Harav Aharon Shteinman on the Asian Tragedy - Part 1

Hamodia published a free translation of remarks made by Harav Aharon Shteinman, one of our generations leading gedolim, on the asian tragedy. The remarks were made on Tueday, 17 Teves at we will post them in three parts over the next three days. Here is part 1:

In these days a tragedy occured in Southeast Asia. As of now they are reporting 24,000 dead - terrible. Twenty-four thousand, it's not one person. And there are hundreds of families who have no communication with their relatives who are there.

Whoever thinks into it [realizes that] there is no coincident in this world, it's all Yad Hashem. Ah Yad Hashem. And everyone sits in his own home and feels good, "By me everthing is okay, just over there people are dying"

But Hakodesh Baruch Hu does this so that we should introspect and learn the ways of Hashem, and unfortunately over there many gentiles drowned, we have to learn [from this] the extent of what sin causes and it is up to us to analyze and learn from this [so we'll] do t'shuva.