Why Did it Happen?

Some of the victims (Times of Israel)

What we do here on earth matters. Actions or lack of them when they are needed - have consequences. That doesn’t mean that what happened in Meron was against the will of God. What it means is that we live in a physical world; God has placed us in it; and given us free will to do good or bad. And that God will judge us by that standard despite the fact that God willed those good or bad things to happen.

This might sound like the ultimate conundrum. And in fact it is. At least to me. But there are a lot of things I don’t understand. Which makes me no less a believer in the fact that God controls the world.

The best example I can think of that demonstrates this conundrum is our own slavery in Egypt. Clearly God wanted us to be there. He actually foretold this to our patriarch, Abraham. The Torah describes the natural way in which this happened. And that God still judged and punished the people that enslaved us. Clearly mankind’s actions in the physical world have physical consequences. Saying it was the will of God when bad things happen is true. But it is a physical act that causes a physical result in a physical world.  

That hasn’t stopped some people from seeking spiritual reasons based on God’s motives for physical catastrophes. Which often boils down to the agenda of the person guessing at them. Physical causes are thereby placed on the back burner if not made entirely irrelevant.   

It has therefore always bothered me that this kind of thinking made some prominent rabbis seek spiritual explanations for the Holocaust. The implied question of ‘Why did God do this to His people?’ is answered by the pet issue of the person trying to answer it. 

In my view that amounts to rabbinic hubris. The idea that a particular rabbi knows the mind of God says quite a bit about what he thinks of himself. Making things even more problematic is that pointing to a spiritual cause for a tragedy might come at the expense of finding the physical cause… or ignoring it even when it is obvious. To me, that is exactly the opposite of what God wants us to do about dangerous physical realities. 

When a dangerous situation exists, it is clear from the Torah that we must do what is necessary to prevent that danger from happening. As Rabbi Natan Slifkin notes in yet another great article, That is why the Torah tells us to build Ma’akah - a fence on a rooftop. So that people will not be able to fall off it and die. We do not simply just leave it alone and say that God will protect us... that if someone falls, it is the will of God... that we don’t really have any control anyway... so why bother?! 

In the aforementioned post Rabbi Slifkin criticizes Eytan Kobre’s latest article in Mishpacha Magazine. Who said the following about the Meron tragedy: 

...all those investigations and articles, all the back-and-forth about the how and when and where and who, are a smokescreen. It’s a distraction from the one question that all of us who aren’t government officials or safety inspectors or askanim should ask ourselves, and that is “Why?”

What he means is that we should be asking why God did this? What message did he send? What does He want us to fix in our behavior that led to that tragedy last week? 

Smokescreen? Is that what he thinks all the activity to determine what the cause of the tragedy - and how to prevent it in the future - is?! That it is our spiritual shortcomings that we should be fixing instead of focusing on the ‘smokescreen’? 

It is that kind of thinking that has led to the following almost ridiculous ‘explanation’ once used in another context - which might be used again here: 

If only women would not wear such long Shaitels this wouldn’t have happened. Our women should have known that this is a form of Pritzus (promiscuity) which is unacceptable to God. Now that this tragedy happened, we know better. What we need to do now is throw out those Shaitels. 

I can’t wait to hear this kind of ‘Tznius’ explanation as the reason 45 religious people were crushed to death by other religious people – albeit unintentionally.  Only an improvement in Tznius will prevent something like this from happening again. Not really so much the ‘smokescreen’ of better security. 

This is not to say that we should not be focusing on improving out lives spiritually. We should. But to blame this tragedy on it is nothing more than an exercise in guesswork without any foundation. Because if we really wanted to focus on spirituality, why always focus on what women are supposedly doing wrong? If chasing down Tznius is the goal, than we should be way ahead of the game by virtue of erasing women for the public square as though they don’t exist (the most prominent example of which is not publishing pictures of women in any of the Charedi print media. Like Mishpacha). 

I would suggest that if we do want to go down that road maybe the opposite is true. Maybe God’s message is that He doesn’t like the fact that his creations are being erased from the public square. But I digress. 

Point is that we do not know – cannot know – the mind of God. And to blame the deaths of 45 innocent religious Jews on our spiritual shortcomings instead of the organizers that encouraged the massively overcrowded attendance - is the wrong thing to be doing right now.