Doron Rosenblum
"Not only is there no God," Woody Allen once complained from the pages of the "New Yorker" - "but you can't even find a plumber on the weekend." How old-fashioned, how politically-incorrect, sounds this self-indulgent and complacent New Yorker complaint before the noise! Try today - and not just this weekend - to find a place where there is no religion and no God, or at least religious rhetoric. One might think that some great miracle occurred, which resulted in this mass repentance, and not a malicious man-made act of terrorism; And not just - but in the name of religion.
The terrorist attack in New York was not a natural disaster, to which perhaps some narrow theological explanation can be attached, but the whim of human evil, and the fruit of planned malice. And here, precisely from the moment of the great explosions, when thousands lost their lives without mercy and sense and meaning, apart from pure human evil - not the word of God and religion from the lips of mankind.
Cardinals, rabbis and ayatollahs came to the forefront of the media stage, and their sermons and sermons were broadcast on the television networks with holy fear even when their words sounded - how shall we define it - more dialectical than ever ("Are you asking where is God?" asked one preacher, and immediately replied with evangelical fervor: "God is found Everywhere, and especially in the ruins of the World Trade Center.
The interfaith mass prayer, which is supposed to be held today at the "Yankee" stadium, is just one of a series of "days of prayer" and religious gatherings that surround the world since the explosions, and which deepen the religious-Christian grounding of the West: its leaders gather in churches, to the sound of bells ringing; CNN cameras focus on large crosses, carried by stern priests; The elderly American preacher Billy Graham got up from his sick bed to deliver a sermon, which was broadcast all over the world live, as if he were the super president of America. Against this background, it is clear that President Bush's words about a "crusade" are not just a fluke. It seems that since the Middle Ages the world has not been enveloped in such religious fervor and language.
The dimensions of the disaster in New York, and more so its blatant symbolic meaning (the loss of confidence in the defenses that man has created for himself - skyscrapers, the power of capital, the routine of the office isolated from the elements, all the things that "Manhattan" was the absolute symbol of) - sent the wandering and frightened people into the comforting arms of religion; The fact that this conviction was also done out of religious motives and for a religious purpose - not only did it not arouse thoughts of heresy, but only fueled the fervor of the preachers of the "correct", "true" religions. And this is what Bob Dylan already sang about in "God on our side": it is possible that Yehuda Ish-Kiryot also thought that God was on his side.
Be that as it may, secularism has not seemed more isolated and remote for a long time. Yes, poor secularism - with human dimensions, low-pretensions, living only in this world, seeking happiness only on earth. "I wish God would give me some kind of sign!", wished Woody Allen, "for example - if he deposited a large sum in my name in a Swiss bank." And not in the name of Bin Laden, for example.
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~381290971~~~100&SiteName=hayadan
