Question

Hello Rabbi,
I hope the Rabbi still has the strength to answer more questions surrounding the Meron disaster of 5781 (some of them really are hard-hitting questions).
But when I saw that the Rabbi was wrapping himself in patience and answering again and again, I said I’d try my luck too.
The first time (and also the last) I was in Meron for the celebration was 20 years ago, and the intense crowding I experienced there really was the reason I never went back to Meron on Lag BaOmer. The feeling was that this was literally a dangerous place.
After what happened this year, besides the sorrow, I also felt anger that those coming to the mountain behaved carelessly.
 
When I told a friend this, he referred me to a post written by Yaron London, and truthfully, among his words there was something that touched me (many of them are emotionally sealed-off, true to form).
That is, obviously there were people who were not aware of the danger and did not understand the risk they were taking.
But the general impression of the people who come to Meron is one of sloppiness and a culture of just assuming things will work out.
I understand that this thought is also a mechanism for easing one’s conscience, but my question is, in general, whether there is morality in the saying of the Sages: “One must not have mercy on a fool”…?
 
Attached is Yaron’s post:
Almost nothing.
From my place as an Israeli, a Jew, an atheist, a liberal, a leftist, a rationalist, a Tel Avivian, I am trying to honestly examine my state of mind from the moment I learned of the disaster in Meron.
The misfortune of those I love shakes me. The shaking diminishes the farther the victim is from the seismograph marking the intensity of my emotions. The troubles of my children and grandchildren generate within me a tremor of ten on the Richter scale, whereas the disaster of thousands in Bangladesh barely stirs a single fiber of my heart. At the far end of the scale lies schadenfreude at the victim’s expense, and beyond that—complete indifference. If indeed the intensity of one’s response to disaster marks the distance between me and the community of mourners, then how great is that distance?
I recall a figure who appeared in the news broadcast aired before the deadly chaos broke out. The man boasted of his devotion to tradition: “I haven’t missed a single celebration in decades.” In my heart I wanted to ask him, “And what’s the point of this persistence?” but I immediately silenced the question, which was driven by a judgmental attitude worthy of condemnation. Every person has the right to choose his pleasures, and it is not for me to judge him. In response to a question about concern over the crowding, which is a Petri dish for viruses, he answered that “the merit of Rabbi Shimon will protect us.” Yes, I said to myself, it will protect us just as Rabbi Akiva protected the hundreds of thousands of Jews slaughtered in the days of the Bar Kokhba revolt. The answer of that complacent stranger already justified my anger, because his recklessness, and that of others like him, increased to some degree the danger awaiting those who are not part of their circle, including me.
Know that I suffer from agoraphobia, a syndrome whose name literally means “fear of the town square,” and one of its symptoms is fear of being in a crowded place. When I saw the tens of thousands of men waiting, packed into a stadium for the start of the lighting ceremony, with hardly any of them wearing masks, the thought crossed my mind that the pilgrims might be harmed by some version of the Maccabiah Bridge disaster, the Arad festival disaster, or the Versailles wedding hall collapse. But I silenced the siren in my head, because I am not the patron of the Haredim nor their educator, and if they scorn danger and so delight in dragging mattresses and baskets full of food, packed into smoke-belching buses groaning up the roads of the Galilee, sweating in bursting train cars, and if their spirits are lifted by crowding and jostling, by the wailing of babies and the gas from the sidelocks of screaming toddlers, and by the blast of shofars and choking campfire smoke, all for the sake of an ancient sage whose laws only a few of them understand, but in whose magical powers all of them believe—why should I worry about them?
To ease the feeling of immediate danger, it helped that there were no distinguishing features among the individuals in the image of the crowd. They resembled one another the way wildebeest resemble one another when they fall into the jaws of crocodiles infesting the Mara River during the great migration in the Serengeti. The herd, in its tens of thousands, charges toward the river, shoulder rubbing against shoulder. The wildebeest slide from the bank like a waterfall and cross the strip of brown water where crocodiles lie in wait, and the viewer cannot distinguish one wildebeest from another, and therefore does not become attached to any specific one—unless the photographer chooses to focus on a struggling calf whose fate is sealed. If, say, one of those gathered in Meron had been wearing a red shirt, or a broad cowboy hat, or had stood out because of his height, or wore a pirate’s eye patch over one of his two eyes, my soul would have latched onto him in some way. But I felt no closeness to the featureless silhouettes, thousands of identical silhouettes moving in unison across the television screen. Why should I care if a few dozen of them fall like identical cardboard figures at a shooting range?
I learned of the disaster only in the morning, and my reaction was: “I told you so!” It is an arrogant reaction, one that contains condescension and schadenfreude. I was condescending toward the Haredim the way a clear-sighted adult is condescending toward a wild little child who behaves recklessly and runs into a wall. There is anger in it too, because the stupid child disobeyed me, rebelled against my authority, hurt my honor, and now burdens me with the need to worry about him and care for him. He is also forcing me to participate in his grief, because it is impolite not to express sorrow, and I already have enough troubles of my own.
I condemned myself for the “I told you so,” but I also could not identify with the mournful tone in which the radio and television announcers spoke—the somewhat slowed, quarter-octave-lower tone reserved for announcements about fallen IDF soldiers and other heavy disasters that occur only in the Jewish world. I knew that voices of survivors would immediately be heard, descriptions by those who were almost killed and escaped only by a miracle, complaints against police officers who acted one way or another and thereby worsened the disaster, reports of intrigue within the police, Netanyahu in his deep voice uttering sentences taken from the drawer in the chest where the words suitable for events like this are stored, demands for a commission of inquiry and for dismissals, explanations about the Jewish character that excels in sky-high initiatives and neglects the details (“The redhead forgot the key,” from Ephraim Kishon). One of the rabbis from the Lau family will speak about how the pain is all of ours and how in situations like these the disputes are forgotten, because once again it becomes clear that we are one people and responsible for one another. Someone will say “Holocaust.” It will not take long before field reporters, prodded by panic-stricken editors, bring us pictures of the dead accompanied by texts teaching us the magnitude of the loss. All the dead will possess exalted virtues, and some of them will have relatives who only recently died in other disasters, because in the Hebrew media there is no disaster victim who dies without a chain of previous disasters in his family.
To sum up: for now I express sorrow out of politeness. I feel roughly as I felt in September 2015, when 2,411 people were crushed to death during the pilgrimage of the hajj in Mecca, a sort of faint “oh dear.” I try to internalize the sorrow, to resuscitate it, to awaken it, to turn it into a personal, authentic experience instead of a rote social obligation—and the effort does not succeed. For now, I feel toward this disaster and its victims more or less as I felt upon hearing news of a tsunami on some Indonesian island. Almost nothing.