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| Bulldozing abandoned cars in LA blocking fire escape route (NBC) |
Entire city blocks in famous neighborhoods (like Pacific Palisades and Malibu) are engulfed in flames. House after house! Block after block! Residents are scrambling to get out by car as flames chase them down, and then abandoning their vehicles in the middle of the highway in a panic. Fearing the flames will catch up with them and they'll be burned alive.
Hundreds of abandoned cars are now blocking emergency vehicles - including fire trucks - from getting through to the affected areas. Bulldozers are being used to clear a path.
Thousands of people have lost everything in an instant. Homes that many of them had been living in for many decades (as well as valuable possessions) now lay in ashes. One moment it was all there. The next - gone! It's like watching a horror movie! Only it’s real and being played out in real time. And quite shocking. May God have mercy on all these poor innocent people suffering right now.
While this tragedy carries on, eulogies were being held for former President Jimmy Carter in Washington.
(As an aside, just before the eulogies began, it was amazing to see former President Obama and President-elect Trump chatting as though they were good friends. Even sharing a laugh together. Considering the pure venom they use when they each speak about each other, you would think they wouldn't be able to look at each other, much less have a amicable conversion. But I digress.)
As I said in a recent post, Carters views about Israel were extremely biased. Favoring by far the Palestinian cause and blaming Israel for all their problems. But unlike my past judgements about him, I no longer believe he was an antisemite.
In the eulogy given by Stuart Eizenstat who is Jewish and a long time close freind and confidant of Carter, he pointed out that Carter respected Judaism and mentioned numerous examples of that. But his attitude about Israel was based on empathy gone estray. This is how Rabbi Daniel Z. Feldman sees it in a RIETS Kollel Elyon
publication and I agree with him:
(The) empathy he apparently displayed was no barrier to him becoming a pawn of forces of pure evil. Also clearly true is that there are many thousands of others whose natural instincts have been exploited and manipulated by terrorists such as Hamas, and innocent and good people all over the world are paying the price…
One who feels empathy will be moved to build houses for the homeless, and that is a wonderful thing. Further, empathy is an end unto itself, rather than a means...
Where empathy falls short is as a policy maker, especially for those who carry the weight of complex decisions that can affect the lives of millions, and that requires dealing with people who are not necessarily what they seem and will exploit any weakness.
The trait of rachmanut, which could be identified with empathy, is indispensable for Jews; the Talmud says its presence is one way to identify a descendant of Abraham. But it also cannot exist by itself; the Talmud also warns that those who display rachmanut to the cruel will thereby act with cruelty to those who truly need rachmanut.
Crucially, the Talmud actually requires three traits to establish lineage from Abraham: two being rachmanut and the practice of chesed, or kindness... Rachmanut is the instinct to act on behalf of those who appear to be suffering; chesed is the benevolent act itself, having been rationally verified as the right course of action, in consideration of all factors in balance. The first is needed to move one to act; the second is to assure that the act is good.
The third criterion is bushah, shame, what may correlate to a sense of humility. This is the controlling factor of the other two; the recognition that it’s possible to be wrong, that one’s initial instinct may not be providing the whole picture, that even the most virtuous impulse may be misguided. If the loudest cheerleaders of Hamas, be they former presidents or ivy league students, had more bushah, the world may actually be a better place.
Even though he was renowned as a great humanitarian the world over, Jimmy Carter lacked the humility to consider that he might be wrong about where he placed his compassion when it came to Israel and the Palestinians. And oblivious to how he arrived at his compassionate views about Palestinians and whose fault their plight was. That was a tragic flaw that might have otherwise left a glorious legacy for him in Israel and for the Jewish people.
