There’s a paradox at the heart of cataclysmic events like last week’s storm and its aftermath. On the one hand our minds are staggered by the innumerable tzaros besetting both people we know and those we don’t and the incomparable outpouring of chesed those tzaros have triggered. But the preoccupation with the many details of these travails and triumphs of the spirit can also draw our attention away from the larger meaning that this ruach se’arah osah devaro is surely intended to convey to us.

It’s de rigueur in our community for people to come up with all manner of hints for momentous current events often from obscure Torah sources. This current event is no exception. One striking example to which my brother-in-law Reb Avromi Beer alerted me is the selichah for the Behab fast that many shuls recited last Monday morning just as Hurricane Sandy was barreling towards our shores: in an apparent metaphor for the trials caused by galus and our sins it speaks in dramatic terms of the extreme havoc wrought by inundation from ocean waves and the rising of the deep. Another instance far more obvious but no less arresting is our leining in shul about our forefather Avraham’s peerless hachnassas orchim on the Shabbos during which hundreds of his worthy descendants in so many different locales bestowed that very chesed upon hundreds of their fellow Yidden.

But we can — and must — also think more deeply and lastingly about things. In the spirit of chochmah bagoyim ta’amin here’s part of an essay in the American Interest by Walter Russell Mead whose highly insightful writing is often informed by a notable decency and religious sensibility. It’s a longer excerpt than usual but so well worth reading for the truths of which it reminds us:

Manhattanis one of those places where nature seems mostly held at bay. Except for the parks oases of carefully preserved nature deliberately shaped by the hand of man every inch of the city’s surface has been covered by something man-made.… Into this busy self-involved world Hurricane Sandy has burst.… For a little while at least New Yorkers are reminded that we live in a world shaped by forces that are bigger than we are….

Soon though the winds will die down and the waters recede.… New Yorkers will go back to their normal pursuits and Hurricane Sandy will fade into lore. But events like this don’t come out of nowhere.Sandyisn’t an irruption of abnormality into a sane and sensible world; it is a reminder of what the world really is like. Human beings want to build lives that exclude what we can’t control — but we can’t.

HurricaneSandyis many things; one of those things is a symbol. The day is coming for all of us when a storm enters our happy busy lives and throws them into utter disarray. The job on which everything depends can disappear. That relationship that holds everything together can fall apart. The doctor can call and say the test results are not good. All of these things can happen to anybody; something like this will happen to us all.

Somewhere in the future each of us has an inescapable appointment with irresistible force. For each one of us the waters will someday rise the winds spin out of control the roof will come off the house and the power will go out for good.

We can protect ourselves from a storm likeSandyby taking proper precautions…. But one day dear reader a storm is coming which neither you nor we can survive. The strongest walls the sturdiest retirement plans stuffed with stocks and CDs the best doctors cannot protect us from that final encounter with the force that made and will someday unmake us.

Coming to terms with that reality is the most important thing that any of us can do. A storm like this one is an opportunity to do exactly that. It reminds us that what we like to call “normal life” is fragile and must someday break apart. If we are wise we will take advantage of this smaller passing storm to think seriously about the greater storm that is coming for us all.…

We each try to build a self-sufficient world a sturdy little life that is proof against storms and disasters — but none of us can really get that done. Strangely that admission of weakness opens the door to a new kind of strength. To acknowledge and accept weakness is to ground our lives more firmly in truth and it turns out that to be grounded in reality is to become more able and more alive. Denial is hard work; those who try to stifle their awareness of the limits of human life and ambition in the busy rounds of daily life never reach their full potential.

To open your eyes to the fragility of life and to our dependence on that which is infinitely greater than ourselves is to enter more deeply into life. To come to terms with the radical insecurity in which we all live is to find a different and more reliable kind of security. The joys and occupations of ordinary life aren’t all there is to existence but neither are the great and all-destroying storms. There is a calm beyond the storm and the same force that sends these storms into our lives offers a peace and security that no storm can destroy.… Accepting your limits and your dependence on things you can’t control is the first step on the road toward finding that joy.…

[W]e hope that our readers will take the opportunity that a storm like this offers step back from their daily lives and reach out to the Power who plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the storm. Getting the right connection with the highest power of all not only gives you a place of refuge when the big storm finally comes; it transforms daily life and infuses ordinary occupations with greater meaning and wonder than you ever understood.

IN ONE MOMENT Many years ago my wife and I spent Shabbos Chanukah at my in-laws in Boro Park with a visit to dear friends in Flatbush planned for after Shabbos. After Havdalah the phone rang; it was the friend calling to tell my wife that she’d have to cancel the get-together. She paused and my wife disappointedly asked why. The friend answered simply “Because I have no house.” It had gone up in flames just 24 hours earlier the victim of Chanukah licht somehow gone terribly awry in the early hours of Shabbos morning.

This week I thought of that long-ago phone call and the lesson it taught me about how little we really know about what life will bring. With the change of the clock on Motzaei Shabbos Vayeira my shul’s Leil Shabbos father-son learning program was to have begun next Shabbos Parshas Chayei Sara and I had been quietly planning to sponsor and enhance this year’s program. I had hoped to post signs before Shabbos Vayeira alerting the shul’s children to look out for an exciting new program coming to our shul.

But I have no shul.

Last Monday six-foot high ocean waters burst through the front doors of the Agudath Israel of Bayswater and surged into its beis medrash the unforgiving waves overwhelming our aron bimah and amud destroying all our siddurim and Chumashim our several sets of Shas and hundreds upon hundreds of other seforim laying waste to our beautiful mikdash me’at. Only the heroics of two neighbors saved us from the unthinkable as they whisked our Sifrei Torah to safety just ahead of the watery invasion.

The devastation of any shul or beis medrash anywhere is unspeakable deeply painful. But this is also my shul and that of my family where for over two decades we celebrated simchahs our own and those of dear friends and neighbors; where we mourned friends who left us far too early; where we danced our hearts out on a Simchas Torah reveled on a Purim were raised to sublime heights by a Yom Tov davening of our baalei tefillah trembled before the Eibeshter on a Rosh HaShanah and cleansed ourselves before Him on a Yom Kippur; where we heard shiurim from the rav and every day of every Chol HaMoed from many other talmidei chachamim; where we learned and chazered and learned some more where we were mechadesh chiddushim.

Those siddurim — we’ll buy others for sure; but we can’t replace them. We davened from them cried into them. Those Gemaras — we learned from them twisted our minds into knots over them and tried to straighten them back out and yes fell asleep over them.

They say we’ll rebuild and I’m sure b’ezras Hashem we will. But do you understand? As I write this I have no shul.