From Arrogance to Compassion

Was Hurricane Katrina wholly a "natural" disaster? Was human action in part responsible for the catastrophe that destroyed a city?

Let us recall a Torah passage that is raised up in traditional Jewish liturgy as the second paragraph of the Sh'ma, the affirmation of God's Unity. The passage reads (Deut. 11: 13-21, following and revising the Everett Fox translation):

"Now it shall be--
If you hearken, yes, hearken!
To My connection-commitments
to which I connect you today,
To love YHWH/ Yahh/ the Breath of Life
and to serve Yahh with all your heart and every breath,
I will give forth the rain of your earth in the right time,
Rain like arrows in its time
and the gentler later-rain as well,
And you shall gather in your grain, your new wine,
and your glistening olive-oil;
I will give forth grassy-eating in your field,
for your animals;
So you too will eat and be satisfied.


"Take care!
Lest your heart be seduced,
So that you turn aside and serve after-thought 'gods'
and bow yourselves down to them,
For then the heat of the Breath of Life
will flare up against you
So that the Breathing-spirit of the world
shuts up the heavens [as CO2 becomes scorching]
And there is no rain [or it smashes your levees and drowns your cities]
And the earth does not give forth its yield,
So that you perish quickly from off the good earth
that YHWH, the Breath of Life, is giving you!"


And in sum, the passage continues:

"If we can teach the Unity of all life to ourselves and our children;
if we can awaken our minds and our hearts, our eyes and our hands, our dreams and our efforts, to the Wholeness;
if we can remember that only the Great Flow of all life is worthy of
worship, not carving out of it our own idols, godlets of greed and ambition and hurry and Control--
Then earth will be heavenly in all its earthiness, a garden of sustenance and delight.

"But if not. "

The New Orleans Catastrophe has lit up our society like a continental lightning flash, revealing what was always present but hidden from us. Let us look at the specifics:

1. When money was needed to shore up the New Orleans levees before disaster struck, the money was cut from flood control funds to spend on the Iraq war.

2. When it would have been crucial to use the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guards to evacuate people and keep order, two-fifths of them were fighting in Iraq.

3. When, decades ago, preservation of the Louisiana wetlands was crucial because they absorbed the rain of hurricanes, they were destroyed in order to drill for oil.

4. When scientists warned again and again that pouring CO2 into the atmosphere was heating the earth and oceans and could spawn more hurricanes of ferocious intensity, their warnings were scorned and the hyper-use of oil continued.

5. When evacuations were ordered, no one bothered to provide the means for hundreds of thousands of Orleanians (mostly black) who were too poor to own cars or to have credit cards or to connect with faraway friends or to buy extra food to pack in middle-class back packs. So many of them died, many of them sickened from hunger and thirst and the poisons released into water and air.

Each of these failures was rooted in human arrogance--arrogance toward the earth and its oceans, toward the poor and people of color. Each was rooted in a form of idolatry, of carving out from the Unity, the Universal Flow of life, some partial piece and worshipping that piece as if it were the Whole. Elevating into godlets our own pride, greed, ambition, domination--and bowing before them.

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