Do you remember the cartoons in which a rain cloud would appear and cause a storm over just one individual?
Even as we can marvel that, at a given moment, it’s raining in Clayton but not in Ladue, at the J but not at Mirowitz, our St. Louis region faces storm and drought together. No person, or family or town has its own weather, comics notwithstanding.
That’s the reality that the second paragraph of the Shema, Deuteronomy 11:13-21, makes clear, explaining: “If you carefully heed my commandments … I shall grant your land’s rain in its season. … But if you rebel by worshipping other gods … God will stop the flow of the sky. There will be no rain. The earth will not grant its produce.”
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Rain, biblically and rabbinically, is a collective blessing; drought is a collective punishment.
We all experience rain collectively, but weather doesn’t seem to track neatly with righteousness. There are lots of good nations that have suffered through droughts or destructive storms, and lots of pretty awful folks who have had terrific weather.
Jewish environmentalists have long read this text in the way that is now inescapably obvious: If we sin by not taking care of the Earth, it won’t provide for our needs. The earlier iteration was that if we pollute, we won’t have clean water or safe food. The more current version is that if we keep emitting greenhouse gases, climate change will result in an earth that is simultaneously hotter, drier and stormier.
That our actions can lead to pollution and climate change is a truism, but it strikes me as a simplification of Deuteronomy, of this text that we traditionally recite twice daily, morning and evening.
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What must our moral, ethical, religious and civic lives as individuals and collectives be like to allow the kind of negative impacts on the natural world that have happened and that continue?
That, to me, is a world where we are not “carefully heeding God’s commandments,” where we are not concerned for the most vulnerable, who are the most affected by pollution and climate change. Where we deceive ourselves and others about the effects of our personal and corporate actions. Where we do not think about the next generations, planning, planting and building for them. Where we walk not humbly, but with hubris.
Deuteronomy envisions a world where neighbors and even enemies help each other’s animals, where the poor are sustained by community, where the widow, the orphan and the stranger are loved and cared for, where courts are just and justice is valued.
Even as we try to recycle, to reduce our carbon footprints, to “save the Earth,” I wonder: Are we thinking too small?
Deuteronomy’s vision is not only about the land’s rain and produce, but about the kind of society we build: one of chesed (kindness) and justice, where the vulnerable are protected, where humility tempers our power, where truth outweighs convenience.
A world rooted in such compassion and fairness is itself the reward. And in that world, our ability to restore the Earth’s health — clean air, pure water, a stable climate, with the right rain at the right time — will follow and flow naturally.
In the cartoons, a single rain cloud would hover over one poor soul while everyone else stood in the sun. Deuteronomy’s vision is the opposite: a shared downpour of blessing in its season.
Rabbi Noah Arnow serves Kol Rinah and is a Past President of the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, which coordinates the d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.
