“The hurricanes in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, have begun the divine retribution that, god willing, will continue” says an Iranian cleric in a video clip on memri TV. Alongside this is a clip of “Jews performing a ritual murder of a man who married outside the religion, after a Talmudic trial”.

Pat Robertson speaks from his American screen, and representative Tom Delay from his, saying “this hurricane was sent to punish the American Civil Liberties Union and the gays”, and “we’ve finally cleaned up the ghetto in new Orleans, we couldn’t do it, but God did”.

So who is the enemy? The enemy shifts. It is the American, the infidel, the Jew, the poor and the black, the homosexual, or the Arab, the Muslim.

The next day at a new york giants game five Muslim men are detained and held for “behaving suspiciously” on the stadium grounds. What were they doing? They were praying.

On NPR a senior editor is interviewed by phone. She’s standing in the driveway of her childhood home in New Orleans. She describes the smell as rancid, the inside of her house is “moldy to the ceiling”, the poplars and birch trees around the yard, one planted in commemoration at her sister’s death years ago, are uprooted and dead.

“There’s no-one back, really”- when asked about her neighbors

“You could walk down the street buck naked and no-one would notice,” she says, laughing. “I don’t think I’ll go there,” says the interviewer, a colleague who obviously knows her “I’ll just say good-bye and thank you”

-“Okay!”

Commercial break:

This cream is to be lightly applied, using gentle upward strokes, starting at the base of the neck over the jaw line, chin, cheekbones, brow. There’s a new one to be purchased every month or two, touted by your retired supermodel of choice, and to be found occupying a section of shelf at Osco and the supermarket cosmetics isle. A bunch of frosted glass bulbs containing the liquid hope of youth. As if youth is all one needs. There’s more than enough youth, and excess, actually, of beauty. That isn’t what’s lacking, if anything is.

“The one who killed me should not accept blame for my death

my life has been pouring out through my eyes for years”

-Ghalib

The idea from the mourners Kaddish that when the world suffers, God suffers, too.

Why would God cause or allow his own suffering?

Is it possible that God recognizes suffering as a privilege?

Suffering a privilege of living and changing, and the source of wisdom?

The process of life and change in the world as the life and change of God’s being, thus, our suffering is his, and the root of the divine wisdom that rules our generation and those to follow?