When I read that the head of the Indonesian Salvation Army said that the "Immediate and URGENT need at the disaster sites (Aceh and Nias Island) is for body bags, medical masks, hand gloves, hand sanitizers and disinfectants," I realized that my paltry maybe-plan for sending water purification filters off to the region was worse than useless. The last thing the relief workers need right now is a crate of 1st world technological gizmos when they're still scrambling just to equip those who are recovering and burying the bodies.
A body bag, I have discovered, costs eight dollars.
A couple of days ago I learned that a tropical cyclone killed 138,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991. Back then, not only was I less aware of the world and usually stoned, I hadn't yet been in close proximity to a terrorist attack. Today, I have a frame of reference: if I multiply that day's toll 38 times I have an inadequate sense of the scale of the present calamity, which is a small improvement over the utter incomprehension that would have been evinced by my younger self.
Despite the efforts of some construction workers who were inconvenienced by the effort of slathering on new paint every few months, a makeshift memorial still exists at Ground Zero. 
It's off to one side, on the west end of the southern pedestrian walkway at the base of the stairs leading up to the truncated skyway over the West Side Highway. Everywhere else along the path, the plywood wall is covered with black paint and stern warnings. But in the one place where they didn't spray-paint that prohibition, visitors to the site have taped up artwork and photographs, and hung dozens of souvenir tokens from the scaffolding.
I wonder, now, if there are memorials to the dead of Bangladesh, and whether there will be similar memorials to the dead of the dozen nations affected by the seaquake. There probably are, and there probably will be.
Beyond their numerical scale, the main difference between the two events goes to the heart of evil: the tsunami was a natural occurrence, a twitch of the planet. September 11 was the product of intentional malice and the will to murder, an expression of the hatred that comes only from human beings. In that sense, it is "easier." We can point the finger and say, "They did this."
But, as Martin Kettle wrote on Tuesday,
A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do [... ] What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life?From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur.
In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the most famous consideration of these issues is found in the book of Job, the tale of that perfect and upright man from the land of Uz who feared God and eschewed evil, but was nonetheless brought low by a series of apparently senseless disasters. The lamentations of Job are some of the most powerful in the Bible, and his direct confrontation with the mighty and ultimately unknowable God of the deserts suggests that, in the end, the reasoning behind the workings of disaster and calamity belong to Him alone.
But there is evidence that, at some point, a "happy ending" was added to Job's wretched tale. Job's final response to God's roaring question, "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?"--a question which encapsulates the power and incomprehensibility of His personhood--was to repent after seeing God face-to-face.
Then, tacked onto the last chapter, are several verses wherein God gives Job everything that He had taken from him, increased twofold: fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand donkeys, seven sons, and three daughters, who were judged the most beautiful in all the land. In the end, "Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. And so he died, old and full of years."
After 42 chapters of misery and suffering, it all gets neatly wrapped up in seven happy verses.
Many modern Christian interpretations of this "blessing of Job" generally fall somewhere along the spectrum of "our trials and tribulations can be endured through a deeper understanding and awareness of God." Jewish interpretations often focus on metaphorical relationships between Job and the nation of Israel.
That's not what I see. I see a 2,600-year old written document that probably had a much longer existence as a spoken tale before that. I see a shying away from one of the hardest and most brutal truths of life, with faith offered as a salve. There is some textual evidence to support the later addition of Job's blessings by one or more authors, not the least of which is Job's sudden addressing of God as "Yahweh" rather than "Elohim." The tale is a long argument of theodicy--the reconciliation of the ideal goodness and justice of God with the punishment of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked we so often witness. But there is no real answer here, other than "God is God, and He is powerful, and His actions are beyond the ken of such flotsam as yourself."
Eventually, someone decided that was just too hopeless, too sour a note, and improved Job's lot from one of repentance before the unknowable power of the universe to repentance with resultant blessings. That change has survived the centuries, as pleasant endings often do. But no amount of repentence will restore and double the fortunes of the hundreds of thousands killed and left destitute by the movement of the earth and its oceans.
So, in the end, I find in Indonesia a mirror of September 11. Just as human evil defined the events of that Tuesday in New York, so will human goodness define the events of this past Saturday in Indonesia. The malice of those so-called martyrs will hopefully be somewhat balanced by the selflessness of those who will truly make sacrifices to bring aid and comfort to people in need.
I don't think it makes sense to excuse a god from responsibility for human evil, and then give that same god credit for human goodness. Therefore, I can only conclude that God doesn't have much to do with either quality.
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Ah, the sweet pixels of bloggish synchronicity.
The good Reverend offers his previous commentary on theodicy and the book of Job, in three bits: "My Buddy God," "God on Trial," and "God Answers."
In "My Buddy God," he offers an alternative to my conclusion:
Job does not see the hand of God in simple terms of cause and effect. Job is coming to terms with his profound loss and the heartbreaking fragility of life. To exist at all is to be vulnerable. God has made us capable of love, but we are "also susceptible to disease, accidents, violence. In this sense, it is God who gives and takes away, from whom we receive both what we yearn for and what we dread. There is a tendency to want to associate God with only what is good. If one does that, however, then when trouble comes it is easy to feel that one has fallen into a godforsaken place. At the time, when one most needs the presence of God, there is only the experience of absence. The wisdom of Job's stance is that it allows him to recognize the presence of God even in the most desolate of experiences. Job blesses God in response to that presence." (NIB)
This is an interpretation that probably wouldn't sit very well with my ex-churchmates: the idea that God is the source of good and evil is a finely shaded view that doesn't fit into the black and white Protestant evangelical worldview, where Satan is popularly viewed as the source of temptation and calamity. Nevertheless, it is certainly incorrect for me suggest that the only reasonable conclusion is that "God doesn't have much to do with" human goodness or evil.
Reverend Sensing expands on this in "God Answers:"
Job has considered only two possibilities: either God is just in ways that we like and understand, or creation is basically chaotic. God's speech reveals another choice: that there can be a vision of everything – even chaos, even evil – brought finally into God's dominion. It is a vision from outside the human plane, "and yet one which serves to give radical hope in the present." "In the beginning, God," says Genesis, and in the end, also God. The Voice [from the whirlwind] is saying, "Don't you understand that there is no one else here?" (Long).
I tend to view scripture through an anthropological, historical, and cultural lens, tracing the development of the Judaeo-Christian god as a human concept, rather than a historical and present reality. So, I don't approach Job from a position of faith, as the Reverend does, but as a seeker of a certain kind of explanatory satisfaction. I don't see in the book of Job the "radical hope in the present" that Long suggests.
That said, the idea that God (or a god, or a multitude of gods, or whatever word you choose to apply to whatever you believe Makes It All Go) is the source of good and evil seems to have a certain amount of explanatory power, and is, ironically, closer to the native theologies of the people who have been so terribly affected by the present catastrophe.
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[Andrea Harris comments.]
