Looks Like Rain
Rabbi Noa Kushner
Rosh Hashanah, 5781
1. Unreceived messages
In his essay, The Postman Rings a Thousand Times, journalist (and fiction writer) Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes his visit to what he calls, the Cemetery of Lost Letters.
The year is 1954, the place is Columbia, and Marquez is describing the place designated for letters that never reach their destination. He writes:
“The change of address of both sender and receiver, although it seems far-fetched, is the simplest and most frequent [reason for letters to arrive at the office of unclaimed letters]. …After months of the efforts …these messages will be sent to
“…567 Carrera Octava, …a single story house, with a low roof and peeling walls where nobody seems to live.
….Six methodical, scrupulous civil servants, covered by the rust of routine, keep doing every thing possible to find clues that still might allow them to [complete the delivery]. (1)
“[But],” he continues, “…[N]ot all the packages found at the lost letters office have the wrong address. Many of them have simply been refused by their intended recipients. …They won’t open the door to the messenger. They are indifferent to the telephone calls from Señor Posada Ucros, who looks up the addressee’s number in the phone book, and implores them… “
“…The messenger, accustomed to these sorts of incidents, resorts to all kinds of cunning ruses to get the addressee to [receive the letter]. In most cases, [though], all efforts are futile.” (2)
2. Three Kinds of Denial
There are three kinds of denial, each one described in our Torah:
The first kind of denial is bold, unabashed. Rather than present a counter argument, this denial refuses to acknowledge a given problem in the first place.
The residents of Sodom and Ghemorrah —
and when I talk about this text I always want to clarify
that in the comments of our rabbis, the
aveiras, the sins of Sodom and Ghemorrah had nothing to do with sexual preference but were rather, based on extreme selfishness
There is a moment when God, based on that selfishness,
Is about to destroy the city.
Lot, who understands what is about to happen — is trying clear out with his family
He runs to his sons-in-law to deliver the message: they all have to leave town, immediately.
(3) וַיְהִ֥י כִמְצַחֵ֖ק בְּעֵינֵ֥י חֲתָנָֽיו׃
“But in the eyes of his sons-in-law, Lot was like someone making a joke.”
And Targum Jonathan translates it this way: “To the sons-in-law, Lot was like a raving lunatic.” (4)
You see, in that place there was such an ingrained pattern of forbidding outsiders, — to the point where the abuse of visitors was commonplace,
an abuse that was carried out in the marketplace, and then validated in the courts —
there was such an ingrained culture of mistrust and selfishness
that the act of hosting an outsider was like putting a target on your back,
that simple act of hospitality, of breaking the rules of selfishness, made you vulnerable to the rage of the community.
That’s the kind of place it was.
This helps us understand why Lot’s sons-in-law could not even take him seriously. Why his warning was, to them, “Fake News.”
Why they did not even engage with his fear. They couldn’t.
For if they admitted he might be right, their whole world view would fall completely apart. They might have to admit that their selfishness was the reason for God’s anger.
So they didn’t even ask him, “Where did you hear this?” “Can you be sure?” They just said, “Are you kidding? Have you see the stock prices!? We’ve never been better!”
This is the first kind of denial, a complete and utter inability to engage with the reality around us.
The second kind of denial is in the story of Noach
Noach is told to build an ark because, the world has become corrupt and violent and again, God is going to destroy the world
What can I tell you? Torah is not for the faint of heart.
But our rabbis, wanting to show God’s good side, explain that the generations before the flood were sent messages, warned to change for 120 years.
THEN Noach planted cedar trees to get ready to make the ark, and the whole time those trees were growing Noach was still trying to tell people the message
THEN Noach built the whole ark himself, repeating the message (5)
What could create that kind of denial? The rabbis have an idea.
They suggest that God had given the generation of the flood every blessing: safety, prosperity, peace. And ironically, that success, is what caused them to say to God,
“Turn away from us, [we have everything], what can we get from you? Do we need [you] for anything, even rain? We already have rivers, we have plenty of water.” (6)
See, the denial of the generation of the flood was based in prosperity.
It was the powerful denial of ego.
Who needs God when you believe you can make up the code for water? Who needs God or the cumbersome baggage of moral responsibility when you kinda already feel like God —?
The third and last kind of denial comes from the story of Jonah.
Jonah, as you remember, is a prophet who does not want to hear a message from God, let alone go and deliver it.
So God, in the very beginning of the story says to Jonah,
(7)…ק֠וּם לֵ֧ךְ
Get up and go to Nineveh — deliver my message.
And Jonah, in response,
Right away
(8) וַיָּ֤קָם יוֹנָה֙
Same word — Jonah gets up, but then,
לִבְרֹ֣חַ תַּרְשִׁ֔ישָׁה מִלִּפְנֵ֖י יְהוָ֑ה
Jonah runs, flees from God.
Jonah runs away with so much commitment and enthusiasm that, Rashi comments, when Jonah finds a ship that’s going away from where God wants him to go,
Jonah pays the fare for the whole boat. (9)
In other words, Jonah doesn’t run from receiving or giving his message because his world view won’t allow him to take in disturbing information
(like the people of sodom and ghemorrah),
and he doesn’t run because he thinks he’s more powerful than God (like the generation of the flood)
Jonah runs because he knows the message is true.
Denial number three, see, is of a different kind: It’s when we know we have a role to play, we know we’re supposed to open the letter, go to the place, we’re just really scared.
And so we board the first ship we can find — the further away, the better. Not because we don’t know what to do, but because we do. (10)
3. Messages Received
This year there is a message for us.
I saw it written in the black sky.
This Rosh Hashana, things are terribly out of balance.
Maybe you saw it, too.
And this is not the first time this message was sent to us, not by far.
Many people have tried to tell us about the natural world,
our complicity in its destruction. Sometimes we listened, watched an important film, thought about:
glaciers melting
species ending
forests dying
oceans warming
coral reefs disappearing
hurricanes raging
fires enveloping
waters rising —
To name a few examples.
And then, with some exceptions, pretty much went back to doing what we had always done. (And if you are one of the tzaddikim who has been making real efforts towards this, thank you, you get the day off). But for the rest of us, the messages that were sent our way
more or less remained unopened.
Perhaps it was all too heartbreaking to believe, so we were like the people of ghemorrah — saying to the messengers, “Don’t be so extreme! Everything’s still good!”
Or, it is possible, because the scope of the problems are truly impossible to fathom, that we simply couldn’t hold them in our minds. What Jonathan Safran Foer, calls a “fatigue of the imagination.” (11)
Whatever combination of fear, denial and human frailty got us here
Now the messages are unavoidable
They wait for us, one piling on top of another
The most recent one actually turning day into night
I could list all the statistics (like usual) but now we’re living them.
Now we don’t need a prophet to tell us, any window will do.
Even Jonah eventually learned: There’s only so far you can run.
4. Things are different now / The world is ours
When Rabbi Eiger returned from Kotzk, his father… asked him: “What did you learn?” R. Eiger answered: The first phrase in Torah —
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים
“In the beginning, God created” — in Kotzk we learned this means, God only created the beginning and left the rest to us. (12)
In the days of Torah, God would send the messages
Things are different now. Now the messages also come from us.
In other words, the black skies last week were a message we
accumulatively, incrementally, consistently — sent to ourselves,
through our choices over the last decades.
In the words of the Kotzker: God only created the beginning — the rest was left to us.
5. Rain is political
In the old days the rain was a sign, a message from God.
And if the rain did not come, the community would assume there must be a problem
Must’ve done something to displease heaven.
We would pray for mercy, for the rain to fall,
And sometimes we would fast to gain God’s favor, there could be up to thirteen fasts.
In the old days, the rain, or its absence, was a sign, a message from God.
Today, it seems the lack of rain is also a sign, a sign we have sent to ourselves.
And I was thinking about the old system:
Us needing the rain —
And praying and fasting —
and God hopefully listening and sending the rain.
And while the climate is now a responsibility resting largely in our hands, perhaps there are still pieces of the old system we would do well to recover.
First, you’ll notice, in this ancient system, our actions are directly connected to the fall of rain.
After all, when our fathers and mothers used to pray and fast for the rain,
They were not abdicating responsibility —
They believed, as some of us believe even today, that talking to God matters,
that articulating pain in private, and the acknowledgment of communal problems in public is a decent start.
Second, (there’s practically a whole masechet on this in Talmud) (13), our ancestors did not only pray and fast to bring the rain.
They assumed no rain meant there was some other kind of corruption in the community (!). (14)
To be more specific, they assumed environmental problems were evidence of local stealing or violence that they then ventured to expose.
Prayer was a big part of the solution but their understanding was that it was these corruptions, these root causes that stop the rain.
What if we carried the same conviction that our actions — even the ones we don’t categorize as “environmental,”
What if we held their same conviction that the way we act in the world
Had a direct impact on the skies?
And there’s more: If the praying or fasting didn’t work, our leaders would insist that people decrease their business (!)
You want disruption? Disruption is not finding a new planet when we’ve destroyed our current one. Disruption is checking greed at the door. Now that’s a radical idea.
A little less business, Talmud says, specifically, less construction.
It wasn’t that hard an idea for our ancestors thousands of years ago to articulate
yet it is strangely still foreign to us:
Hold off on the building projects you don’t really need, Talmud says
And by the way, this specifically does not include building homes for people who need homes —
So if the skies are closed
Try holding off on the building projects for vanity and ego
Try imagining that your building project does not supersede God’s world. (15)
See where I’m going here?
For anyone who says ideas with political implications and trajectories do not belong in shul
For the rabbis, even the rain was political.
And it doesn’t end there.
If the rains stopped and the skies closed (and I swear I am not making this up)
The people would search for the smallest of moral infractions: to see if anyone had engaged in using words to hurt one another, (16) (assuming what happened in private and what happened publicly were totally interrelated)
Specifically, they would see if there had been any false boasting —
Perhaps a person claiming he has given charity in public and then breaking that promise. (17)
They have many more ideas about what closes the skies,
Each one built on the assumption that what we do in all the aspects of our lives matters,
But my personal favorite?
Uncollected taxes (18)
Okay, they may have been talking about tithes to the Temple —
But I think this idea can easily, and must be expanded.
In other words
If communal organizations, the structures and laws by which people are cared for, in all kinds of ways are broken,
If there is no enforced system for taking care of the larger community, for prioritizing our civic and moral and spiritual health,
For guarding for the rights of the many, for the vulnerable?
No rain.
I don’t know but it sure sounds as if the rabbis of the Talmud were advocating for the Green New Deal.
As if the rabbis understood that what we consider to be the economic situation and the environmental situation and the spiritual situation was actually all one situation.
Who takes a draught, the anguish of thirst and a lack of livelihood and uses it as a springboard towards social equity and justice?
Who, when they are at their most tired, most weak — insists on exploring the root causes of the lack of rain in order to address them?
Who reads all the unopened messages we’ve sent to ourselves and, instead of running, finds a way to respond in civic structures, religious rituals and legal systems? The Rabbis, that’s the rabbinic project, that’s what the rabbis were trying to do.
And that, my friends, is what the great tzaddik Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, may her memory be a blessing, that’s what she worked her whole life to do.
And that, as hard as it is, my friends, that’s what we’re going to do now, too.
6. Forgiveness
There’s a story of an actual rain-maker
A man, Honi, who, when things got really bad, would stand in a circle and shout and demand rain from God.
Now I definitely love the fact that he would carry on and yell at god and raise a lot of awareness and risk his reputation and, let’s face it, put his life on the line for the community
But, to be perfectly honest, I need to say this, my favorite part of the stories about Honi is that there are so many (19), as if to remind us:
Even the most famous rainmakers don’t change things permanently —
invariably, society tumbles off its path and another draught comes along.
In other words — the project of keeping rain going, of maintaining our overall spiritual-economic-enviornmental-communal health never ends, famous rainmaker living or not.
In any case, the story I need to tell you doesn’t even involve Honi
It concerns his daughter-in-law. (20)
I’m sad to say her name has not been saved for us (at least in this story)
But since her husband, Honi’s son, is referred to as “Abba”
Father in Hebrew
I’m calling her Imma. It means mother, and while it is not the most original name, it’s something.
In any case, some visitors come visit Abba and Imma to ask for rain.
They clearly believe the rainmaker thing runs in the family.
And long story short, because Abba and Imma are sort of magical —
Even before the guests have a chance to ask them to help —
Abba and Imma mysteriously go up to their roof and immediately, the rains come.
And it turns out, and the visitors witness this —
The clouds gather on Imma’s side of the roof. She brings the rain.
After witnessing the whole phenomenon
The visitors ask Abba, “Why did the rain clouds gather on Imma’s side of the roof?”
(After all, she’s not even related by blood to Honi the famous rain maker!)
And Abba answers, saying that once, when there were biryonei / hoodlums, rebels, gangs in the neighborhood —
“I, Abba, prayed they would die
But Imma prayed that they would make t’shuvah / that they would turn, repent, change.
And indeed, he says, “It happened. The people made t’shuvah and restored themselves.”
So you see, here,
In addition to being a barometer of social health and a reflection of economic equity
rain also follows the possibility of t’shuvah / of forgiveness, return. Public, private, no matter. What matters is the generosity, the long game.
In other words, you can be the son of Honi the famous rainmaker.
But there will be no rain without forgiveness.
I spoke with Nigel Savage, of Hazon, and asked him about the messages we’ve been sending ourselves, the messages we seem unable to read without running away. He said something that stuck with me: “If we are going to come through this, we’re going to need to name the guilt and come out the other side.”
We know t’shuvah, turning requires us to name what we’ve done wrong.
Maybe if we name the lost time, the ignored messages, the denial —
Maybe if we can imagine the edge of forgiveness —
We can start to find our way to the other side.
7. There are some things we don’t do anymore
Of course, confessions alone will not be sufficient.
We can read all the messages in the sky, we can beat our chests and cry wearing sack cloth and ashes (I hear there are plenty available) —
We can virtue signal from now until Greta’s 120th birthday.
But if we do not also engage in restitution, action, we’ll only recreate another version of Jonah’s running.
And turns out committing to action is not so bad because, we’re jews, we’re people who do jewish — we know all about keeping laws. We know all about the fleeting nature of intent, even the best intent, when compared to good old commitment.
So now, as part of our t’shuvah, along with our seeking to be righteous in our taxes and speech, we will now also keep new holy laws, new mitzvot, the details of which are still being worked out, because frankly I am kind of making them up.
Like many fluid times in history, there are many new laws vying for codification,
So I won’t promise these are the only contenders
But we need to start somewhere, so, I suggest —
Starting in 5781
1. We will limit or refrain from driving
2. We will limit or refrain from flying
3. We will make concrete steps towards eating a plant based diet
4. And we will vote and vote our consciences and do what we can to get out the vote in order to ensure this conversation about the rain and sky is etched in our legal codes and budgets and reflected in our priorities.
We know these new mitzvot / commandments alone will not fix what we have done
But we also know that if we practice them with commitment, these rituals will be a constant reminder to us that we’re engaged in a greater process of t’shuvah, that we want the rains to come again —
That the new world can look different than the one we’re just leaving now.
And, just like Kitchen-ites have begun an anti-racism cohort, just as Kitchen-ites have formed lasting relationships with members of the GLIDE community, I’d like us to convene a group who prioritizes these and other environmental commitments for our community —
A cohort who forges partnerships with existing groups and helps us understand the work ahead.
Nigel reminded me that five days after the instillation of our new president, please god, which would mean the beginning of the Green New Deal, please god, five days after the instillation is the holiday of Tu Bishvat — the holiday of the trees.
He told me, “This year, let’s move beyond happy trees and eating fruit and nuts. This year, let’s consider Tu Bishvat as the start of the rest of our lives.”
He suggested we create a team who takes the time from Tu Bishvat to next Rosh Hashanah to convene and create a real plan, with the promise that next Rosh Hashana we will present it, and commit publicly to being a part of a larger solution.
I suggest this group call itself “the rainmakers,” but if you show up, you can call it whatever you want and I am in your hands.
8. Bringing our world back to life
In a very common prayer — you may have said it without realizing it — there is a strange, even controversial phrase:
מְחַיֵּה מֵתִים אַתָּה רַב לְהושִׁיעַ
With great mercy God, you give life to the dead.
(You can see why it causes a stir.)
We read it metaphorically
As in reviving a relationship that has died —
Reviving an agreement, trust —
That kind of thing.
When these things happen, we say מְחַיֵּה מֵתִים
Thank god, something has been brought back to life.
But this Rosh Hashanah, what stopped me in my tracks
Is that I remembered that we make a blessing with just this phrase when we see someone we have not seen face to face for more than a year.
In other words, this is the one prayer we’d all better learn
Because, now it dawns on us, now we realize,
How many faces we have not seen
And just how much will need to be brought back to life.
In fact, now we realize we will need to resurrect a great many things
And this phrase that at first seemed so strange
May in fact be the very prayer of our hour.
We realize now that now we must do nothing less than bringing ourselves, and our world back to life.
I don’t blame any of us for being frightened, for checking the proverbial ship schedule to see when the next boat is leaving town.
But, before you go, I only ask, finally, that you also notice a line in our same prayer.
You could call it a kind of message —
Only this time, it is from the rabbis to us
Because out of all the prayers to choose from
It is right here, right in our prayer about bringing things back to life,
that rabbis also added the prayer for rain.
As if they were saying,
as if they wanted to tell us:
You want to bring your depleted world back to life?
You want justice, leaves on the trees? Forgiveness?
It is still possible.
Just trust us,
It all starts with the rain
Follow the rain
Do whatever it takes to bring it back.
Endnotes:
1. These quotes I put together from, “The Postman Rings One Thousand Times” in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings, New York: Knopf, 2019, p. 38.
2. ibid, p. 41
3. Genesis 19:14
4. Targum Jonathan to Gen. 19:14
5. Midrash Tanhuma, Noach 5
6. Sanhedrin 108a:7-8
7. Jonah 1:2
8. Jonah 1:3
9. Rashi to Jonah 1:3
10. I want to give credit to R. Arnold Jacob Wolf, z”l who uses this language “we run because we know” in his outstanding essay, “The [Black] Revolution and Jewish Theology,” in his book, Unfinished Rabbi.
11. Jonathan Safran Foer, We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019. p. 13.
12. Parphrase. Itturei Torah / Torah Gems, Complied by Aaron Yaakov Greenberg, Tel Aviv: “Yavneh” Publishing House, 1992. Vol. 1, p. 13.
13. Ta’anit
14. Ta’anit 7b:14,12
15. Megillah 5b:12
16. Ta’anit 7b:7
17. Yevamot 78b:16
18. Ta’anit 7b:6
19. Berakhot 19a:11, Ta’anit 19a:6-8, and Ta’anit 23a:4
20. Ta’anit 23b:2-7
