Question

Hello and blessings,
I wanted to get the Rabbi's response to Professor Yoel Elitzur's remarks about the coronavirus crisis and what follows from it, which seemingly do not align with the Rabbi's approach regarding the contemporary relevance of divine providence and reward and punishment from the Holy One, blessed be He.
And here are his words:

Then the land will appease its Sabbaths

What is hardest for us today is to believe in God — a simple, biblical faith, not sophisticated and not sophisticating.

The government announcement that almost everything is being shut down and that all the buses will be suspended over the weekend from Friday through Sunday reminded me that not so long ago, the burning issue in the news was the initiative of the mayor of Tel Aviv and other mayors to force public transportation into operation on the Sabbath.
Their enthusiasm, and that of the media that supported them, in promoting the initiative met our quiet sadness over the further harm being done to the sign of the covenant between the Jewish people and its God, in the precious commandment from the Ten Commandments, "Remember and keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it," the historical identity card of the Jewish people. So here the Holy One, blessed be He, is shutting down transportation for us on the Sabbath, though not in the way we would have wanted.
What is hardest for us today is to believe in God — a simple, biblical faith, not sophisticated and not sophisticating.
Many years ago, when I still did reserve duty twice a year, we once arrived at a post on Mount Hermon, and the rooms we were housed in had no mezuzot. I turned to the military rabbinate, and to their credit I received the mezuzot within two days. I am sitting and rolling up the mezuzah scrolls, and leaning over me is a curly blond fellow from one of the kibbutzim in the Negev. “Hey, Elitzur, what are you doing?” — “Preparing mezuzot for the rooms here.” — “Yes, I see the mezuzot, but what are these papers?” — “Those are what go inside these tubes, and that is actually the mezuzah itself.” — “Oh, I didn’t know. Can I read what’s written here?” — “Sure.”
He holds the mezuzah and reads, apparently for the first time in his life, the text written in it, and it turns out he also understands what he is reading (which could not have happened in the generations before Zionism and the revival of the Hebrew language!). Then he asks: “Elitzur, tell me, do you believe what is written here?” — “??” — “I mean, that if we don’t behave properly, God won’t give rain. Look, on our farm nobody does any commandment, only transgressions, and still this year there was lots of rain! What do you say to that?”
I was stunned for a moment, apparently because until that moment I too had never really thought about the question. I knew from when one recites the Shema in the evening and in the morning, and that one must separate between ‘grass in your field’ and pronounce the zayin in ‘you shall remember’ sharply, but the matter of rain and its connection to God was not exactly on my mind. I collected myself and gave him a formulaic answer of the sort common in our circles: you surely fulfill many commandments — settling the Land, working its soil, combat service in the army that protects the people and the land, and commandments between one person and another, etc. And besides, the Holy One, blessed be He, reckons with the people as a whole and not with each kibbutz individually, and perhaps after the Holocaust God does not scrutinize us so minutely.

 

All of that is true, but perhaps the main answer, the one I did not say then, is that there is no point in stopping the rains when nobody — including the religious, the Haredim, and the rabbis — understands that God speaks to us through the rains. Someone who is not a farmer is happy about a full Kinneret, about anemones in the south, and about the Beit Zayit reservoir overflowing, but is not too upset when that does not happen; and someone who is a farmer talks about compensation from the government. And then the Holy One, blessed be He, has no choice but to speak to us in harsher ways (see Maimonides, beginning of the laws of fasts).
The root of the problem is that we have completely lost the Torah’s central principle of faith: that the living God guides us through the way of nature, and speaks to us through events. And that the more surprising the events are, the more the hand of God is evident in them.
In our generation we are numb. Our ancestors sang to God when they saw the Egyptians drowning in the sea and Sisera’s chariots in the Kishon Brook, proclaimed a fast and assembly when the plague of locusts came in the days of Joel, and offered sackcloth and ashes publicly when Haman’s plan became known. We are almost sealed off from any connection between the events that befall us and the Holy One, blessed be He. True, we merited to reach the recitation of Hallel with a blessing for the wondrous miracles of 1948 and 1967, but that is where it ended.
Among us, the Holocaust is something one is not allowed to try to interpret in a faith-based way, and all the more so all the other things that happen to us are, for almost all of us, secular matters unrelated to Torah and faith. The intifadas and the exploding buses of the Oslo years, and the stabbing attacks that came after them on the one hand, and the friendship of the United States, and the gas fields suddenly discovered on the other, and the fact that specifically our tiny state invented drip irrigation, solar water heaters, the removable disk, and Waze — all these are matters for newspapers and news and opinion pieces, not for prayer or simple, human thanksgiving to God.
That is how it happens that when people ask the Chief Rabbi about the coronavirus, he gives instructions about how and when to read the portion of Zakhor and the Megillah, and what to do about kissing mezuzot… but it does not occur to him to call for repentance and prayer.
Everything that has happened to the Jewish people in recent generations is irrational and does not fit any human ideology, and all of it fits the divine plan of the Torah of Moses. The Holy One, blessed be He, brought us out of exile with a strong hand and gathered our exiles so that we would be a treasured people and a light unto the nations and conquer and settle the land He promised our forefathers. He certainly does not intend to give up on His plans after investing so much in them. In this generation God speaks well of Israel and increasingly surprises us for the good. The laws of the covenant — “If you walk in My statutes” and “If you despise My statutes” — have not been revoked, but after all we have been through, the Holy One, blessed be He, is trying to lead us in a positive way and hopes we will awaken.
The course we are receiving from the Holy One, blessed be He, these days is educational. On the one hand, we are in full seriousness under an existential threat that could in a moment become a question of being or ceasing to be: “For now I could have stretched out My hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been wiped off the earth,” which is meant to remind us to be humble and modest and to focus on what is essential rather than what is trivial and gossipy. On the other hand, up to now not even one Jew has died from the plague that has already wrought and is wreaking havoc in not-so-distant Italy.
The present reality is one of sudden release from pride and from material slavery — slavery to restaurants and cafes every day, to nonstop and unnecessary flights abroad, to giant ostentatious weddings that impoverish families. My parents in the pre-state days, and our ancestors in the time of the Mishnah as well (Nedarim 5:6), made weddings in the courtyard with a few friends and relatives that the courtyard could hold, and it was pleasant to see this week a joyful wedding of that sort in the courtyard of Mercaz HaRav.

 

We began the year with a divine rebuke carried out with mercy and with real miracles — countless rockets and exploding balloons sent to us in all fairness from a holy region of land that our people foolishly abandoned and handed over to the worst of the wicked in the world, yet not even one Jew was harmed by them; and now we have been surprised from Heaven with the plague of coronavirus, which no one could have dreamed of, which has struck hundreds, but as of now has not killed. A similar rebuke, with the attribute of mercy and with miracles, was the Gulf War nearly thirty years ago. Then too we were humiliated and shut indoors wearing masks inside sealed rooms; then too there was enormous danger combined with an unexplained miracle — 39 missiles on our population centers that did not take a single life.
Let us come out of this. A first core group needs to arise that frees itself from the chains and returns from ‘religion’ to Torah. The time has come to return to God with simplicity and uprightness.    

Source: https://www.inn.co.il/Articles/Article.aspx/20543?fbclid=IwAR1kL1eHscNzozUdS9F2FCn_1GiqcyVyUSB5lZ5UxKQNdJC24BeSEVYdrsY
Thank you to the Rabbi for responding!
Respectfully,
Shimon Itiel Yerushalmi