I wonder if following 9/11, it occurred to any officials to ask the chaplains of various clergies working at ground zero, to leave the work to specialists. What a bizarre move that would have been.
Yet, Buddhist monks claim something similar is happening to them in Quinghai, in Central China’s highlands, following a deadly earthquake on April 14.
“Our job was to figure out how to respect the rules of the authorities without jeopardizing the law of religion,” said Rabbi Jack Meyer of Misaskim — a Jewish organization, which provides recovery services for mourners – to Beyond Business.
While Rabbi Meyer and his team, along with diverse members of the clergy, spent several months at ground zero working along in team effort with the Port Authority Police Department and the New York City Police Department, the Chinese central government thanked the monks’ rescue efforts a week after the disaster.
“It would bring more difficulties to disaster relief work if lots of unprofessional personnel were at the scene,” the Chinese State Council said.
What makes a professional at a scene where more than 2,000 people died and 12,000 injured, is a good question. But it was the thousands of monks who ran most of the early rescue operations following the catastrophe. And at a disaster scene there are certainly more to reconstruct than the infrastructure.
Under Jewish law, a recovered body must be quickly brought to burial. This also made the presence of Misaskim so important for religious Jewish families at ground zero back in 2001.
“There was no body removed from the site without a chaplain being there to pray for them. We offered spiritual guidance to anybody,” Rabbi Meyer said.
The same way, the monks in China have supervised mass cremations and mandatory three day period of mourning, until now.
Whether the underlying motives of asking the monks to leave are political — some suspect that the Chinese government may want to present the rescue work as a Chinese effort to the region’s Tibetan population — or simply organizational, the act, both politically and practically, seems highly irresponsible.
