The Satan comes to Boro Park
So how did he get there anyway?
It goes something like this:
Like rolling thunder he moved from one place to the next. Way out at first on the other side of the world through New Zealand and Japan, leaving earthquakes in his wake, then a lot closer in the form of tornadoes tearing through the Deep South and then through Joplin, Missouri. From there he went into the flood business as he devastated the Mississippi Valley, and then, back in tornado mode, he dropped in for a quick pit stop next door in Springfield, Massachusetts to quench his thirst by almost sucking up the Connecticut River.
These weren’t isolated incidents.
As is well known, the Gemara teaches that every disaster that comes upon the world comes only because of Klal Yisroel. It’s always about us. It always was and it always will be.
Rav Miller, z”l used to say that if you see a small news item on the bottom of page 89 in the New York Times reporting a cyclone in Bangladesh that killed 200,000 people, the whole purpose for this devastation was that a Jew named Miller in Flatbush should hear about it and do Teshuva. And if he doesn’t do Teshuva, then it’s a waste of a lot of goyim for nothing.
Like rolling thunder, the Satan moved from one place to the next. Each stop along the way Hashem knocked on our door, but we didn’t answer. And so it went until he reached Boro Park.
And when he finally got there, Hashem didn’t knock. He let the Satan kick the door down instead.
You can’t say we weren’t warned.
A lot of ink has been spilled trying to decipher the message that we are supposed to take away from the unspeakable tragedy that muddied, last week, what we mistakenly thought was the very tranquil pond of Boro Park, Brooklyn. What can we say that hasn’t already been said by those much more knowledgeable and qualified to opine on an issue of such sensitivity? Very little to be sure, so we will suffice with merely a few observations.
Everyone seems to be in agreement with the suggestion that we should all take on something, be it increased tzeddakah, a commitment to work on a given middah, Shimiras HaLoshon or anything else that will strengthen our Yiddishkeit. What down side could there possibly be in getting closer to the goal for which we were placed here in the first place?
To this I would like to add a little something.
About a year ago, someone I know quietly gave his son something like $2,000 to pay the bill that the son’s yeshiva in Eretz Yisroel had run up at the local grocery. Very nice, but he didn’t stop there. He also gave him another thousand dollars to create a credit balance so that the yeshiva wouldn’t go back into debt again the following morning.
Taking our cue from that extra thousand, maybe we should be taking on two somethings rather than one. The first, which is reactive to the potch, conveys our understanding that Hashem is very upset with us, our present confusion as to the details notwithstanding.
That second something is proactive and carries a simple message:
Please, Hashem, let there be no next time.
And so it goes. We are very good at reacting with concern, outrage, remorse, mesiras nefesh, intense emotion, and yes, even occasional achdus to things that upset us, and therefore no one had to think twice about how to react to the tragedy that took place in Boro Park last week. The truth is that no one had to think even once because our reaction flowed viscerally from the kishkes of the Klal.
And to take it a step further, who doesn’t or didn’t at one time have a nine year old boy somewhere in his extended family sprinkling nachas all around as if it were fairy dust? Given all of the above, exactly how difficult was it for us to intimately relate to the totality of this staggering blow, relate to young Leiby, a"h and to the Kletzky family?
Are we not hard wired to feel the pain of others?
Are we not hard wired to feel the pain of others?
But feeling Hashem’s pain is a different story altogether, and it’s something we have to work on because it doesn’t come easy. If we were on a high enough madreiga our emotional responses to those things that “pain” Hashem would be as axiomatic as our responses are to what we perceive to be our own misfortunes. Unfortunately, we’re not holding there right now.
In the course of detailing the Satan’s inventory of natural disasters, one very “unnatural” disaster was omitted, and that was the abomination known in our circles as The New Marriage Act that became law in New York State last month.
While we leave to bigger people the deeper meaning of the connection between this disgrace of a law and the calamity that rocked all of us last week, there is no question that the juxtaposition of these two events, with this law passing a bare two weeks before the horrific murder of Leiby Kletsky, a"h by someone quite possibly harboring “unnatural” inclinations, was meant to get our attention.
At the time of the Hevron Pogrom in 1929, Rabbi Yechezkel Sarna, z”l, who a few years later became the Hevron Rosh Yeshiva, said that when he heard the report of the disaster that had befallen the Yeshiva he couldn’t eat for three days. “But I didn’t faint,” he said, “Rav Kook fainted.”
Rabbi Aryeh Levine testifies that when Rav Kook heard the same news he fell backwards off his chair and fainted.
When that wicked law passed in New York there was a lot frustration and confusion in our community as to what our response should be. It wasn’t something that came naturally to us as a group. We knew it was wrong to be sure and many even sensed that it was a disaster. Some of us called our state representatives in protest while others wrote letters to the newspapers. A few even asked their Rabbis if they should move out of New York State. Most of us just gnashed our teeth because we understood that we didn’t have the political clout to do anything about it.
But we didn’t faint.
We didn’t go into a collective state of shock and mourning as we did last week. We didn’t put the same emotions and mesiras nefesh on the table for something that was important to Him.
So the Satan came to Boro Park.
NOW WE KNOW what Hashem wanted from us last month. He wanted us to feel sick about it.
He wanted us to feel like we do now.
