I Bet You Wish You Had This Kind Of Serenity

I've been thinking about this
since the day the bus exploded in Jerusalem. The
bus was packed with Haredim. Most of the
casualties - the dead and the wounded, some of
them critically - were Haredim or their children.
If this type of tragedy had happened to secular
Israelis, messianic Jews, members of the Chabad
movement or Mizrahi Haredim, their cries of grief
would have immediately sought out the guilty
parties: the government, the bus company, the lack
of security guards. And, of course, the usual
cries of "Death to the Arabs" and the terrible and
justified anger against the human agent that
brought the tragedy down upon them.


But the Ashkenazi Haredim do
not hold anyone to blame. With
a sort of nobility devoid of
pathos, they live in a world
that lies outside of history.
What is true in our world is
not real truth for them. They
live in a world in which the
Blessed be He loves the Jewish
people and whatever befalls a

person is God's handiwork. God instructed his
chosen people to fulfill his commandments and
to do what is good in his eyes. God does not
need to explain what this good is.

The Haredim do not believe that calamities occur
at random. God runs this world and he knows
what he's doing. His knowledge is not the same
as human knowledge, and a believer ascribes
himself to God and lives within the Torah.

When I saw how they stood and prayed over their
own blood, with terrible grief and restrained
horror, begging God to forgive them, I could
only be envious that my forefathers were like
them. When I said Kaddish over my father's
rag-bound corpse, as it was about to be plunged
into the earth, and was compelled to praise and
extol God - in Aramaic, no less - I hated every
moment. I felt contempt for my forefathers. But
in the eyes of my forefathers, my hatred would
have been perceived as a misreading by a
distorted mind.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/S...ID=0&listSrc=Y