Elazar Abu Hatzirah
On Harav Elazar Abuchatzeira, popularly known as Elazar Baba, was the grandson of the famous Baba Sali. Rabbi Abuchatzeira was appreciated as an ish peleh and a miracle worker. His whole body, soul, and spirit served God and he merited a special intuition to help people. He knew the names and specialties of all the top doctors in the world and he would direct people who came to him to the best doctor to heal their illness. Rabbi Abuchatzeira often spoke about and lived ahavas Yisrael. He respected every person, regardless of dress or external appearance. Moshe Moskowitz, who lives in Petach Tikva, was a follower of the Rav for over 20 years, yet he asked that he not be referred to as “close” to the Rav. “Tzadikim are fire, and we dare not approach fire for fear of getting burned,” Moshe explains. “Instead, we keep a distance and warm ourselves from the holy heat.” Yidden from all circles flocked to Rav Elazar, but many didn’t understand the Rav’s answers. “The Rav would speak little,” Moshe explains, “and as is the way of many tzaddikim he tried not to say no to anything.” Moshe would therefore often help those leaving the Rav’s room understand what the tzaddik had meant. “You can’t say that I understood the Rav - who am I to understand the tzaddik? - you can write that I merited to understand that I don’t understand,” Moshe stresses. Ahavas Yisrael and Middos The Rav often spoke about ahavas Yisrael, and his ahavas Yisrael was apparent both in his respect for every Jew, regardless of dress or external appearance, and his exceptional patience. The Rav would frequently say that the correct path is to be mekarev every single Jew in a peaceful way, deracheha darchei noam. He always spoke well of Jews and never wanted to hear bad things about them. Chaim Ben Moshe, one of the Rav’s chassidim, relates that he was once having trouble with a coworker. All efforts to resolve the problem failed, and he finally decided to approach the Rav for advice. Every person who came to the Rav would write his request on a slip of paper and hand it to the Rav. When Chaim gave his paper to the Rav, the Rav immediately turned it over without reading it, refusing to relate to the lashon hara it contained. He would often speak about baalei teshuvah who learned in yeshivah but belittled their secular parents. “They don’t need to learn in yeshivah. We don’t need more baalei teshuvah yeshivos; they must instead be makpid about kibbud av,” the Rav would say. The Rav spoke very strongly against machlokes. When Bnei Yisrael did the chet ha’egel, Moshe davened for Hashem to forgive them. Yet when it came to the machlokes of Korach, Moshe davened that Hashem should get rid of Korach and his crowd. “This shows us,” says the Rav, “that when Bnei Yisrael are united, even if they serve avodah zarah there is place for forgiveness. But if there is machlokes, it has to be cut away immediately.” The Rav was deeply troubled by the phenomenon of people who couldn’t find shidduchim for their children due to a lack of money. “All people care about is money, and that is what they are looking for when making a shidduch,” he complained. “What about yiras Shamayim, middos tovos, why don’t they look at that?! There are people full of middos and yiras Shamayim, yet they find it hard to make a shidduch because they don’t have money.” When Moshe was offered the position of shul gabbai, the Rav dissuaded him from taking it. “You should know how great is the koach hapeh, the power of one’s words,” the Rav said. “If people would know what power their words have, they would bless Jews all day long! “If you become a gabbai, there will always be people who are unhappy with your decisions, and they might say a bad word about you. “This,” concluded the Rav, “could be dangerous.” The Rav was connected to the country’s top doctors. Once, someone told the Rav that the doctors in a certain hospital wanted to operate on his wife, who was suffering from an eye problem. The Rav told the person that he and his wife should travel to Yerushalayim’s Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital. When they approached the specialist at Hadassah, noting that they had come all the way from Be’er Sheva, the doctor expressed his surprise. “The person who sent you here is correct - we are the only ones in the whole country who know how to properly treat this eye problem!” One seudas Erev Yom Kippur, the Rav spoke of the importance of asking forgiveness from a fellow Jew. “If you don’t ask forgiveness from a person you have wronged, the whole Yom Kippur davening is pointless,” the Rav said, adding that properly begging forgiveness doesn’t mean sending a fax or a message, but personally approaching the person. At the seudah was a Jew who owned a factory, and who was trying to undercut a rival that was manufacturing the same product. When Moshe heard the Rav’s words, he realized that the factory owner had to beg forgiveness from his rival for having causing him heartache throughout the year. After the seudah, Moshe wrote a note to the factory owner, urging him to follow the Rav’s advice, intending to place the note on the factory owner’s windshield. Shortly afterward, the crowd passed by the Rav wishing him a good Yom Tov, and when it came to Moshe’s turn, the Rav suddenly turned to him and said, “Thank you for what you have done.” Kedushah and Perishus Although the Rav reached extremely high levels of kedushah and Kabbalah, he was able relate to the most simple Jew, advising him on any topic. The Rav himself was totally detached from this world. He fasted every Wednesday; from Rosh Chodesh Elul until Yom Kippur; and throughout the six weeks of Shovavim. Even when not fasting, he ate sparingly. He didn’t eat meat, nor did he eat bread during the week. His meal consisted of salad, which he would only eat a morsel of, giving the rest to his chassidim. In his earlier years, for a 15-year period, the Rav fasted every week from Motzoei Shabbos till Erev Shabbos, until his teeth blackened from fasting. Yet despite his weakness, he continued his gruelling schedule, receiving hundreds of Jews who flocked to him every day from three in the afternoon until the wee hours of the morning, very often until dawn. Then, the Rav would immerse in the mikveh, daven Shacharis and learn until the doors opened again for kabbalat kahal. The Rav, who would immerse in the mikveh twice a day, related that his grandfather the Baba Sali was his mohel and mentor, and that the Baba Sali had taught him how to suffice with just two hours of sleep a night. “Inside the Rav’s room, you could touch the kedushah,” says Rabbi Cohen, one of the Rav’s chassidim. “And just sitting in his midst and hearing him make a brachah, pronouncing the words carefully and with kavanah, was in itself a whole mussar sefer.” The Rav was so detached from the world that he would not even speak on the telephone. When his close chassidim called with an emergency, the gabbai would answer the phone and ask the Rav the question, and the chassid could hear the Rav’s reply via the open telephone. The whole Abuchatzeira family has a tradition of being extra vigilant in guarding their eyes. The Rav always wore a hood over his eyes so as not to see anything inappropriate, and had a tunnel dug from his home to the beis medrash, so he wouldn’t have to walk in the street. In his early days in Be’er Sheva, the Rav would travel by car to shul. Before stepping out of his home, he would ask the gabbai to check that there weren’t any people on the street. Only once the area was clear, did the Rav quickly take the few steps to the waiting car. Once, after the gabbai told him that there was nobody on the street, the Rav asked him to check again. The gabbai didn’t see anybody, so he told the Rav that the area was clear, but the Rav insisted that he check again. “Where should I check?” the gabbai asked. “Behind the garbage bins,” the Rav replied. Indeed, behind the garbage bins three women were having a heated discussion. The only women allowed into the Rav’s room were his Rebbetzin, daughters and sisters. Women who wanted a brachah would give their requests to the gabbai, who would read them out to the Rav; the Rav would then reply to the gabbai, who would relay the answer to the women waiting outside. Emunas Chachamim Emunas chachamim was another important attribute that the Rav instilled in his followers. One Jew who didn’t have children came to the Rav for a brachah. Since the Rav was unable to help him, the man wasn’t allowed in. However, the Jew, refusing to give up, returned a short while later. Once again, he was refused entry. This continued for a year and a half, after which the Rav gave him a brachah and he was blessed with a child.
in Otsuchi, Iwate prefecture |
Rubble parked alongside the airplanes |
Schools in the Fukushima area were closed because of radiation exceeding safety limits. In the middle of May, in order to open the schools the Japanese government increased the radiation limit by 20 times. The new rules mean that the level of radiation allowed for a Japanese child is equivalent to that of a German nuclear worker. The science advisor to the Prime Minister resigned in protest.
The Crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
The crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, run and owned by TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, is located on a 860 acre site in the towns of Okuma and Futaba in the Fukushima Prefecture. TEPCO is the largest electric utility in Japan and is the 4th largest electrical utility in the world. The plant has six boiling water nuclear reactors, the first one being commissioned in 1971. Its generation capacity of 4700 megawatts makes it one of the 15 largest nuclear power plants in the world.
It is not unusual to find that with size comes power, arrogance, and corruption. TEPCO has size and has conducted its business with arrogance. And it has had corruption and scandal. Recurringly, TEPCO has submitted fake safety and repair reports and did not report various incidents, including one that reached criticality. Investigative reports show that TEPCO failed to inspect more than 30 technical components of the six reactors, including power boards for the reactor's temperature control valves as well as components of the cooling system such as water pump motors and emergency diesel power generators. All this was revealed in August 2002 by the government of Japan. The government report stated that between 1977 and 2002 TEPCO had filed over 200 falsified reports of technical data to the Japanese government. Although this caused the chairman, the vice president and advisors of TEPCO to resign, no attempt was made by TEPCO to identify and punish those responsible for the falsifications.
Using only recent historical data, rather than the full historical record, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had been designed with a sea wall of 19 feet. Recent requests from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency for TEPCO to re-examine this design parameter were essentially ignored. On December 19, 2001 TEPCO perfunctorily filed a one paged document that simply ruled out the possibility of a tsunami large enough to knock the plant offline and gave scant details to justify this conclusion. The government regulators did not mind the brevity of TEPCO's response and made no moves to verify the report's assumptions and calculations and did not ask for further supporting documents.
The tsunami wave had a height estimated at 33 feet. The power plant was flooded. The flood knocked out the emergency diesel cooling system. The reactors, although in a shutdown mode, heated up. The nuclear fuel rods which needed to be covered by water became exposed. Within three to four hours the temperatures became high enough for a partial nuclear meltdown. The melted fuel rods fell down to the bottom of the containment vessel. At four and half hours, the temperature at the bottom of the containment vessels reached over 1600 degrees Celsius causing a breaching of the reactor containment vessels in reactors 1,2 and 3. Holes in these containment vessels may be as large as 4 inches.
Hydrogen gas formed in reactions of water with the hot zirconium clad rods and caused explosions in these reactors. Meanwhile, outside the reactors, the spent fuel rods stored in special pools heated up as the pool water dropped due to cracks in the pool. The spent fuel rods became exposed. The combination of the reactor situation and the spent fuel rod situation caused large amounts of radiation to be released. The radiation level reached over 1,000 millisieverts per hour at the plant. Radioactive iodine 131 reached levels of over 65,000 times legal limit in the sea water outside the plant. Radiactive Cesium 137 levels exceeded legal limits in the sea water, on the ground, and between March 21 and March 26 were above legal limits in drinking water as far away as Tokyo.
Evacuation of 80,000 people within a 12.5 mile radius of the plant was ordered. Those people living between the 12.5 mile and 19 mile radius of the plant were told to say indoors. The radiation escaping from the reactor deposited across a wide area of crops and grazing pastures, making the plants and ground radioactive. The radioactive crops growing in the region around the plant were not allowed to be harvested or sold. Radiation increases were measured all around the world. In the United States increased radiation was detected in drinking water in many American cities. Cesium 137 has been found in American milk. Milk samples from Phoenix and Los Angeles contained iodine 131 at levels roughly equal to the maximum contaminant level permitted by the EPA in drinking water.
The Fukushimi disaster is rated at Level 7, the highest on the UN's International Nuclear Event Scale, and is considered the world's second most serious nuclear disaster, after Chernobyl. The cost to bring the 6 reactors to a cold shutdown is now estimated to be 200 billion dollars. As well, TEPCO is facing huge compensation costs. There is a high probability that TEPCO will become bankrupt and the government of Japan may have to nationalize it.
The official death toll is close to 15,000 with more than 13,000 people listed as missing. Over 5,000 people were injured. More than 300,000 people became refugees having to seek housing in temporary shelters. The enormous amount of debris and garbage, including homes reduced to wooden slats, like match sticks, and washed away destroyed cars is estimated to be 25 million tons and is estimated to take three to five years to clear away. The economic cost for clearing away the rubble and rebuilding has been estimated to be over 300 billion dollars. This has become the world's costliest disaster, surpassing both Hurricane Katrina that levelled much of New Orleans in 2005 and Japan's Kobe earthquake in 1995. Japanese Prime minister Naoto Kan said that this was the most difficult crisis for Japan since the end of World War II.