I pray each morning at the very early minyan. Recently, it was dark when I approached the shul, the sky an opaque black blanket. As I emerged after davening, the sky was still black even though sunrise time had passed. The sky looked strange, with patches of grey, and as the winds picked up, the black and grey was skidding rapidly above me. I soon realized that the hill fires some 16 miles westward were blowing towards us. When I arrived at my house, the skies to the west were white, as billowing smoke from the hill fires some 16 miles eastward filled the air. Then, screaming orange flames appeared on the far-off hills and in the canyon hills just north of our neighborhood. Ash fell from above, peppering vehicles and clothing with a grey residue. Sirens blared as fire engines rushed to the many areas ablaze. The cellphones began to squawk orders from the city about who should evacuate and when.
Calls flooded our Chai Lifeline national crisis line, at our regional office in LA, and on my own office line. Homes were incinerated. Schools and synagogues, gone. Business districts razed. Teeming throngs of students with no more school to attend, and not sure where their families would run to, panicked. Calls came from friends and colleagues who had lost literally everything, from houses to clothing to cars to food to mementos: their entire lives. Friends tried to evacuate elderly impaired relatives. No water left. Electricity shut off. Streets off limits. Entire neighborhoods engulfed. The fires started quickly and moved even quicker. Dry reservoirs with no means of supplying water to hydrants. Smoke and soot filled the air, making breathing difficult. Everyone around us coughing. Some crying; others panicking, all apprehensive. Calls coming in from worried adults whose spouses had retreated to bed, unable to face the new reality that their businesses were gone, their income uncertain, their children out of control. Calls from parents needing immediate guidance on what to say to their children. How can the family regroup and bond if they are holed up in a crowded shelter with no privacy? Our Chai Lifeline office wants to send guidance handouts, but for evacuees with no computers, that is impossible. The sensory overload increases as the sky shifts from grey to black to white to fiery orange to an eerie ochre. The air reeks with burning trees and buildings; the streets rumble with the cacophony of sirens intermingled with wailing voices.
Two neighborhoods just north of me were ordered to evacuate. We are told to pack emergency supplies into a ready suitcase and fill our cars with gas. A policeman is at the gas station directing cars in and out because everyone seems to be complying with that latter order. The roads are packed and traffic crawling as some compete to find fuel and others try to flee the city. I get frightened callers saying that all the motels within driving distance and out of the fire’s range are full. Some head south. A few try north. The rest go east. Cannot go west, as the conflagration is now at the edge of the Pacific Ocean shores along fabled beachfronts. I speak to my local Chai Lifeline crisis team members, some of whom are trying to pack up while calming their own children who are very literally terrified. Our neighborhood is next on the evacuation list as the intense canyon fires consume trees and vegetation as it rampages for the city streets, less than two miles away.
I am dealing with this at three levels. As director of the Chai Lifeline crisis services, I recognize that I have a mission to fulfill and responsibilities to meet. People are in a crisis. Some are in trauma. They are calling, texting, and emailing. I am blessed with dependable teams in cities across the continent and in other countries, too. They pitch in from remote locations, responding to calls when our local responders are too inundated. My wife, also a clinician and a team member, takes calls, providing crisis intervention and crisis management. We are busy, yet also packed to go. I have a second role: I am a rabbi with regular mitpallelim and talmidim who call me with halachic and other questions. If they run, what should they take? Should the wife bring her kesuba? What about Shabbos? Should they just have faith and stay put, or should they treat this as a true sakanah and flee? How do they explain what is happening to their children—and to themselves? Is this a punishment from Hashem? Do anxiety and fear indicate a lack of trust in Hashem?
I have a third role: I am dealing with this also at a subjective level. Setting aside my professional and pastoral roles, I have my own inner process. I think about what we’re going through and my mind rushes to our brethren in Eretz Yisrael, who have been going through many severe traumas for a long time now. They know fear. They know suffering. They are in the midst of war, terrorism, and fires of catastrophic proportions.
Perhaps I can increase my understanding and compassion with this slight taste of what those in our Holy Land experience nightly and daily. My mind then goes upward: What is the message here? To me, the message is that a Jew in the Diaspora can never truly feel anchored to the mundane and tangible possessions that we accrue. Sometimes it takes a pogrom. Other times, an Inquisition or a Holocaust. Or sundry antisemitism. Those horrible encounters prod a Jew to think about the transitory nature of our life in exile, always having to prepare to flee at the sign of trouble. Are the fires communicating the same thing in their own traumatizing way? Are they telling us that we should be ready to flee even when life seems comfortable?
Dovid Hamelech famously says in Tehillim 23: “Your rod and your staff they comfort me.” My great Rosh Yeshiva Rav Simcha Wasserman, zt’l, explained that a shepherd carries two tools: a rod and a staff. A staff is to lean on, to make the journey easier. The rod is to hit with, to goad and to prod a wayward sheep to return to the fold. Sometimes, Hashem gives us His staff, a gentle peaceful reminder of His loving presence.
Other times, He gives us His rod, which is meant to goad us to teshuvah. These are the times we must heed and not ignore. When He employs His rod, which in this case is the fire, I recognize in my heart and soul that I must be poised to run, to flee back to the fold. Yet, I also hope that I will take from this metaphor the need to respond with greater alacrity when His peaceful staff beckons me to return to His fold—to the Holy Land—with the coming of Moshiach. If not before.
Rabbi Dr. Dovid Fox is a forensic and clinical psychologist, and director of Chai Lifeline Crisis Services. To contact Chai Lifeline’s 24-hour crisis helpline, call 855-3-CRISIS or email crisis@chailifeline.org. Learn more at www.chailifeline.org/crisis.
