Repentance After Disaster

On September 1, 1923, one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history hit the Kanto plain in Japan and laid waste to Tokyo, Yokohama and surrounding cities and villages; well over 100,000 people perished. Although it was before the advent of modern communications, news of the disaster reached distant places. Even the Polish town of Radin, the home of the "Chofetz Chaim."

His real name was Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan, but the sainted Jewish scholar came to be known by that snippet of a Hebrew verse - it means "one who wants life" - after the name of one of the 21 works he authored on Jewish law, this one on the prohibition of improper speech like gossip and tale-bearing. He was one of the (if not the) most important decisors of Jewish law of the 20th century (he died in 1933 at the age of 95), renowned world-wide not only for his scholarship but for his kindness, righteousness and modesty. He and his wife subsisted as the proprietors of a small grocery store, whose finances he carefully scrutinized, on alert always for any possible overcharging of a customer.

When a student informed the elderly sage of the mass deaths in Japan, he was visibly shaken, immediately undertook a partial fast and insisted that the news should spur all Jews to repentance.

Japan could as well have been Neptune to any early 20th century Polish Jew. It was a place that existed only on newspapers' pages and in stories. And the inverse relationship between distance (cultural and religious, as well as geographic) and empathy is a well- recognized part of human nature.

Mass destruction has visited the world, and that cannot be something a Jew simply takes note of before moving on.

Yet the Chofetz Chaim's dismay and resolve were genuine. Although there were not likely any Jews directly affected by the tragedy in Japan, the 13th century Spanish Jewish luminary Rabbeinu Yonah of Gerundi, in his commentary to Avot (3:2) describes how "the way of the righteous" is to "... pray for the peace of the entire world and feel the suffering of others."

But there is something more in the Jewish sources, something that might surprise many contemporary Jews: the idea that catastrophes, even when they do not affect Jews, are nevertheless messages for them, wake-up calls to repentance. Insurers call such occurrences "Act of G-d"; for Jews, that description is precise indeed, and demands a response.

It is, to be sure, a very particularist idea, placing Jews in a central place within humankind. But, while Judaism considers all of humanity to possess potential holiness and while its prophetic tradition foretells the eventual movement of all of humanity to service of G-d, Judaism does in fact cast the Jews as a chosen people. That election includes the responsibility to perceive Divine messages in the trials of humankind.

And so that is an additional layer to the Chofetz Chaim's reaction, the conviction that the distinctive nature of the Jew demanded a meaningful Jewish response to the catastrophe that had occurred.

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