Earthquakes and Belief – An Angry Response to “Believers”

By Yaacov Mascetti

6621 and counting. I am writing this article on May 2nd 2015, and that is the number of deaths in the Nepal earthquake. And as the authorities have declared that there is no longer any chance of finding survivors under the rubbles, the death toll keeps rising. As usual in cases like this, where tragedy is so mindboggling that one cannot even come to terms with the event and its consequences, there is always someone around me who has the lack of tact to say the magic words: “It is God’s will – he is angry at us!” In this case it was my daughter’s geography teacher, who in a religious elementary school in Jerusalem told the pupils in her class that earthquakes like this happen because of God’s wrath. She’s just the local example of a trend – rabbis of haredi denomination and from the national religious framework usually race towards this kind of event, with very inappropriate declarations.

An example? In 2008 a small earthquake hit Israel – I was sitting, as usual, in the Hebrew University library on Mt Scopus, the shelves moves for a couple of seconds, and it stopped by the time I actually realized what had happened. One of the best responses was that of the then Member of Knesset (and future prison inmate) Shlomo Benizri from Shas who declared that “the Gemara mentions a number of causes of earthquakes, one of which is homosexuality, which the Knesset legitimizes.”

In the case of the major earthquake in Nepal, a certain Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch stated that the earthquake happened “because of incest and other sexual immorality taking place in Israel along with fraudulent conversions to Judaism performed by Israeli state Orthodox rabbis who are not strictly haredi.”

My first reaction to all this is physical – I get stomach cramps and very, very angry. Why does belief have to be accompanied, in so many people, by a feeling of security and calm? Why is it that so many people feel so certain of the Divine will and feel they possess the interpretational tools to read Divine decisions and understand them (and maybe even justify them)? Why is belief never a state of fragile balance between understanding and frustrated misunderstanding, a tense and humble state of mind in which a human being stands in front of the cosmos with a wonder-struck expression and just doesn’t get it?

So I don’t get it. I really don’t. And I am very upset that there are people who think they understand, and see God’s iron laws confirmed – because all they see, as far as I am concerned, is a reflection of their fears. All they see is not the God-infused cosmos, but a blurry and vulgar reflection of themselves. A religious person, one who wishes to define herself as such, declares in cases like this, a humble lack of understanding, and a certain degree of anger for the tragedy and the blood spilt.

In 1755 Lisbon was hit by a major earthquake that killed between 10000 and 60000 people. Again, a tragedy. The response came that time from the French philosophe Voltaire, who wrote a long and very angry poem in response to the Leibnizian optimists, who, like the religious “authorities” quote here above, stated that it was God’s will and that as such it was part of the best of all possible worlds. I will quote a few passages just for the sake of clarity:

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.
Tranquil spectators of your brothers’ wreck,
Unmoved by this repellent dance of death,
Who calmly seek the reason of such storms,
Let them but lash your own security;
Your tears will mingle freely with the flood.
When earth its horrid jaws half open shows,
My plaint is innocent, my cries are just.
Surrounded by such cruelties of fate,
By rage of evil and by snares of death,
Fronting the fierceness of the elements,
Sharing our ills, indulge me my lament.

[…]

“All’s well,” ye say, “and all is necessary.”

God I respect, yet love the universe.
Not pride, alas, it is, but love of man,
To mourn so terrible a stroke as this.
Would it console the sad inhabitants
Of these aflame and desolated shores
To say to them: “Lay down your lives in peace;
For the world’s good your homes are sacrificed;
Your ruined palaces shall others build,
For other peoples shall your walls arise;
The North grows rich on your unhappy loss;
Your ills are but a link in general law;
To God you are as those low creeping worms
That wait for you in your predestined tombs”?
[…]
God holds the chain: is not himself enchained;
By his indulgent choice is all arranged;
Implacable he’s not, but free and just.
Why suffer we, then, under one so just?
There is the knot your thinkers should undo.
Think ye to cure our ills denying them?
All peoples, trembling at the hand of God,
Have sought the source of evil in the world.
When the eternal law that all things moves
Doth hurl the rock by impact of the winds,
With lightning rends and fires the sturdy oak,
They have no feeling of the crashing blows;
But I, I live and feel, my wounded heart
Appeals for aid to him who fashioned it.
Children of that Almighty Power, we stretch
Our hands in grief towards our common sire.

[…]

In you I mark the nerveless boast of pride
That hides its ill with pretext of content.
I am a puny part of the great whole.
Yes; but all animals condemned to live,
All sentient things, born by the same stern law,
Suffer like me, and like me also die.
The vulture fastens on his timid prey,
And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs:
All ’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while
An eagle tears the vulture into shreds;
The eagle is transfixed by shaft of man;
The man, prone in the dust of battlefield,
Mingling his blood with dying fellow-men,
Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds.
Thus the whole world in every member groans:
All born for torment and for mutual death.
And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say
The ills of each make up the good of all!
What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice,
Mortal and pitiful, ye cry, “All ’s well,”
The universe belies you, and your heart
Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit.
All dead and living things are locked in strife.
Confess it freely evil stalks the land,
Its secret principle unknown to us.
Can it be from the author of all good?

[…]

From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
And came it from no other, for he ’s lord:
Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!

[…]

From Leibniz learn we not by what unseen
Bonds, in this best of all imagined worlds,
Endless disorder, chaos of distress,
Must mix our little pleasures thus with pain;
Nor why the guiltless suffer all this woe
In common with the most abhorrent guilt.
’T is mockery to tell me all is well.
Like learned doctors, nothing do I know.

[…]

Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research;
He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
This world, this theatre of pride and wrong,
Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness.
With plaints and groans they follow up the quest,
To die reluctant, or be born again.
At fitful moments in our pain-racked life
The hand of pleasure wipes away our tears;
But pleasure passes like a fleeting shade,
And leaves a legacy of pain and loss.
The past for us is but a fond regret,
The present grim, unless the future ’s clear.
If thought must end in darkness of the tomb,
All will be well one day—so runs our hope.
All now is well, is but an idle dream.
The wise deceive me: God alone is right.
With lowly sighing, subject in my pain,
I do not fling myself ’gainst Providence.

Echoing Voltaire, I would like to conclude by saying that wen tragedies of this kind take place, we are not to fling ourselves against Providence, but rather must experience the unbearable weight of our lack of understanding. And while rabbis and other religious and political authorities play with God or the idea of Divine will by projecting this or that message, I stand angry and frustrated and I cry for the dead, and pray for the survivors. Because belief, is not about explaining or accepting – it is about dealing with contradictions, with tragedies, with happiness and beauty. We are to engage the cosmos, the chaotic cosmos we live in, with active minds and must try to understand – but when there is nothing to understand, we, believers and non-believers, must simply acknowledge the pain, and be merciful. One is not to inquire why – one must, though, act, acknowledge pain, and prevent himself from projecting onto God his or her own ideas of truth and justice. So, to say it with Voltaire, I respect God, and yet I love the universe – it is not pride, but love of man, to mourn so terrible a stroke as this.

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.