From synagogues to churches, clergy are turning their attention to questions still burning in the embers of this week’s tragedies.
Why me?
Why not me?
What now?
“Just try to help people make sense of their experiences,” Rabbi Tamar Malino said in hurried comments between phone calls as she checked on members of Temple Adat Shalom in Poway (Shabbat services are at 10 a.m. today; 15905 Pomerado Road).
Some denominations are planning special gatherings in response to the firestorms that turned much of San Diego County into an inferno.
This is an All-American mixture of absurdity and impertinence. Blame God? What for? Here’s a simple lesson: The brush fires are inevitable. If you build your house in a land where drought and brush fires are as common an house flies, if you build you house in an area where mud slides are as common as house flies, if you build a city on a major fault line, a city that has already had a vast catastrophe when this fault liine moved, then you have no one to blame but yourselves. This shouldn’t be hard to understand. Blame God. Sure. It lifts the blame from your own shoulders. LM