Unruly citizens

The irony of the disaster scenario is that the two destructive forces – natural and social – are both unruly. 

The natural destruction threatens the population and its person; the social destructive forces – the mob, the panicked looters – threaten property. 

The ruling elites panic because at bottom they intuit their power as deriving from the preservation of property relations rather than as deriving from personal, human (dare we say covenantal) relations. 

For the ordinary citizen, disaster is a threat because of the natural destruction; for the ruling elites, disaster is a threat because the ordinary citizen might become unruly. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, for the ruling elites the population isn't the solution, the population is the problem. 

In the Eastern European Jewish community the elite panic took the form of trying to preserve not property rights but ideological rights. The selfsame brittle, paternalistic, condescending attitude of the ruling elite to the general public however was as much in evidence in Eastern Europe as anywhere else. 

God has faith in humanity. It is the ruling elites who lack faith in ordinary people. We have lost our faith in God because those who represent Him to us have lost their faith in us.