"There was once a king," the medieval commentator Rashi relates, "who invited his children for a banquet for several days. When it came time for them to go, the king said, "My children, please, stay with me just one more day...your parting is difficult for me."
"Just one more day."
We’ve been through the heshbon nefesh of
Elul,
the intensity of Rosh Hashanah with its stirring
verses attesting to the Rulership of God in the universe,
the reiterated declarations of Al Chet on Yom
Kippur, fasting, beating our breast,
and then, at last, because "those who sow in tears
will reap in joy,"
we’ve borne the sheaves of our spiritual
and agricultural harvest, during Sukkot, the Season of our
Rejoicing.
For a people as we are -- obsessed with history, obsessed with learning, obsessed with the meaning of written texts and words -- this period from summer’s end. when the first trace of moisture enters the air, to the slippery border between autumn and winter, must give us pause. For even more vividly than lighting the candles of Hanukkah during the darkest time of the year, or celebrating the birth of our people in the spring with the exodus from Egypt, the sacred season from Rosh Hashanah to Shmini Atzeret calls upon us to fully experience the role of nature in our lives and the intricate relationship between nature and spirituality in Judaism.
We have "dwelled" in booths thatched over by the palm fronds of desert oases, like the shepherds of Sinai in this season, in ancient days as well as the present. We have shaken our lulavim in all the directions of the world – the lulavim whose palm, myrtle, willow and etrog, evoke the desert, mountains, river valleys and cultivated plains – the four major ecological regions – of Eretz Yisrael.
And yesterday, on Hoshanah Rabbah, we made seven circuits around our sanctuary beseeching the Holy One not to forget us in the agricultural year to come, but rather to
renew the face of the earth, plant trees in desolate lands,
vineyards and sycamores
cause an abundance of crops, sweeten the luscious fruit,
Open the treasure troves of your rains for us,
As you water the parched earth and bring salvation now.
As the Talmud teaches us in tractate Rosh Hashanah (16a), during Sukkot "the world is judged for water." And today, Shemini Atzeret, we will chant the year’s first prayer for rain.
I’d like to suggest to you that this year, in particular, our sense of God ruling over nature, and the hoshanot we have uttered, along with the prayer for rain, raise a profound challenge to us. For, on the one hand, rain is salvation. The ancient Egyptians could rely upon the annual overflowing of the banks of the Nile to water their crops. But in Eretz Yisrael, if the crops were to grow, if there was to be food in the year to come, if life was to be sustained, water – in the right season, in the right amount -- had to pour down from the heavens. Drought is death. Rain made life possible for our ancestors in Eretz Yisrael; just as it does today in Eretz Yisrael; right here in Southern California, and indeed, in most of the world. Rain is life. Rain is salvation.
On the other hand, have we, in recent history, ever before witnessed the furiously destructive power of rain, as we have this past year? As a result of hurricane after hurricane, thousands have lost their homes and more than a thousand people have died because of the power of wind and rain in our own country. It is one thing to extol the power of God who "shatters the cedars and makes Lebanon skip like a calf", who "makes the winds Your messengers, fire and flame Your servants," as the psalmist says – and another to become aware of the human price paid for that shattering and those winds.
So my question is: Do we really believe that God controls nature, and if we do, do we hold God responsible for wringing this destruction upon our planet? A related question: Do we believe that it is God who "holds the world firm," as the psalmist asserts over and over again, when millions of people are homeless, hungry, and freezing as a result of the earthquake in Pakistan?
Today, Shmini Atzeret, is the turning point of the year: it is today, and only today, that we offer to God the prayer for Geshem, and from this day until the coming of spring we will praise God as the One "who makes the wind blow and the rain descend." But do we believe it? Do we really believe that God is the rainmaker? That it is God, rather than the coincidence of certain metereological forces, who is responsible for opening the "treasure troves" of heaven and pouring down water that might feed our summer-parched soil – or drown the cities of the world?
I don’t have an answer. All I can offer you is a way to reflect on the question by turning it around, For the tradition describes what happens when, instead of too much rain falling, our land suffers drought.
For the rabbis of the Talmud, drought is not God’s doing, but the result of human sin: one sage asserts that rain is withheld because people gossip; another because people are brazen (Taanit 7b). It analyzes the elaborate rituals of repentance the people and their leaders must undertake in order to appease the drought-God and plead for rain: detailed rules for fasting, for praying, for blowing the shofar to call attention to the imminence of disaster.
The tractate Taanit tells a story.
The renown rabbi Rav came to a town suffering from a drought, and even though he decreed a fast, and the people fasted, no rain fell. One day during prayers, though, no sooner did the shaliach tsibur recite the line, "He makes the wind blow," then the wind blew; no sooner did he chant, "He makes the rain fall," then the rain fell.
Rav was astounded. What was it about this shaliach tsibur that enabled his prayer to be so quickly heard by the Holy One when the fasting had helped not at all? He asked the shliach tsibur what he did for a living. And the man responded: "I teach children – the children of the poor and the children of the rich. If someone is too poor to pay me, I take nothing from him" (BT Taanit 24a).
Despite its elaboration of the halakhic rules for coping with drought, the Talmud suggests, it wasn’t those rules that affected the response of God: it was the quality of lovingkindness in the simple teacher who led the prayer. God became the Rainmaker only because the shaliach tsibur was godly.
It is as we ourselves have the capacity to "replenish" the earth. And we replenish the earth through our acts of lovingkindness.
Martin Buber tells a story. "Once," he writes, "they told Rabbi Pinchas of the great misery among the needy. He listened, sunk in grief. Then he raised his head. ‘Let us draw God into the world,’ he cried, ‘and all need will be quenched."
But how does one "draw God into the world"? What does it mean to do so? Buber goes on to tell us that the Kotzker rabbi once asked some scholars, "Where is the dwelling of God?" They laughed at him, responding, "Isn’t it true that the whole world is full of His glory?" And then the Kotzker responded, "God dwells wherever human beings let Him in."
So what is it we were actually doing when we chanted the Hallel today?
It seems to me that we were seeking to draw God into our world – or more directly, in our lives, into our hearts, into our very consciousness. During the Hallel, we speak of crying out from the depths of ourselves to God: mai ha’makim karati Yah – the depths of despair, the depths of loss, the depths of suffering. Like those barely saved from drowning in Hurricane Katrina, we cry out Ah’fa funi khevlai –mahvet – the cords of death encompassed me. And yet, just a few lines later, we go on to say: How can I give back to God for all God’ bounty to me?
Perhaps the only answer we can offer is that the blessing we pray for from God in our Hallel is one we must first manifest in our own lives, like the teacher in the Talmudic tale. The bounty we enjoy from God can be given back to God only by giving to others with the same generosity we have experienced from the Holy One. Opening our homes, opening our hearts, opening our minds and our spirits, and when the need is there, opening our wallets. Deeds of generosity, deeds of lovingkindness, bring God into the world.
And so, too, it is with our "Geshem" prayer. May the wind blow and the rain fall, we pray, "for a blessing and not for a curse, for life and not for death, for plenty and not for scarcity."
But it is we, ourselves, who must first be stewards of this earth for "blessing, and not a curse, for life and not for death, for plenty and not for scarcity."
We ourselves who, by the way we treat one another, and the way we use the precious resources of our world – our rivers and our trees, our mountains and our valleys, our "fossil fuels" and our air, our fish and our birds, our precious soil – who must first serve as a "blessing and not a curse."
We who must seek to share the plenty, the abundance, the richness of God’s world, with other peoples.
We who must serve the cause of life by providing resources for the hungry, education for the young, decent health care for all.
On Shmini Atzeret, the end of our long season of soul-searching, repentance, and rejoicing, when we imagine God expressing God’s longing to us to "Stay with me," what is really meant is that we, too, should reside on our earth
"for a blessing, and not for a curse."