{"id":28,"date":"2010-02-10T16:19:45","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T16:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/rabbishmuleyunleashed\/2010\/02\/haitian-apocalypse-and-a-bold-new-world.html"},"modified":"2010-02-10T16:19:45","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T16:19:45","slug":"haitian-apocalypse-and-a-bold-new-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/rabbishmuleyunleashed\/2010\/02\/haitian-apocalypse-and-a-bold-new-world.htm","title":{"rendered":"Haitian Apocalypse and a Bold New World"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Photos and Videos of Rabbi Shmuley’s trip are available here)<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Nothing can prepare you for Port-Au-Prince.
\nNot watching the devastation on CNN for a week. Not viewing a Time
\nmagazine photo montage of blue-tinged bodies in rigor mortis. Nothing.<\/p>\n

Perhaps
\nthe only thing that prepared me were grainy black and white photographs
\nthat I had seen of Berlin and Tokyo in the summer of 1945, cities
\nreduced to endless stretches of rubble. Port-Au-Prince looks like it
\nwas bombed mercilessly from the air by a powerful foe.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\n
It hits you slowly. As you make the long drive from Santa Domingo
\nand cross the border into Haiti, you first think to yourself, ‘Thank
\ngoodness. The earthquake wasn’t nearly as bad as described.’ We saw a
\nfew homes that had collapsed on the outskirts of the city and heard the
\ntragic story of a grandmother who had been crushed under a collapsed
\nroof. But 300,000 dead? The estimates had to be exaggerated.<\/p>\n

Then you get nearer and the tent and squatter cities of the endless
\nnumber of homeless, sitting outside their makeshift abodes with little
\nto do and looking like ghosts, begins to hit you.<\/p>\n

But only when you get into the very heart of the city, ground zero
\nof the quake’s devastation, does a world of pure destruction open
\nbefore you. One of out every two buildings collapsed like pancakes,
\ncreating giant tombs in the city’s heart. The stench of death,
\ninescapable, is all around you. Noone will ever know how many are
\nburied inside these mountains of wreckage. It took ancient Rome empire
\nhundreds of years to collapse and become a city if ruins. But mother
\nnature accomplished the task in Haiti in a matter of seconds.<\/p>\n

As you drive through the downtown what makes the scene even more
\nmacabre are the hundreds of people who walk through the rubble and the
\ncars who traverse the devastation seemingly barely cognizant of the
\napocalypse that is all around them. Barely a store is open. The
\nelectricity is long gone. But they walk through, determined, as if the
\nheart of the city still beats.<\/p>\n

The airport, if you can call it that, is a scene of vast quantities
\nof supplies strewn about, bubble-wrapped and waiting to be distributed.
\nThe UN compound – a vast blizzard of white vehicles with the dark black
\nUN letters adorning them – sits immediately nearby. Every country on
\nearth seems to be represented and one can verily hear people speaking
\ntongues, that is, every known tongue. Never have I witnessed such an
\nextensive relief effort. I was greeted warmly by soldiers of every
\nnationality, from the Brazilians who bought groceries next to me, to
\nthe Indians who smiled when I waved, to the Italians who fought to
\nmaneuver their giant convoy through the traffic-clogged streets, to the
\nPeruvians who tried to clear a way for them to pass.<\/p>\n

And everywhere – dominating air, sea, and land – are the Americans.
\nFrom the airport field hospital operated by the sleep-deprived heroes
\nof the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, to the awesome
\nsite of Air Force Ospreys rising vertically and then taking horizontal
\nflight, to the giant C-130 transports landing and making the earth
\nshake, to the American Homes passing through the streets, with smiling
\nsoldiers atop, the American people are providing the lion’s share of
\ninternational relief.<\/p>\n

I came to Haiti with my friend Glen Megill of the Christian
\nhumanitarian organization, Rock of Africa, and my eldest daughter
\nMushki. Last thanksgiving we visited Zimbabwe to distribute corn seen
\nand mosquito nets and now we were in Haiti to visit an orphanage. I
\ncame directly from broadcasting a radio show at the Super Bowl in Miami
\nand then watching the game with my family, following a nephew’s bar
\nmitzvah. A different side of America was on display this past weekend
\nin South Florida. Saints fans turned Ocean Drive into the French
\nQuarter’s Bourbon Street. All-party-all-the-time. A country whose
\nbiggest cultural event of the year is a bunch of enormous guys hitting
\neach other as hard as their muscles would allow. I am a huge football
\nfan. But the way in which the Super Bowl dominates the American
\ntelevision landscape instead of, say, the debate over health care, is a
\nlittle difficult to comprehend. But make no mistake about it. This is
\nnation that plays hard but knows when it’s time to get serious.<\/p>\n

And as I watched the world coalesce around the tragedy of the
\npoorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, the paradox of the world
\nachieving the ancient messianic vision of global unity only through
\ntragedy and sport began to gnaw at me. The only time I had ever seen so
\nmany people of so many different nationalities coming together in such
\nharmony was at the Olympics I had witnessed in Barcelona, Lillehammer,
\nand Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n

The UN, a body that has long disgraced itself by its hatred of
\nIsrael and its defense of Arab dictators is doing an awe-inspiring job.
\nHaiti has also seen the near-universal praise of Israel as a country of
\nunparalleled humanitarian commitment with Wycliffe Jean, arguably
\nHaiti’s biggest celebrity and the global face of the Haitian
\nhumanitarian effort, telling me on my radio show that the Israelis out
\nshown every other nationality in their expert professionalism and the
\namount of lives they saved.<\/p>\n

Is it only in moments of competitiveness and tragedy that the world
\ncan rally together as one indivisible family? Is it only through
\ncatastrophic death that the world can learn the value of life? Can we
\nrally together only in adversarial conditions, or when we are in
\nterrible pain?<\/p>\n

I guess that in a world so deeply fractured we should be grateful for whatever unity we can get.<\/p>\n

I leave Haiti feeling overwhelming grief for the devastation
\nexperienced by its inhabitants, a profound respect for their courage
\nand how little they complain, and in awe of the human capacity to draw
\ntogether to help those in need.<\/p>\n

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the founder of This World: The Values
\nNetwork. His upcoming book, Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Lived Life
\nwill be published in April by Basic Books. Follow his Haitian tweets
\n@RabbiShmuley and on his website Shmuley.com<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Photos and Videos of Rabbi Shmuley’s trip are available here) Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Nothing can prepare you for Port-Au-Prince. Not watching the devastation on CNN for a week. Not viewing a Time magazine photo montage of blue-tinged bodies in rigor mortis. Nothing. Perhaps the only thing that prepared me were grainy black and white photographs…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"yoast_head":"\nHaitian Apocalypse and a Bold New World - Rabbi Shmuley Unleashed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/rabbishmuleyunleashed\/2010\/02\/haitian-apocalypse-and-a-bold-new-world.htm\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Haitian Apocalypse and a Bold New World - Rabbi Shmuley Unleashed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(Photos and Videos of Rabbi Shmuley’s trip are available here) Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Nothing can prepare you for Port-Au-Prince. 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