromi Beer alerted me is the selichah for the Behab fast that many shuls recited last Monday morning just as Hurricane Sandy was barreling towards our shores: in an apparent metaphor for the trials caused by galus and our sins it speaks in dramatic terms of the extreme havoc wrought by inundation from ocean waves and the rising of the deep. Another instance far more obvious but no less arresting is our leining in shul about our forefather Avraham’s peerless hachnassas orchim on the Shabbos during which hundreds of his worthy descendants in so many different locales bestowed that very chesed upon hundreds of their fellow Yidden.
But we can — and must — also think more deeply and lastingly about things. In the spirit of chochmah bagoyim ta’amin here’s part of an essay in the American Interest by Walter Russell Mead whose highly insightful writing is often informed by a notable decency and religious sensibility. It’s a longer excerpt than usual but so well worth reading for the truths of which it reminds us:
Manhattanis one of those places where nature seems mostly held at bay. Except for the parks oases of carefully preserved nature deliberately shaped by the hand of man every inch of the city’s surface has been covered by something man-made.… Into this busy self-involved world Hurricane Sandy has burst.… For a little while at least New Yorkers are reminded that we live in a world shaped by forces that are bigger than we are….
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