Below is a paraphrased commentary by Rodger Kamenetz, entitled “Was God in This Disaster?” which raises the question of God’s role in the Tsunami disaster (sent to me by the World Federation of Practical Christianity).
“I am trying to connect to this tragedy the best I can. The pictures help a little. I see dead children on the floor, a parent weeping. The little ones look like they are sleeping; it is unimaginable that they are dead. I see a parent holding his dead child. I feel in my body what it is like to hold…that weight and the heaviness of a body that does not hold life.
But I can’t multiply what I feel by 10,000 or 40,000 or even by ten. We know more than we can feel. And we respond as best we can, I think. This is our situation in a time of instant global communication. The heart does see from one end of the world to the other, and faster than the internet.”
There are many opinions and comments from those who are trying to think from a spiritual point of view; from the Buddhist, to the Christian to the Jew…All trying to justify a deeper cause.
There is a story from the Talmud about Moses traveling to heaven to see for himself who is the greatest teacher of Torah. When Moses ask God what the teacher’s reward will be, God shows him a vision of the teacher being tortured by Romans in the marketplace, his flesh stripped from his body.
Just as it is incomprehensible that children, whole families, whole islands could be taken up by a wave and drowned, it is incomprehensible to Moses that a great and good teacher would be rewarded with torture.
When Moses asks why, God answers with a riddle, “It arose in thought.”
