Making confident pronouncements about why certain things happen to us as a nation or as individuals is a foolhardy business one that runs the risk of actually transgressing a Torah prohibition of ona’as devarim as the beraysa in Bava Metzia 58b states quite clearly. Nevertheless a plethora of Torah sources make clear that Hashem does at times utilize the vehicle of non-Jewish aggression as sheivet apo His instrument to educate and awaken us to our failings.

Thus a careful balance must be struck. On the one hand we need the humility and sensitivity to profess our ultimate ignorance in the absence of prophecy as to why particular things happen to specific groups and individuals. But at the same time we must summon both the courage and creativity to consider all possible messages that lie in a particular event and just as importantly the willingness to point the accusatory finger of culpability at ourselves as quickly as at others. As the writer David Klinghoffer put it pithily in a wonderful 1998 essay in First Things:

It would be a presumption to assert that G-d caused the Holocaust or allowed it to happen in order to punish European Jewry for their increasingly widespread devotion to secularism. In any given historical event we can never know G-d’s true intention. But it would also be a presumption and a worse one to assert that such a punishment was not what He had in mind. 

The task of finding meaning by seeing the madness as a mere medium of the Divine message is made easier by the fact that Hashem’s  response often takes the form of middah k’neged middah with the parallelism enabling us to discern what it is that brought Him to act through the guise of anti-Jewish aggression. Applying these axioms of Torah-based historical analysis can prove fascinating and profitable and never more so than in examining events that are unfolding in our times. Two examples out of literally scores:

When the street theater troupe otherwise known as Women of the Wall (in Exile) aka WOWIE reached a new level of thespian achievement by setting up the arrest —  gasp! — by Jews — double gasp! — of WOWIE’s fearless leader Abby er Anat Hoffman for the crime — say it ain’t so! — of wearing a tallit — the very first word that leapt to mind was …“flotilla.”

The parallel after all is beyond uncanny. The Mavi Marmara gambit was a successful instance of terrorists and their “useful idiot” abettors setting up a situation in which the entire world would be outraged at those erstwhile Nazi-victims-turned-Nazis themselves otherwise known as Israeli commandos using wildly excessive lethal force against unarmed idealistic peaceful folks seeking nothing other than to bring desperately needed food and medical supplies to the innocent people of Gaza.  Of course as we know a funny thing happened on the way to the theater of the absurd — a little complication called a “video” largely ruined the carefully choreographed production by revealing for all to see that the flotilla-teers were in fact armed thugs who brutally attacked the Israelis causing the latter to defend themselves and kill nine of their attackers.

At this point when the Israeli government has officially apologized for the killings and offered to pay $100000 to the family of each of those killed — the only detail to be worked out being whether it’ll make a direct deposit into Islamic Jihad’s bank account — the point of the parallel I draw here is somewhat weakened.

It’s true as well that some of the same people cheering on the WOWettes and indeed the whole enterprise of heterodox agitation for equal rights in Israel also believe with perfect faith that jackbooted Israeli soldiers killed in cold blood pure-hearted relief workers on a mission of mercy to Gaza. To them there really is nothing to say for they have terminal utopianitis a particularly virulent and widespread modern disease.    

An aside: The fact that the above-mentioned deeply deluded types believe what they do about the flotilla or march at Sheik Jarra etc. probably helps explain why their fight for religious pluralism hasn’t gained any traction with the Israeli public. Israelis ever vigilant not to be taken as freiers know exactly who does and who doesn’t stand with them against their enemies and reciprocate accordingly.

But at the time of the flotilla incident most Jews even heterodox and secular ones saw it clearly for what it was: a highly transparent deeply dishonest contrivance designed to push the “world community’s” emotional buttons A through E in service of a lie. Yet these same Jews who refused to be crudely manipulated by a Passion Play staged by Islamist Jew-haters are now reaching for the Kleenex and their checkbooks too at the sight of Ms. Hoffman being led away nearly in leg irons by big bad Jewish policemen merely for seeking to do that which countless Jews yearned to do throughout the millennia to pray to G-d at the Wailing Wall draped in a tallit. Heartstrings duly pulled.

A few months ago in an even schmaltzier version of this gripping drama a couple of Israeli paratroopers who helped liberate the Wall in ’67 were tracked down and trotted out by the WOWsers to stand around arms folded and sunglasses donned to make sure nobody would bother the “sistas” as they prayed at the top of their lungs at the Wall that the former paratroopers themselves gave us. How’s that for raw emotional power? 

My problem with such surpassing naiveté isn’t even so much a religious one as an aesthetic one. Surely many of the American Jews who have been shocked shocked by the arrest of Ms. Hoffman are regulars atLincolnCenter and the theater district that is to say appreciators of fine drama. How then could they possibly fall for such artistic schlock?

In any event the parallels between the “thrilla on the flotilla” and the “brawl at the Wall” are at the least thought-provoking.

Example two: The overwhelming bias of much of Western media against Israelis a long-standing fact. A piece in this month’s Commentary sums up the brief against one of the more notorious perpetrators the BBC:

Of all the reflexive political attitudes of BBC management and staff the animus againstIsraelstands out for its obsessive and visceral qualities. The organization makes more documentaries aboutIsraeland the Palestinians than about any other foreign subject. Again and again events inIsraeland the Palestinian territories are the lead story on the BBC news Web site even when world-shaking events are taking place in parts of the globe you might expect progressives to care about.

The BBC’s Middle East “experts” were almost all taken by surprise by the Arab Spring so focused were they on Israel and so convinced were they that all the problems of the Middle East derive from the Zionist presence. An official internal report on anti-Israel bias by Malcolm Balen in 2004 has been suppressed by the BBC presumably because it confirms the existence of the same; the corporation has spent almost $400 000 in legal fees defending the report against Freedom of Information Act requests seeking its release.

Once again anyone familiar with the monomaniacal focus in much of the secular Jewish press on the Orthodox community’s problems and foibles both real and contrived can’t help but be struck by the many parallels that exist between that often deeply unfair coverage and the treatment accordedIsraelby the “Beeb” and its fellow members of the liberal-dominated media.

But now for an admission: It’s so satisfying to look at an incident like the Mavi Marmara and find an intriguing parallel in the antics at the Kosel (which have been going on for years now) and speculate about whether “they” brought about the flotilla incident with “their” cynically sacrilegious behavior. And that might just be true.

But Chazal tell us that that when Klal Yisrael became lax and slothful about avodah in the Beis HaMikdash the opportunity to perform it was taken away courtesy of the Yevanim. And so has it been in other times and contexts. So isn’t it worth pondering whether there’s something for example about the way we comport ourselves at the Kosel or in our mikdashei mi’at wherever they may be that might have brought about the possibility for “them” to act the way they have? And might the way others speak about — and slander — frum Jews have some relation to how we speak about our own?