Was it Just a Storm?

In EmunahSpeak: A Gut Rehab we opined that In the ruins of Long Beach, Belle Harbor, Seagate, and Staten Island, to name but a few of the worst hit areas, Hashem has revealed to us where we go from here. The gut rehab that hundreds of us are doing to all or part of our houses is a moshol for the gut rehab we have to do to ourselves.

You have to become a different you, period.

And we don’t mean doing the Daf, writing a big check for disaster relief, or becoming a regular on the Shemiras HaLoshon Hot Line or at the Ohel Sara Amen Group.

As we said above, “The days where we could throw Hashem a bone so to speak and go about our business are over.”

We’re talking Tikkun HaMiddos here as the Mesillas Yesharim understands it. Simply put, in paralleling what we are doing to our houses we have to rip out our gaiva, taiva, kas, and kina and toss it into the dumpster with the sheet rock. 

And this is poshit, because as Rabbi Yehuda Litwen reminds us, the Gra writes in Mishlei that the purpose of life is to break the middos that we have not yet broken, and if not then there is no point in living.

Leaving aside those who were displaced from their homes because Sandy had invaded their actual living space as opposed to their basement or a rental unit, the moshol was apparently a tad north of where most of the rest of us were holding because rather than use the sheet rock etc. as a template for the heavy lifting that a real Tikkun HaMiddos would require, we did the opposite.

We remodeled instead with a better floor (ceramic tile), carpet, appliances, doors and anything else we could get the insurance company and/or FEMA to pay for.

Vos ken men zogen?

In sharp contradistinction to how the big picture of the events in which they were engulfed and the meaning of their place therein was so clear to the Gedolim of previous generations, that’s how unclear the tenor of our times, with its associated disruptions, is to us.  We are a generation of pygmies, not tzaddikim, and the best that can be asked of us is to endure the dislocations that have followed in the wake of Sandy, as we put our lives back together again with the aforementioned new walls, floors, appliances, and anything else that would improve upon what heretofore defined the contours of our material existence.

Is there nothing more to this than a plague of mold?

Could it not be that our extended community, its manifold imperfections notwithstanding, was zoche to have the tircha and the losses resulting from the fury that the Ribbon Shel Olam unleashed, amidst the Jewish communities stretching from Lido Beach to Seagate, piled onto the z’chus side of the scales of life and death that were at that time precariously balancing the merits of the Yishuv in Eretz Yisroel against the Satan’s bill of indictment? 

And if so, could it also not be that having tilted the scale towards life, our travail was then morphed into the Iron Dome interceptors that shot Yishmael’s arrows out of the sky?

Or was it just a storm?