Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi and the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas movement, said on Wednesday that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for U.S. President George W. Bush's support for Israel's Gaza pullout. [...] Yosef also said recent natural disasters were the result of a lack of Torah study and that Katrina's victims suffered "because they have no God," singling out black people.
Associated Press
4 comments:
arggghh
Yes, that's what I said. At least there is a certain amount of resistance to him as well.
This is a great example why most Israelis find Shas to be over the top. Yosef is not unusual in that he takes any religious concept and applies it to support his position. This is the same logic that some Jewish settlers use to justify claims to the West Bank or Gaza (that God promised the Land in such and such a scripture - the problem is that God also promised to expel Jews from the Land in other scriptures - but they try to avoid those discussions at all costs).
Yosef ought to be more careful about 'playing God', shame on him. (That doesn't mean I don't find people like Tim Wise equally worthy of contempt since he, too, has God's judgement down pat.)
Stuart, thanks for responding. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that that Tim Wise is equally contemptible as Rabbi Yosef. Firstly, in the Tim Wise piece, Wise doesn't claim to be speaking for God, but he (rightly) questions the appropriateness of a certain theology.
And secondly, even if they claimed to speak for God, there would still be a difference in what they would be saying. Someone who claims to speak for God in order to promote the most extreme and bizzare form of victim blaming is still in a different place from someone who claims to speak for God but actually promotes something positive.. like say.. Martin Luther King.
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