But the bush was not consumed
It’s been a week since the wildfires began their march of destruction, and it’s still hard to breathe.
My asthma has flared up in protest against the brittle air, each cough a reminder that everything could change in an instant. The winds have shifted again, and our boxes of irreplaceables—wedding album, fragile heirlooms, passports, birth certificates—remain packed, “just in case.”
I am a rabbi here in Los Angeles. Over the last week, I’ve struggled to find words for too many friends, graduate students, and colleagues whose homes and lives have been reduced to the flecks of ash that line my windshield and make my lungs ache. What could I possibly say to someone who still doesn’t know if their house is standing? Who lost everything they owned, along with everybody else they know?
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Growing up in rainy Oregon, Los Angeles always seemed like the “promised land” to the south—the glorious sun, the palm trees, the shiny people. Visiting as a kid, I hoped I would find a girl here someday and settle down, and one day I did. And despite its many faults, I’ve indeed found it a really nice place to live.
But I understood the city’s dark side. I still remember reading Joan Didion’s “The Santa Anas” in eleventh grade English. This essay made its rounds again this week, haunting me like a prophecy fulfilled. Didion wrote:
The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself … the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse … the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.
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As soon as you deplane at LAX, you’ll hear Mayor Karen Bass over the PA system welcoming you to the “entertainment capital of the world.” But anyone who actually lives here knows it’s not a place trying to entertain you. The boulevards are mostly empty past 8 p.m. People here like to plan in advance around traffic and parking and wake up early. No, you go to Vegas to be entertained. You go to LA to be in entertainment.
LA is not really the entertainment capital of the world—it is the imagination capital of the world. Angelenos are creators, illusionists, dreamers. We imagine new stories, new inventions, new ways of life.
Los Angeles’ capacity for imagining, for conjuring, is, to quote the Greatest Story Ever Told, “a blessing and a curse.” We dream up narratives about what could be, storyboards of fun in the sun and infinite possibility, while living in a place whose geography and geology relentlessly remind us of mortality. The self-image Didion describes is both reflective and reflexive; her essay itself woven into the mythos. The city’s own self-narrative contains an apocalyptic vision: the earth quakes beneath our feet; the waterlogged hillsides slide away; the flames roar in the canyons, creeping ever closer.
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As flames raged across the City of Angels, I was struck by the eerie realization that this week’s Torah reading also features an angel within a flame: the revelation to Moses at the Burning Bush.
“And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and, behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed.” (Exodus 3:2)
Commentators note that in the scorching desert heat, it’s not unusual for dry thornbushes to sometimes spontaneously combust. But what initially caught Moses’ attention was that this particular bush kept burning without turning to ash.
The ancient Sages of the Midrash read into this vision the Israelites’ oppression in Egypt—though the fires of bondage raged around them, they remained intact; God suffering alongside them amidst the thorns.
Thus did the burning bush become a potent emblem for a people who faced unimaginable tragedy time and time again, yet somehow always mustered the faith, resilience, and imagination to never be consumed by suffering. Jewish history, including recent history, is choked with ashes, but each time we rise again, phoenix-like, from the iron crucible.
This mystery of Jewish survival, forged in fire, perplexed thinkers from Twain to Tolstoy, who concluded that “the Jew … guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear.”
This prophetic message is that which inspires imagination: a vision of what could be. It’s no coincidence, therefore, that it was the vision of Jewish dreamers and entrepreneurs, fleeing pogroms, escaping the factory fires and the suffocating tenements, looking for America—that transformed Los Angeles from a dusty orange grove into the metropolis that would fuel the imagination of the entire world.
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The very land here is flammable, designed to burn and then regenerate. Southern California’s chaparral ecosystem is full of pyrophytic plants, which rely on fire to crack open their seeds. And after each burn, certain flora grow back even stronger.
Some have argued to let California burn. Yet we continue to settle here in an act of sheer faith, recklessness, or both—a faith perched like a Malibu mansion at cliff’s edge over the vast Pacific, thumbing its nose at the false gods Poseidon and Prometheus, defying the impermanence and fragility of life.
Faith feels odd to speak of while entire towns sit ravaged by fire. But it was revelations of fire too that, according to our tradition, sparked the faith of Abraham at the burning palace, of Moses at the thornbush, of Elijah at Mt. Carmel. The faith that emerges, as Heschel describes, when “[w]e too, walking in the wilderness, arrive at times at the mountain of G-d and see the whole world—a burning bush, aflame with hatred, envy and murder—yet the world is not consumed.”
Back in October, the devil winds blew the schach-roofs off our Sukkahs, those rickety Biblical huts we Jews build to symbolize both the shade of faith and transience of the terrestrial world. We put them right back on. As the inimitable Rabbi Sacks put it, “Faith is not certainty. It is the courage to live with uncertainty.” Faith does not undo the destruction, nor does it guarantee reconstruction, but it gives us permission to not fall to pieces—even as we still inhale the microscopic pieces of our loss from the acrid air.
In this city of dreams and the world it reflects, we exist in constant tension between creativity and calamity—caught between the illusions we mortals build and the real fires that tear them down. And yet, we hold firm to faith, to imagination, and to one another.
Like the burning desert shrub, Los Angeles endures—singed, scarred, blackened in places—but still standing. A powder keg of prophecy and possibility, a stirring of the Santa Anas that we can never fully tame. The place where I and everyone else wanted to be, and will be still. Burned, but not consumed.