This bears some explaining, since (1) most members of the congregation probably have no idea what he is talking about, and (2) this statement, typically, throws the baby out with the bathwater.
In 2008, three Israeli teenagers were tricked into unknowingly smuggling drugs into Japan. A religious-appearing individual had promised them $1000 each to take a suitcase with "antiques" hidden in a secret compartment "for safekeeping" to be sold at the Tokyo Art Fair. Of course, the suitcases contained narcotics. The boys were promptly arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison terms. One was transferred to a prison in Israel and has since been released. The other two are languishing in a Japanese prison.Predictably, some have suggested that the earthquake is God's way of punishing the Japanese for subjecting these youths to harsh treatment despite their obviously unwitting participation in the crime. Now, everyone will readily admit that we don't definitively know the reason behind God's actions. However, to use that concept to prove that we can't draw any lessons or conclusions is preposterous. For one thing, we are always speculating about why God does certain things. For example: if I asked why God split the Red Sea during the exodus instead of building a bridge across it, don't you think the Rabbi would have suggested an answer? Now, no one would think that the Rabbi was stating definitively that he knew God's thought process, but we would accept his (or any congregant's) idea as a reasonable suggestion, as a point to ponder.
Similarly, the Talmud tells us the reasons behind various events. For example, the first Temple was destroyed because of various heinous offenses committed by the nation. The second Temple was destroyed because of internecine hatred among Jews. Of course, we do not have the ruach hakodesh that the chachmei hatalmud had to be able to understand the specific reasons for things occurring nowadays, but the concept that people might know why God does such and such is not foreign to Judaism.
Actually, the gemara indeed indicates to us, by way of general rules, why certain things happen. For example, the Talmud in Shabbat 119b tells us that fires occur in places where there is desecration of the Sabbath. Now, does that mean that we know that a specific fire occurred because of a specific act of shabbos violation? No, of course we don't. What it means to tell us is that when there is a fire, God forbid, we consider that chillul shabbos may have been occurring, somewhere, at some point, and we want to take steps to rectify it. So when certain people attributed the fires in Northern Israel late last year to chillul shabbos, it was with this context in mind, that it is a general attribution only, and meant to prod us to improve our ways, not to ascribe specific punishments to specific actions.
The events in Japan are to be viewed in a similar fashion. The Talmud in Berachot 59a states that when Jews are being tormented by the nations of the world, God cries two tears into the ocean and causes an earthquake. (Two God-sized tears must cause quite a wave, don't you think?) Now, if that doesn't sound like what happened in Japan, I don't know what does. Again, no one is saying the we definitively know that this specific statement in the Talmud was carried out here, or that it was the result of Japan's imprisoning the two youths. However, the parallel is extraordinary and it would be silly to ignore.
In Berachot 5a we are admonished to treat punishment as an opportunity for introspection. We don't know exactly why certain events occur, but we can think about possible reasons, using our traditional sources as a basis. Moreover, we must certainly learn lessons and sublimate the memory of the events into a clarion call for teshuva.
