@lakewhut, thank you for sharing your honest feelings. You’re not alone and I know that many others identify with every word you wrote, so please let me share the thoughts of a simple jew in EY.
Not feeling tzaar from the tragedy is understandable. To you the victims are no more than a picture and a number, they had no impact on you when they were alive so deaths have no impact on you either. All this is again understandable, you are human after all.
What is not understandable is when we skip the tzaar because we found the reason for their deaths. “This was waiting to happen!” or “the kever was a breathing hazard!” are easy ways to calm any uneasy feelings we might have that forty-five people were killed in one night. If this was a natural event, why should we feel bad? People die of old age too, don’t they? Death is inevitable!
Therefore I ask you to stop for a minute and ask yourself some uncomfortable questions:
Is it natural for forty-five people to be crushed to death in one night? Is it ‘unsurprising’ that a Chosson’s friends attended his levayah instead of his chasunah? Or that a father came to Meron with three sons and left with only one? Is it unsurprising that a four-year-old was flung from his dying father’s hands? Or that a bochur carried his friend’s dead body away from the scene?
Yes, there are guilty parties, no one is denying that. But the question we should be asking ourselves is; what are we supposed to make of it on a personal level? This is not some mussar point for a mashgiach to tell his yeshivah. What happened in Meron was a slap in the face of the entire jewish community. In the largest annual gathering of jews, forty-five children, bochurim and fathers, from almost all backgrounds , died an unnatural death. Do we really need another wake-up call?