Leap of Faith: responding to disaster

In biblical times, one would not have known the wide-ranging details of a devastating natural disaster that occurred elsewhere. ‘Our’ flood story in the Book of Genesis is shared with other near eastern texts but information would not have been on the level that we are used to today.

As I write, the known death toll in the earthquakes that have hit south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria is 40,000. By the time you read this it may be much more. Such events usually garner someone in the Jewish community, in this case the Safed Chief Rabbi, to suggest something that the rest of us find abhorrent – that the victims are paying the price for individual or communal sins, the earthquake a ‘sign of divine justice’.

A redundancy of theology that promoted reward and punishment was already raised in the time of the prophet Ezekiel. In contemporary times of tragedy, Judaism will offer a plethora of responses, the humblest of which is admitting that one does not know what God wants or where God is at such a time. All we know is that there are lives to be saved in the immediate aftermath, and then a commitment to supporting the bereaved, in this case whole villages, towns and cities.

And so, we turn the question to ask what humanity can do. There is a short-term response for which the Jewish community can be justifiably proud – the role of World Jewish Relief (WJR) as our way to contribute to non-sectarian causes. Able to channel funding for local response workers on the ground, the strength of feeling we have as individual Jews is translated into support for those who we see broken and in tears on our screens. Even when we learn of the difficulties faced by local networks – human and infrastructure – that have been literally destroyed, and heinous local politics that obstruct aid we, through WJR, supply not just support but hope.

There is a wider issue that such natural disasters highlight – that they are not purely ‘natural,’ but there is a human element. As I listened to my daughter revising for her Geography A Level, I heard that almost exclusively the destructions brought by nature are exaggerated by a ‘poverty trap’. It is a mechanism that, according to the Economic Times, “forces people to remain poor… leading to the over-exploitation of natural resources and land,” especially in the poorest places. That is not to mention the human greed that the Turkish-born novelist Elif Shafak has been the latest to rail against.

Our task on earth would be simpler if we did not know about horrific disasters that do not occur on our doorstep. But we do. Lo tuchal l’hitaleim (Deuteronomy 22:3) is translated by Onkelos (the translation of the Torah into Aramaic) as ‘you may not hide yourself.’ We do not hide ourselves when we donate through WJR in the short term. However, while we might try to limit our selfishness, we may admit that, just as we do not know the nature of God, we also do not know the answer to human greed.