What does New Orleans have to do with Tisha be'Av?
Thanks to my dear friend, brilliant sociologist Brenda Brasher, I found myself in the "Big Easy" a couple of weeks ago, attending the conference she organized on "Jewish Women and Philanthropy." While I was there, Brenda helped me get my consciousness raised about the disaster that struck the city, and the efforts at recovery.
On a "Katrina tour" of the parts of the city hardest hit by the hurricane, I heard the bitterness in the voice of our soft-spoken guide, Gail Cherlew, whose home was flooded, destroying most of the possessions that make a life. "The flood was a man-made disaster," she told us more than once. Contrary to what one may have heard, it wasn't the earthen levees lining the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain that gave way. It was the drainage canals running through parts of the city, whose purpose is to drain off floodwaters and pump them into the lake. And those, Gail told us, were not built to the specifications set down for them by the federal government. Meant to go 50 feet into the ground, they went down a mere 14 feet. When the test came, they simply fell down.
Somewhere along the way, the money for building those canal walls was siphoned off, leaving the city at risk of catastrophe. The possibility of a catastrophic storm had in fact been considered -- yet was put aside as "unthinkable."
Maybe you can already see what I'm getting at. In the additional reading for the Torah portion of Deuteronomy, read last Shabbat as part of the lead-up to Tisha be'Av, we heard: "Your silver has turned to dross; your wine is cut with water. Your rulers are rogues and cronies of thieves, every one avid for presents and greedy for gifts; they do not judge the case of the orphan, and the widow's cause never reaches them" (Isaiah 1:22-23).
Which of these decadent ways created the aperture by which the catastrophe of conquest rushed in? We cannot know. It is said that the first destruction was a result of corruption; the second -- leading to a 2,000 year exile -- of divisiveness and mutual hostility. But these were the indirect causes; the direct cause was conquest and defeat by a greater power that became an enemy. Decadence blinded the nation to the reality of the risks facing it and to the holes in its defenses. The possibility of conquest was the elephant in the room; it was "unthinkable" -- and so it was not prevented.
People will disagree about what the "elephant in the room" is today, and of course that's one of the problems. There are plenty of elephants to worry about, from meteorites striking the earth to swine flu. I personally see a grave risk in the policy of continuing to settle the territories while hoping that the "Palestinian problem" will somehow go away; and I see a grave source of corruption in keeping masses of people in our territory without the civil rights emanating from democracy. And what about the possibility of alienating our great friend, the United States? "Unthinkable"! Others will disagree with me about the elephant's identity. But perhaps the real difficulty is that decadence in our society will keep us from recognizing the real risks and coping with them before -- well, I don't want to say. It's unthinkable!
An Israeli whom I happened to meet in the US before setting out for New Orleans said to me: "I can't understand why people would go back to live in such a place, knowing that a hurricane could come again!" I responded as you probably would: "And you're from the Middle East??" "That's different," she said. "it's home; that's where my family is." It's often the risk closest to home that we don't want to think about.
To go back to New Orleans, I met wonderful people there. They are committed to rebuilding their city, making it better than before, and sealing the holes in its defenses. And they are doing that by getting the city's diverse communities to work together. Now that I've been there, I feel a little bit like a citizen of New Orleans, and as an ambassador, I take back this message: Don't ignore the unthinkable. By letting empathy grow and rooting out corruption, we, too, can remove the blinders and see to our defenses.
Thanks to my dear friend, brilliant sociologist Brenda Brasher, I found myself in the "Big Easy" a couple of weeks ago, attending the conference she organized on "Jewish Women and Philanthropy." While I was there, Brenda helped me get my consciousness raised about the disaster that struck the city, and the efforts at recovery.
On a "Katrina tour" of the parts of the city hardest hit by the hurricane, I heard the bitterness in the voice of our soft-spoken guide, Gail Cherlew, whose home was flooded, destroying most of the possessions that make a life. "The flood was a man-made disaster," she told us more than once. Contrary to what one may have heard, it wasn't the earthen levees lining the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain that gave way. It was the drainage canals running through parts of the city, whose purpose is to drain off floodwaters and pump them into the lake. And those, Gail told us, were not built to the specifications set down for them by the federal government. Meant to go 50 feet into the ground, they went down a mere 14 feet. When the test came, they simply fell down.
Somewhere along the way, the money for building those canal walls was siphoned off, leaving the city at risk of catastrophe. The possibility of a catastrophic storm had in fact been considered -- yet was put aside as "unthinkable."
Maybe you can already see what I'm getting at. In the additional reading for the Torah portion of Deuteronomy, read last Shabbat as part of the lead-up to Tisha be'Av, we heard: "Your silver has turned to dross; your wine is cut with water. Your rulers are rogues and cronies of thieves, every one avid for presents and greedy for gifts; they do not judge the case of the orphan, and the widow's cause never reaches them" (Isaiah 1:22-23).
Which of these decadent ways created the aperture by which the catastrophe of conquest rushed in? We cannot know. It is said that the first destruction was a result of corruption; the second -- leading to a 2,000 year exile -- of divisiveness and mutual hostility. But these were the indirect causes; the direct cause was conquest and defeat by a greater power that became an enemy. Decadence blinded the nation to the reality of the risks facing it and to the holes in its defenses. The possibility of conquest was the elephant in the room; it was "unthinkable" -- and so it was not prevented.
People will disagree about what the "elephant in the room" is today, and of course that's one of the problems. There are plenty of elephants to worry about, from meteorites striking the earth to swine flu. I personally see a grave risk in the policy of continuing to settle the territories while hoping that the "Palestinian problem" will somehow go away; and I see a grave source of corruption in keeping masses of people in our territory without the civil rights emanating from democracy. And what about the possibility of alienating our great friend, the United States? "Unthinkable"! Others will disagree with me about the elephant's identity. But perhaps the real difficulty is that decadence in our society will keep us from recognizing the real risks and coping with them before -- well, I don't want to say. It's unthinkable!
An Israeli whom I happened to meet in the US before setting out for New Orleans said to me: "I can't understand why people would go back to live in such a place, knowing that a hurricane could come again!" I responded as you probably would: "And you're from the Middle East??" "That's different," she said. "it's home; that's where my family is." It's often the risk closest to home that we don't want to think about.
To go back to New Orleans, I met wonderful people there. They are committed to rebuilding their city, making it better than before, and sealing the holes in its defenses. And they are doing that by getting the city's diverse communities to work together. Now that I've been there, I feel a little bit like a citizen of New Orleans, and as an ambassador, I take back this message: Don't ignore the unthinkable. By letting empathy grow and rooting out corruption, we, too, can remove the blinders and see to our defenses.
