Over the past week, the recovery and clean-up of the forest fire in the Carmel region of Northern Israel that charred acres, burned property, and killed 42 people has gotten underway. It’s been particularly interesting for me, having just visited Tel Aviv for the weekend, to witness the ways in which Israelis are organizing en masse to volunteer with helping out. In particular, I visited two synagogues, each of which talked about ways to support the Yemin Orde Youth Village, a center that’s home to more than 500 children, that suffered a loss of over 40% of their buildings during the fire.

Yet alongside the public response to rebuild the affected areas, there has also been a strong drive to find answers for the fire, and in particular, to understand who is responsible for allowing this tragedy to unfold in the way it did.  While police believe they may have identified the person who started the fire, much of the vitriol is being leveled against the government, in particular the ministries of interior and finance, for underfunding and mismanaging the fire and rescue services and not equipping them with the supplies – like the tanker planes that governments across Europe and the US provided – that would have ended the forest fire before it became too big.

But while it may be appropriate to blame the government for negligence, I think that this narrow focus may be a bit short-sighted.

About a week ago, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the former Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, attributed the forest fire to Jews’ failure to observe Shabbat properly. While his remarks have an eerie resonance with what Rev. John Hagee said about New Orleans’ permissive attitude toward gay pride causing Hurricane Katrina, reading Rabbi Yosef’s comments got me thinking about what it means to cast a broad net of responsibility when government readiness cannot meet the scale of a natural disaster (even if I think his specific argument is insane). For Ovadia Yosef, the reason why the fire burned in the North was because of Jews’ failure to follow religious commandments, meaning (in the most charitable way I can see it), that the scope of responsibility for the loss of property and life does not lie with just the individuals who set the fire, the government, or the politicians. Many more people share responsibility for this.

Coincidentally, right after reading this article, I heard a lecture in the Old City of Jerusalem on chapter 5 of Ezekiel. I had never learned this passage before, but it seemed quite relevant to the fire in the Carmel:

And thou, son of man, take thee a sharp sword, as a barber’s razor shalt thou take it unto thee, and cause it to pass upon thy head and upon thy beard; then take thee balances to weigh, and divide the hair.

A third part shalt thou burn in the fire in the midst of the city, when the days of the siege are fulfilled…

And of them again shalt thou take, and cast them into the midst of the fire, and burn them in the fire; therefrom shall a fire come forth into all the house of Israel.

Thus saith the Lord GOD: This is Jerusalem! I have set her in the midst of the nations, and countries are round about her.

And she hath rebelled against Mine ordinances in doing wickedness more than the nations, and against My statutes more than the countries that are round about her; for they have rejected Mine ordinances, and as for My statutes, they have not walked in them.

Putting aside the explicit focus on Jerusalem and the apocalyptic predictions, I think it’s important to ask: what is the wickedness – or perhaps, misguided behavior – that people have committed that may have brought on this tragedy?

This forest fire broke out during the driest November Israel has experienced in over 60 years, if not longer. While the winter season is supposed to be cloudy, dreary, and rainy, here in Jerusalem, prior to last week, we had been having an unseasonable heat wave since the summer. It was so bad that the Jerusalem Orthodox rabbinate called two separate fast days, and another progressive religious group in Jerusalem held a prayer service for rain. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as Israel has been experiencing a protracted dry-spell, Europe is being pummeled with freezing temperatures and snow. Given these conditions, it seems clear that climate change played a role in the fire and how it spread so quickly.

A traditional rabbinic Jewish understanding of rain not falling is that it is due to sin – our inability to observe proper moral and ritual conduct. And a fast is designed not only to awaken God’s compassion on the land and on the people, but to get people to recommit themselves to proper behavior. I don’t believe that a conscious God or the environment notice when people miss a meal, but I do think there is some profound wisdom in this idea. We could say that it is because of our sins – our addiction to consumption-based lifestyles that produce tons of carbon gasses that go into the atmosphere and change weather patterns – that the weather has changed so much such that the lack of rains facilitated the rapid spread of the fire. That each of us in the developed and developing world need to take a measure of responsibility for the fire in the Carmel, just as we need to take responsibility for the range of environmental changes that we are witnessing today.

While I cannot get on board with the specific justification of either Ovadia Yosef or John Hagee as to why natural disasters happen or why inept politicians and bureaucracies make them worse, I want to lift up what I see as their sense that the scope of responsibility for environmental tragedy is much large and must be shared: even when we don’t live next door to a tragedy, we need to own up to the mess we’re helping to create.