By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–A blessed rain has fallen over the scorched and smoking northern hills of Israel, where Elijah once blasted the idolaters of the Carmel Mountain, and where the mystics wrote their tomes in Safed. The people of Israel, a beautiful farrago-state of clenched faith and flaring rage, have heard the precious words from their entangled government: “The fire has been managed.”
The announcement comes after the loss of some 40 lives, ranging from a sixteen year-old volunteer to a host of prison guards engulfed in their bus’s flames as they made their way to the scene, to the female chief of the Haifa police. And even as the emergency aircraft (including many from other nations) now leave the skies above the Holy Land, the people of Israel are confronted with a new sense of vulnerability and unease: Their necessary focus on war and defense has betrayed their potentially lethal lack of preparedness for natural disasters—or the sabotage of enemies at industrial ports or again in the high woods.
And yet: Something discernible, something wistful and, yes, tantalizing, has risen in the smoke and now clearing skies of this disaster in the biblical forests. Even as the children have been lighting the little Hanukkah candles, one by one, every night this past week, small miracles of compassion came to the land.
For the first time ever in its stressed and inspirational history, Israel had to turn to other countries—some of them adversarial—for relief and aid. A strange twist for a mighty little country that has always been hailed as among the first to send its doctors, engineers, scientists, and trauma specialists to all points, from Africa to Haiti to Indonesia, when catastrophe has struck and assistance was needed.
Firefighters and equipment, aircraft with flame-retardant chemicals and the ability to transport massive tonnage of water, cots, blankets, medicine, ointments, began to appear from points of origin such as Egypt, Russia, Jordan, Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, France, Spain, and others sent help in the form of personnel and/or supplies and technology. Even Turkey set aside recent animosity and commissioned help. In what has to be one of the most touching items reported, the Palestinian Authority dispatched three late-model fire trucks that rushed through Israeli towns and villages to the scene; Palestinian firemen worked side-by-side with Israelis to douse flames and search for victims.
Lord, even as we pray for the victims, can you be sending a Hanukkah message of hope, burned in fire, to teach us at last what life means in the Holy Land?
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego