remind you of anyone?

 Q:

We say נותן לחם לכל בשר, that Hashem supplies food to everyone, so how do we understand that in many countries thousands of people are dying because they don’t have what to eat?

A:

Question:  How is it that people are dying of starvation if Hakodosh Boruch Hu gives לחם לכל בשר?

If a man refuses to go to work, then we have no sympathy with him.  It’s his own fault.

Now those places where people don’t have parnassah, they’re starving, you have to know in most cases there’s a very simple reason.  

Let’s say the tribes in the Congo in Africa, you know what their occupation was? Not making a living.  Their main occupation was fighting each other.  It’s remarkable.  All their poems, all their songs and traditions were fighting their neighbors, killing, killing each other.  It’s remarkable, an ambition of killing.  Instead of building up a civilization that would support them by the yegi’ah kapei’hem, they spend their lives on doing the most wicked things, on shfichas domim, so Hakodosh Boruch Hu said, “For them I’m going to send starvation.  I’m going to send epidemics.  They deserve everything because they’re criminals.”

In the olden days, people didn’t live for the purpose of murdering their neighbors.  But the Indians in America, all the tribes lived for one purpose, to fight against each other.  They used to capture victims from other tribes and tie them up to stakes and skin them alive.  All kinds of achzoriyus and wickedness.  

I saw a photograph of a group of young men in the South Sea Islands were making a war dance in preparation of attacking a neighborhood village and in their dance they were symbolizing what they would do when they would conquer the village, they’d kill the men and they’d rape the women and they’re doing it with such a hislahavus, chas v’shalom lehavdil like frum Jews dancing around the sefer Torah.  That’s their whole simchah.

So Hashem said, “Such sheratzim? That's human beings?  So a kilayah on them.  They deserve everything.”  These are the people who are the ones who are starving.  

But in decent civilizations, people don’t starve.  There’s sometimes a hungry person, yes there are exceptions, but in general the populations of civilized nations live on יגיע כפיהם כי תאכל and אשריך וטוב לך.  

In most cases, it’s their own fault.

(September 1996)