Going the Moral Distance

Shortly after Katrina devastated the coastal cities of the Gulf, I was with my colleague, Rabbi Brian Schuldenfrei, discussing topics to speak about on the High Holidays. We agreed one had to talk about the hurricane. He paused, and said, "Well, of course, Rosh Hashanah is still more than a month away."

Simultaneously, we had a frightening realization--it seemed possible that in a month or two the topic would no longer be "hot." To be sure, people would still be suffering. Shattered lives would not be repaired. The shock-waves of catastrophe would roll through the souls of many thousands of people, but would the topic still be on people's minds?

We had no idea that another hurricane would soon strike the United States. But Rita in some ways reinforces the centrality of the problem. The speed with which calamity fills the screen of our lives and then leaves is astonishing. We are connoisseurs of instant information, sympathy, and forgetfulness. Once the images no longer dominate the news, we have been there, done that.

It has been less than a year since the Asian tsunami ravaged several countries. Not only did untold numbers die, in the hundreds of thousands, but the lives of millions were changed forever. Yet who was still talking about the tsunami when the hurricane hit? It had filled our screens, moved our hearts, and then we moved on. After all, Britney was having a baby.

It would be an instructive, although ultimately sickening, exercise to measure column inches and broadcast minutes in American news over the past few months before Katrina: Brad and Jen's breakup versus the aftermath of the tsunami.

I don't mean to trivialize. We did not only move on to foolish obsessions, but because we have our own lives. We cannot live from disaster to disaster. There is wisdom in Thoreau's admonition from Walden Pond: "I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter--we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for myriad instances and applications?"

We can read about disasters all day. Once we know that fires can happen, does it matter that there is a new one? Who does not regret that local news has become a parade of petty crimes and lurid tragedy?

Continued on page 2: 'What separates the men from the boys' »