A few decades ago, we knew a woman living in Israel, who was deathly afraid of Arabs. She had been born in Poland. I am not sure about her precise history, but she was clearly a victim of the Holocaust (she had probably been born around 1930) and knew what could happen if a group of people who hated you suddenly attacked or wound up in charge. She was convinced that one day, the Arabs would come for her. She passed away, at a fairly young age, in a hospital in a town in northern Israel, after an infection set in following a routine surgery to remove her gall bladder.

I am reminded of this as I watched the tragedy unfold in so many parts of Los Angeles, as the fires are destroying homes and lives and landscapes. As I write this Wednesday evening, 100,000 people have been displaced, well over 2,000 buildings have been destroyed, five people have died and many more have been injured. Yes, California has had its share of wild fires, and some knew that the dryness of this year’s “rainy season” had increased the potential for fires throughout Southern California, no one was thinking that there could be a situation like the one that actually has come about. Not that the residents of these portions of Los Angeles thought that they were immune from natural disasters. For their entire lives, they have been deathly afraid of……..earthquakes, and certain that, one day, their lives would be affected by the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates.

All their lives, the fear of earthquakes. And they were taken down by a fire.

Yes, disaster can strike from unexpected places. We all know that, even if we don’t act as if we do most of the time.

As one of my first books of 2025, I read Stuart Hampshire’s book titled simply Spinoza. It’s not a biography (Spinoza’s life story is told in an appendix of about six or eight pages), but an attempt to understand his philosophy and manner of thinking. Hampshire, who taught for years at Oxford, was a very dense writer; paragraphs in this book could run four or five pages. Yet, even Hampshire described Spinoza’s writing as terribly dense – too dense for normal reading. And he mentioned at least two times that scholars have not been able to fully understand certain aspects of Spinoza’s thinking.

Yet some things were clear, the most important being that Spinoza concluded (not felt, but concluded), on the basic of logic that was to a large extent beyond my thinking, that God does not exist except to the extent that everything in the universe is an element of God (a philosophy known as pantheism). So, to Spinoza, normal religion was irrelevant. There was no God to pray to, because we are each God, or a part of God, as is every planet, tree and insect. He also concluded, as I understand it, that mankind does not really have free will, in spite of what we may think (this, like many other things, shows 17th century Spinoza agreeing with most 21st century scientists and thinkers). Everything we do (in fact, everything that happens) is the inevitable result of what has preceded it, and happens either as a result of something in our internal makeup or of something that affects us externally. We think we are making a choice; we aren’t. We think things happen by chance; they don’t.

Under this theory, the fires were inevitable. From the time of creation (I use that term loosely, because I don’t think that Spinoza would say that God “created” anything, since we are all part of God and not separate from God, and it is illogical to say God created itself), it was inevitable that on Sunday night the fires would start spreading in Los Angeles County.

Now, when the fires burn themselves out, people will assess their losses, grieve, and rebuild, but we don’t know what will happen, even though whatever happens is inevitable.

Yes, this is a kind of predestination, but it isn’t John Calvin’s version, who believed that God had a conscious plan for each of us. It’s predestination because we are all part of God, and God works in accordance with the system of God, and we are part of that system. We are not externally instructed to do more, or to do less, or to turn right, or to turn left, but Spinoza’s logic, he says, explains why we do what we do.

But it does mean that, if we were smart enough, we could put all the pieces together and see the future. We are far from being able to do that, even with the gains being made by Artificial Intelligence, but who knows? Maybe one day Artificial Intelligence, if it can be programmed to (or can program itself to) utilize perfect logic and see into the workings of God (i.e., the workings of everything). to see into the workings of the universe, past, present, and future. But not in our lifetimes.

And that brings me to our inevitable president-elect, Donald Trump. Years ago, Donald Trump castigated the government of California for not managing its forests. Remember when he said that the forests of California should be raked? And just today, he has said that the fires are the fault of Governor Newsom, whom he calls Newscum.

Digression:  That reminds me of when Chubb Peabody was governor of Massachusetts and some opponent or critic said that he was the only governor of Massachusetts ever to have two cities named after him – Peabody and Marblehead. End of digression.

Today, he said the fires were Newsom’s fault not only because of forest mismanagement but also because of water mismanagement. And, although I don’t think that he addressed it today, back when he was talking about raking the leaves out of the forests, he also said that the United States government was not going to provide any funds to California to repair forest fire damage.

This may be both Trump’s first big test and the Congressional Republicans’ first big test. Will Trump stick to his “no relief money for California” position? If he does, will Congress let him get away with it?

We can’t answer that question with any degree of certainty. But the answer is inevitable.

(My apologies to Spinoza for what I am sure is a total misinterpretation of everything he ever thought, wrote or said.)