Blaming Women. Again!

Rabbi Meir Kessler, Av Beis Din of Kiryat Sefer (Wiki)

What we need most in our world right now is more tragedies. At least that’s what it seems like to those who need tragedies to push forward an unrelated agenda

I find it appalling once more that a bus tragedy where people were killed is being used ‘as a message from God’ to improve specific behavior. It’s always about improving things that have absolutely no connection to what happened. This happens all the time of late.

The issue du jour being the immodest way women dress. That seems to always be what any tragedy is blamed on. As it was in a story reported on Rafi’s blog, Life in Israel about a funeral for victims of a bus accident. No… it’s not road conditions or the bus driver that was at fault. Why were these people killed? Why it was the way women on the bus were dressed, of course. They apparently were not modest enough. 

This – among other things - is what Meir Kessler, Rav of Kiryat Sefer (Modiin Illit) blamed the tragedy on . True he mentioned a few other things, but as Rafi noted on his blog, the men did nothing wrong. As Rabbi Yosef Bechhofer implied on his Facebook group, OJADAR  when commenting on this story, ‘Sure. Blame the women. Again’

Not to be outdone Rabbi Shalom Cohen blamed the tragedy on Tiberias  Mayor Ron Kubi who allows the city’s bus-line to operate on Shabbos. Which has absolutely no physical connection to that accident.

This is not to say that the issues they addressed aren’t legitimate. But to use a tragedy to push forward even a legitimate agenda is - in my view immoral. How do the bereaved feel about prominent rabbis publicly using the sudden tragic loss of their loved ones blaming it on what other people do wrong? I guess the agenda is more important than using a tragedy to make a point.

I realize that there is a tradition to see world tragedies as message from God about our behavior. Rav Yisroel Meir Kagan (better known as the  Chofetz Chaim) made a similar connection to us as Jews about a tragedy that happened half way around the world that killed well over 100,000 people. From a 2010 Cross Currents article: 

Informed of the mass deaths in Japan, the 85-year-old rabbinic leader was visibly shaken, immediately undertook to fast and insisted that the news should spur all Jews to repentance. 

As far as I know, neither Rabbi Kessler nor Rabbi Cohen fasted. Nor did they say that we all need to be spurred to repentance. They took issues of the day and blamed the tragedy specifically on that without compunction. They did not have the wisdom or any sense of compassion on how the bereaved might feel about it. Not so with the Chofetz Chaim. As noted in that article: 

Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan, the sainted Jewish scholar renowned around the world even then for his scholarship, honesty and modest life. 

I have no clue why tragedies of any type happen. Whether it involves one person or 100,000 people. I am not a Navi.  God has His reasons for allowing all manner of tragedy to happen. And certainly we have a right – if not an obligation to take lessons from it. We may not know the exact nature of what that lesson might be. But we all have areas that could use improvement in our lives. 

The Chofetz Chaim understood that and did not single out any specific problem that might have plagued the Jewish people of his time. And I’ll bet the Jewish people had plenty of their own problems back then – just as we have now. But he did not have the Chutzpah to imply that he could read the mind of God and thereby point to something specific.

But these two rabbis apparently think they know the mind of God. Which places them in the same category that Chazal places those who claim to have prophecy in our day. The Gemarah in Bava Basra (12b) tells us that the gift of prophecy in post biblical times is given to the Shoteh (the mentally ill) and to children. These rabbis are clearly not children. That leaves only one category. Do the math!