Going through these parshiyos in the context of current events, I can just imagine a conversation that took place more than thirty-five hundred years ago between an Efron and a Srug the Fourth, as they sat sipping their date-palm smoothies ten miles east of Kikar Sedom.
“Did you hear about that crazy fire last week around the valley area?” asked Efron.
“Yeah, unbelievable,” said Srug. “Whole neighborhoods went up in smoke. People say houses literally flipped over.”
“I heard it was arson,” Efron replied. “Some fellow named Lot took in the wrong guests and his neighbors got angry. He must’ve started it himself.”
“Arson?!” Srug’s eyes widened. “You’re out of your mind! Sulfur and brimstone fell from the sky! It was divine judgment!”
“Divine judgment?” snorted Efron. “Come on. Fake news. I heard the same thing happened once in Pompeii. Just nature doing her thing.”
And so they went back and forth, two ancient talk-show pundits without microphones, one denying the obvious, the other insisting that Heaven had spoken.
Or maybe both agreed that it was clearly the Hand of Hashem.
Roll the clock forward to 5785.
The California wildfires of early 2025 — the ones that scorched Los Angeles County, the Palisades, Altadena, and half the western seaboard — caused catastrophic loss of life and property. The official count said thirty dead, but later analyses estimated hundreds more when smoke-related and indirect fatalities were included. More than one hundred thousand residents were evacuated. Millions breathed in toxic air. The Palisades Fire alone destroyed nearly seven thousand structures. The Eaton Fire wiped out another nine thousand homes and buildings. Total economic losses reached upward of fifty billion dollars.
Experts called these fires among the most destructive in California’s history, and perhaps they were right. But while the experts spoke in acronyms — El Niño, ENSO, CO₂ — none spoke of the hashchosah (destruction) of Hollywood, and certainly none spoke of the Hand of Hashem. I couldn’t help thinking of our two old friends from the Sedom region of Canaan.
You see, as long as it’s written in the Torah, we see it clearly. When Hashem rains fire on Sedom, we say, “Middas hadin.” When the Mabul sweeps across the world, we understand it as Hashgocha Protis. When Korach is swallowed by the earth, we marvel at the miracle. But when those same events repeat themselves in the modern era — when fire consumes whole cities, when floods sweep nations, when the ground itself opens in earthquakes and tsunamis — they call it nature. They call it weather. They call it politics. They do everything but call it the Hand of Hashem. And all they do is try to make us nod our heads in agreement.
It seems that when the novi closed his sefer, our eyes and hearts closed with it.
When Yosef is appointed viceroy of Egypt, the Torah records every twist of fate. We study it. We revel in the Midroshim and the meforshim who point out every moment of Hashgocha Protis. We see the Hand of Heaven. But when a world leader today suddenly rises from obscurity, or a government falls overnight, or an election reshapes the global order, we call it strategy, demographics, or economics. When Haman becomes second to the king, we tremble at the gezeirah min Shomayim. When a modern enemy rises with the same hatred, we call it progressivism. When plagues ravaged Egypt, we called them makkos. When a virus shuts down the planet, we call it a pandemic.
The Torah’s written elucidation may have paused, but Hashem’s authorship has not.
If we had the glasses of a novi, what would we see? What would we call out to hearken to? Would there be a Sefer America, describing how the sea to the west swallowed homes while fires consumed the forests? Would there be a Megillas Tech, describing how man attempted to build towers — not those of Bavel but of bandwidth — trying once again to storm Heaven with his algorithms until a Great Hacker crashed them and humbled them all? Would Mamdani rate a mention, recording how world leaders aligned and realigned in eerie echoes of Purim?
We’ll never know, because there’s no novi to record it. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t the same Torah speaking to us.
Our generation reads Parshas Noach, Parshas Vayeira, and Parshas Bo, and we shudder at the magnitude of the miracles. But then we close the Chumash, open the newspaper, and the same Ribbono Shel Olam who split seas and rained fire becomes a meteorological footnote. We have trained ourselves to see His Hand only when the Torah captions it. Unfortunately, today the caption reads “coincidence.”
That blindness — that sophisticated, enlightened blindness — is one of the great consequences of golus and muddled minds. When we stop seeing Hashem in the present, the Torah becomes a book of history. We see it, and when we leave the museum, we enter a world of altered reality. We stop turning its holy narrative into our everyday lives.
When Heaven shakes the world, our job is not to analyze the Richter scale. Chazal tell us that thunder was created to straighten the unevenness of our hearts. It’s to ask, “What does Hashem want from me?” Because if the Torah taught us anything, it’s that every unnatural event is an unnatural message — naturally.
The Torah is complete, but Hashem’s pen never ran dry. The Ribbono Shel Olam is still writing history. Only now, the letters are made of wind and water, of fire and politics, of headlines and hash tags. Our job is to read those letters, whether they appear in the headlines of the newspapers or the storm clouds of history.
Because if we can see His Hand only when we’re called up for an aliyah, then we’re missing the rest of the story. The Torah may have closed after twenty-four seforim, but the Author never retired. There is a new chapter every day, by the same Author, with the same signature.
Just saying.
