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Our Rabbi's Message
August 3rd 2007
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelAt the very end of the Torah portion that we read this week, we read the second paragraph of the Shema, the one that speaks of 'rain in its proper time.' According to tradition we received the Torah in about 1200 BCE. That is about 3,200 years ago. Way back then one of the major issues confronting people of the world was the weather. People did not know how to control the weather.
They believed back then that weather was determined by moral actions of the community. If the community acted well before God, rain fell in its proper time. If the people rebelled against God rain did not fall, or worse than that, rain fell at the wrong time and destroyed crops that were growing.
The Talmud, composed one thousand to one thousand three hundred years later held that rain in its proper season meant that the rain would fall at night when every one was at home in bed and sleeping, or on Shabbat when people did not work and would probably not be caught in a downpour of rain.
If one looks at commentaries, he will find that good rain and bad rain was determined by geography. People who lived near the Tigris and Euphrates had one concept of rain. People who lived near the Nile had another. People who lived in the desert feared no rain or just a few inches of rain at one time, which could bring flash floods and death. People in Europe looked for rain during all the year, while those in the Middle East looked for rain only during the autumn and the winter.
What was a blessing in some areas was a curse in other areas.
Here we are in a postmodern world and we can make anything. We can make buildings that are larger than anything ever built and we can work with atoms, one at a time. Yet we still have trouble controlling the weather. We are able to predict weather today almost as badly as we did during the time of Moses. With all of our sophistication we have not progressed very much as meteorologists and we still cannot stop a hurricane or a winter storm.
In other words, the Shema is still relevant to us today.
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