November, 2009:

This is the paper I presented to the Chronicle-Ezra-Nehemiah and Exile combined session. I was invited to speak about how the destruction and restoration of Jerusalem can be understood through the waters of Katrina. I have images that go with this (see a few images from Katrina at my flickr account) that I will post eventually and I recored the audio as well and I hope to have that up later as well.

Restoration and Recovery Through Scripture

By 8:30 am on Saturday August 27, 2005 I was standing in front of Butler Hall, the honors dorm on Tulane University’s campus, talking with Rabbi O_____ and his wife. I was entering my 9th year at Tulane and my second as director of the Honors Program. The O_____s were moving there third child and third honors Tulanian into Butler. Their twin daughters had been my students 3 years earlier and now their son was joining them in New Orleans. (Curiously enough, given where I would end up 12 months later, the O_____s had recently moved to State College, PA.) It was a typical hot and muggy August day and we had our honors banner up and our returning students were already moving nervous freshmen into the dorm. By 11 am we had signs posted saying, “Evacuation! All students must evacuate campus by 6 PM.”

Hurricane Katrina was on her way and while we now know that it would be the deadliest and costliest hurricane in US history at the time it was simply another evacuation. Each year for seven years in a row, my wife and I with our young children had evacuated at least once. In our second year tropical storm Francis had brought so much flooding, nearly entering our raised house that we were renting, that when it came time to purchase a home we intentionally moved across Lake Ponchetrain, a 65 mile commute for me, so that when it inevitably came time to evacuate we would not have to cross either the Mississippi or the lake. And so after seeing that all of our students and staff were evacuated, on Sunday my wife and I boarded the windows on our new house and packed the kids in the car and made our way to our friends in Mississippi. It turns out we would have been safer at home.

When all had died down by Monday afternoon the little town in MS to which we had evacuated was nearly destroyed. Tall pines were down across homes and streets and the power was out in the entire region. We awoke early Tuesday morning and drove the two hours back to our house, passing abandoned cars and uprooted trees. It was amazingly quiet and eery. In spite of the cell phones not working and local radio stations down, the XM satellite radio in our car enabled us to hear the audio of the major news channels. To this day I have not seen the grocery cart that MSNBC kept describing as going 60 MPH across the parking lot of our local WalMart. When we arrived in our neighborhood, a newly planned community where a wood had been cleared for the houses, we found very little damage. Our home was fine. A mere two miles away, the house next to the one we had just sold the year before was crushed under three pine trees. Tornadoes had ripped through old Covington and left paths like a snake crawling across the sand. There was no power, no water, and no sewage. After a day of cleanup we decided that it would be safest and best for our family, our son was only 1 and a half years old and our daughter was just about to turn 8, if we evacuated to my brother’s house in OH. We remained there for 9 days, until the power had returned to our neighborhood.

You all know that the recovery had just barely begun by the time we returned to our home, but we often forget that the recovery continues 4 years later and will likely continue for years to come. Indeed, we could argue that NOLA has been in a state of continual recovery since the first European settlers tried to tame the native communities and lands, constantly and incompletely coping with the natural, political, and social upheavals that are as much a part of this tropical port city as gumbo or jazz.

In this paper I was going to try to examine how the priest-scribe Ezra restores Torah to Israel and consider, by way of analogy, similar use of Scripture by New Orleans’ clergy and leaders in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. As I did the research for this approach I realized that I would end up spending most of my time providing appropriate caveats and considerations for opposing views regarding the restoration of Jerusalem, the historicity of Ezra’s promulgation of the Law, and other such matters that are extremely important and I understand as the usual grist for the mill of this section. In so doing I would lose, however, the opportunity to reflect more broadly on what has happened to NOLA and how the experience here can inform and be informed by the ancient events surrounding Jerusalem in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.

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