When the world is burning around us, it is to fire that we must turn

Speaking again in our Beit Midrash last night between minchah and maariv, Rabbi Jonathan Neril discussed the deeper meaning of the references to fire in the Torah. The tantalising topic of the Burning Bush--which was aflame but which the fire did not consume--was the point of connection between parshat Shemot, which we leyn this Shabbat, and a host of writings by our scholars and sages on different aspects of fire.

 

Rabbi Neril mentioned the horrendous fire that has gripped Los Angeles over the past week but put it firmly in its perspective. Despite the damage it has caused [recent estimates have placed the cost of this conflagration at between 250 and 275 billion US dollars], it is insignificant when compared to the scale of fires in the very recent past in the Amazon basin, in Siberia, in Canada and in Australia.  This unprecedented plague of fire must surely be telling us something.

Rabbi Neril then turned to the gemara, at Yoma 21b:

Our Rabbis taught: There are six different kinds of fire:

• fire which eats but does not drink;
• fire which drinks but does not eat;
• fire which eats and drinks;
• fire which consumes dry matter as well as moist matter;
• fire which pushes fire away;
• fire which eats fire.

The gemara explains and references each of these fires in turn, but Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan adds a seventh: the fire of the Burning Bush—the holy fire that burns inside us and motivates us to seek out the meaning of God in our lives. This is literally the aish haTorah. When the world is in flames, symbolising the crisis points in our own lives, it is to the fire of the Torah that we must turn.