Making confident pronouncements about why certain things happen to us as a nation or as individuals is a foolhardy business one that runs the risk of actually transgressing a Torah prohibition of ona’as devarim as the beraysa in Bava Metzia 58b states quite clearly. Nevertheless a plethora of Torah sources make clear that Hashem does at times utilize the vehicle of non-Jewish aggression as sheivet apo His instrument to educate and awaken us to our failings.
Thus a careful balance must be struck. On the one hand we need the humility and sensitivity to profess our ultimate ignorance in the absence of prophecy as to why particular things happen to specific groups and individuals. But at the same time we must summon both the courage and creativity to consider all possible messages that lie in a particular event and just as importantly the willingness to point the accusatory finger of culpability at ourselves as quickly as at others. As the writer David Klinghoffer put it pithily in a wonderful 1998 essay in First Things:
It would be a presumption to assert that G-d caused the Holocaust or allowed it to happen in order to punish European Jewry for their increasingly widespread devotion to secularism. In any given historical event we can never know G-d’s true intention. But it would also be a presumption and a worse one to assert that such a punishment was not what He had in mind.
The task of finding meaning by seeing the madness as a mere medium of the Divine message is made easier by the fact that Hashem’s response often takes the form of middah k’neged middah with the parallelism enabling us to discern what it is that brought Him to act through the guise of anti-Jewish aggression. Applying these axioms of Torah-based historical analysis can prove fascinating and profitable and never more so than in examining events that are unfolding in our times. Two examples out of literally scores:
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