Skip to content
For obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about the weather over these last couple of weeks.
Perhaps it started when I spent an hour and a half shoveling snow to get our car dislodged, finally understanding the Philly practice of sticking a lawn chair in a street parking spot to claim “savesies.” Perhaps it started when we had our three- and six-year-olds stuck at home for five straight days. Or perhaps it was compounded by receiving wind advisory and extreme cold warning emails from Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management within the span of a couple of hours.
Whatever it was, I’ve been reflecting on the ways in which our bodies, our psyches, and our spirits are profoundly interconnected with the earth, the climate, and the weather.
In case there was any doubt, this is not a new phenomenon. As a rabbi, I’ve been reflecting on the Jewish relationship to weather over the millennia — and no, I’m not talking about conspiracy theories that Jews control the weather, a notion that has been raised by multiple politicians over the last decade or so.
I’m talking about an ancient Jewish understanding, which shows up in our liturgy, our prayers, to this day, of our vulnerability, our interconnectedness, our dependence, on the rhythms of the flow of weather, precipitation, nourishment in our lives. Each and every time we offer the Amidah — the silent prayer we just offered, the central prayer in Jewish life offered three times per day, around which all of our services are built — we acknowledge the seasons.
As part of the second blessing of the Amidah, we connect ourselves to the seasons found in Eretz Yisra’el, the land of Israel, the paradigmatic homeland, the earth — the soil of the people — which in essence experiences two seasons; a rainy season, from approximately mid-September to mid-March, and a dry season, the other half of the year.
In ancient times, if the rainy season did not bring rain, we were truly in trouble. Crops would not grow. But when the rains came, and when even in the dry season dew formed under cooling night skies, that moisture sustained life and carried us toward the next rainy season.
As part of our prayers, we therefore acknowledged this — we held space for our interdependence, our anxieties about what each season would bring, our hopefulness that each season would produce the nourishment to sustain us. Atah gibor l’olam Adonai, we would say, “You are eternally powerful, Adonai, Source of Being.” And then, depending on the season, we would alter our next verse of prayer: in the winter, mashiv haru’ah, u’morid hagashem, “the One who makes the wind blow and the rain fall;” in the summer: morid hatal, “the One who makes the dew descend.”
There is an acknowledgment here that not everything is in our hands — that we are dependent on a force beyond our control. And there is an effort to live in alignment with that force: we don’t pray for rain in summer or dew in winter. There is a recognition of the cycles of life, ebbs and flows, and also a recognition, to borrow a phrase from another tradition, that there but for the grace of God go I, we acknowledge the blessings of life on which we are all dependent.
This operates on a physical, terrestrial level, and I also relate to it on a spiritual level. There are times in our lives when we need all of the spiritual nourishment we can get — when we need gushing rainstorms, rivers overflowing, when we have time and spaciousness to let it all in, when the seeds nourished in those seasons can therefore bear fruit and keep us sustained for months on end.
There are other times in our lives, meanwhile, when that kind of nourishment is more difficult to come by, when the challenges we face may not offer us the luxury of a rainstorm or overflowing riverbanks, but when those molecules of dew, those droplets, give us all the nourishment we need — when those little drops of dew can nurture verdant slopes, green valleys even in the summertime. In those moments, we find our nourishment where we can get it.
Another prayer central to Jewish life I see as being about: can we let in that nourishment, even when it’s available to us, or do we ignore it?
I’m someone for whom words of affirmation are very important. If I’m pouring myself into my home life or work life or family life, and someone notices and appreciates it and says so, that can go a long way with me. The words can nourish a parched soul — if, that is, l let them in. For whatever psychological reasons we want to speculate about — a traumatic childhood leading to a lack of trust that such nourishment is dependable — I sometimes have a tendency to dismiss such words, not absorbing them, not letting them saturate my soul; instead, like the Greek mythological figure Tantalus, never drinking from the water right there in front of me.
Another central prayer in Jewish life teaches us about this.
The second paragraph of the Sh’ma, which Tobias led for us tonight, is the one we read silently, and it seems to be one that’s challenging for us theologically. It’s the one which says, if we would but follow God’s mitzvot, God’s sacred calls, we experience rain and nourishment, and if not, we do not.
Sure, we can read that in that literal sense of “do good, receive good” — except that our witnessing of the world would have us draw different conclusions: trouble seems to befall all of us, no matter our worldly conduct.
Instead, I see this passage as an invitation to experience the nourishment that is presented to us. Align ourselves with the call of the sacred, living a life cultivating sacredness, and doing so will facilitate our attunement to what is good and holy, watering our parched souls. Closing ourselves off to that alignment, silencing those sacred calls — well, it’s hard for me to imagine that facilitating the sort of nourishment we all need.
And it’s never too late: Jewish tradition is rife with expressions that each day brings with it renewed opportunities to align ourselves with what is good and true.
So the wind and the cold might be swirling around us. On one hand, we might see that as an obstacle, a barrier to whatever we’re trying to accomplish in the world. And no doubt, our intrepid guests navigating this weather to help Tobias and family celebrate his bar mitzvah should be commended for overcoming it.
And also the weather outside is our reminder of our interdependence, our vulnerability, our teaching that the world is filled with blessings and that we’re all invited to let them in.
Wishing you a blessed Shabbat.
