The Burning Bushes of Los Angeles
January 17, 2025

 

By Rob Goldberg

The devastation of the wildfires in the City of Angels has been apocalyptic: resembling what we imagine to be the end of the world. And for those whose homes and keepsakes have been consumed, it was just that.

The magnitude of the calamity is staggering, said Rabbi Sharon Brous, LA Rabbi who spent a week at Chautauqua this past summer. In her sermon last Shabbat, she shared that our identity is rooted in home. “The home is—or is intended to be—a place of privacy. Of safety. Of comfort from an often-unforgiving world.”

My wife Shira and I have been wintering in LA since mid-December where our oldest daughter and her family live. Their home is in Cheviot Hills, just a few miles East of the worst of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. And while they have been spared the flames and evacuations, like all Angelenos, they know so many who have been directly affected.

This Shabbat we begin the book of Shemot, Exodus, and in the early chapters we read how G-d is revealed to Moses in a fiery thornbush. Our sages were curious why G-d would choose a flame engulfed shrub to catch Moses’ attention. One suggests that a lowly thornbush was chosen to symbolize G-d’s empathy with Israel in their suffering. While another offered the perspective that although our ancestors would suffer at the hands of the Egyptians, they would not be annihilated.

The fires in LA, as was the burning bush, took place in the desert, a parched landscape full of craggy rocks and scrub brush. The difference of course is that while the bush is unconsumed, challenging the laws of nature, the wildfires are very much a natural disaster having led to the deaths of 24 people and the destruction of more than 12,000 homes and businesses.

So how do we understand this devastation through the lens of Torah and the account of the burning bush?

Perhaps it is the choosing of Moses in the narrative that is most revealing.

Moses was tending to the flocks of his father-in-law, Jethro, the chief of Midian at the time of the revelation. Midrash suggests that he led the flocks to Horeb, the mountain of Gd. He grazed the sheep in the desert, beyond the grasslands in a remote place where only the nomads dwelled. It was then that he noticed a lamb had strayed from the herd and he began looking for her. He finally found the animal under a ledge providing a bit of shade and drinking from a small pool of water. Moses bent down, gently hoisted the little lamb in his arms and placed her on his shoulders. “I didn’t know you strayed because you were thirsty. You must be tired,” he said, and carried her back to the flock.

It was at that moment, suggest our sages, that G-d was revealed in the burning bush, knowing that Moses would be a caring leader for the Jewish people, as he showed a special tenderness to the lamb. In essence, if Moses could be that kind to an animal, especially one that wasn’t his own, imagine what a leader he would be when tending to G-d’s flock, the Israelites.

The quality of leadership Moses showed was on full display in the way in which the Jewish community responded, with swiftness and kindness, amid the wildfires last week.

One example was at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, where several Temple members and staff ran into the synagogue while it was ablaze and rescued the Torah scrolls before the building was destroyed from the Eaton fire. And within hours of the first flames, the LA Jewish Federation, each synagogue movement, and other Jewish agencies established fundraising campaigns to help all those impacted by the fires, not just members of the Jewish community.

Toni Morrison wrote: “Home is memory, home is your history.”   We can all relate to those words because we know that home matters to us and our families, and the loss of one’s home is devastation unlike no other. But like our sages who understood the pivotal and surreal moment of the burning bush, perhaps G-d is revealed in the fires through the heroism of those first responders and the leadership of everyday Angelenos.

As we unpack the reality of this latest round of Southern California fires, and families and communities begin to rebuild, we also pray that G-d, who was by our side during the collective pain of our wanderings in the desert, is revealed again, this time in 2025.

If you would like to support efforts to provide relief to the victims of the LA fires, please consider a gift to the Jewish Federation of LA’s wildfire relief fund.

Rob Goldberg is the immediate past CEO of the Buffalo Jewish Federation and currently serves as its Senior Advisor.