This sermon, “Prayer for Rain”  by Rabbi Justus Baird was delivered at Congregation Shomrei Emunah in Montclair, N.J. on Shemini Atzeret 5786 (Oct 14, 2025).

Sukkot started off so nice this year…then, well, rain sort of ruined it. Today we’ll pray for rain. Prayer for rain and dew has always been a personal favorite of mine – it combines water and theology in an irresistible way.

But tefilat hageshem is also so visceral: (1) rain is so tangible – you know when it rains and when it doesn’t; and (2) in the land of Israel, it’s so critical and necessary for life.

To spiritually prepare for tefilat hageshem, I decided to look closely at the “theology of weather” in Jewish tradition. In some of the prophets, we read how God uses rain as a punishment or reward – consider this example, in Amos (Ch4):

I [GOD] withheld the rain from you 3 months before harvest time: I would make it rain on one town and not on another; One field would be rained upon, while another on which it did not rain would wither…Yet you did not turn back to Me—declares GOD.

In other words: I tried to use weather to wake you up, but you still did not turn back to me. But surely the most familiar text about these ideas is the second paragraph of the shema – v’Hayah im shamoa – from Deut 11. As a young rabbi, I had a real theological problem with that paragraph, and for many years I didn’t recite it. I just didn’t believe what it said: that if you follow God’s mitzvot, the rains will come at the right time, the grasses will grow, you will have grain and wine and oil and enough to eat. But over time, I softened up, and returned to recite that paragraph.

That paragraph makes a lot more sense if you consider the verses that appear right before it:

For the land that you are about to enter and possess is NOT like the land of Egypt from which you have come. There [in Egypt] the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own labors, like a vegetable garden;  but the land you are about to cross into and possess, a land of hills and valleys, soaks up its water from the rains of heaven. It is a land which your God יהוה looks after, on which your God יהוה always keeps an eye, from year’s beginning to year’s end.

The core idea is that Egypt has one type of relationship to water and to God (because of the Nile), and land of Israel has a different type of relationship to water and to God (because of the rains). The rabbis wrote many midrashim about these ideas. One (from SIfrei) focuses on the differences between Egypt and Israel: in Egypt, you have to work to get the water from the Nile to your crops – you have to build irrigation channels and then operate and maintain them. But in Israel, rain descends like a blessing. The rabbis interpret: Israelites are God’s servants, and God takes care of God’s servants, giving them water while they sleep – they don’t have to do any labor to get the water, to receive the rain.

However, the Israelites do have to carry out their side of the bargain to receive the rain – this is the core message of the second paragraph of the shema: the rains will come only if we keep the mitzvot. Rashbam put it nicely when he taught: “The land of Israel is better than Egypt and all other lands for those who observe God’s commands, but it’s worse than all other lands for those who do not observe them.”

You can make a compelling argument that if the Israelites had ended up in a different land – say, southern Egypt or Ethiopia – our theology would have been different, because the climate would have been different. Core aspects of Jewish theology were shaped by the climate of the Land of Israel.

I stumbled upon the work of a Scottish Theologian named George Adam Smith, who lived in late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, who wrote compellingly on this idea. I’ll paraphrase the way he saw how climate and theology were interconnected:

In the Land of Israel, fertility of the land is not inevitable or predictable, like it is Egypt. There is no water source that humans can control. The rains come down from heaven, and when heaven withholds the rain, there is nothing humans can do, there is no substitute. The climate of the Land is regular enough to inspire people to farm the land, but the regularity is often interrupted. Droughts come, and when they do, they bring famine and pestilence. Locusts come, earthquakes periodically arrive.  The result is that the human imagination is roused to feel the presence of a will behind nature. Humans interpret the vicissitudes of the climate to be acts of God – this is how the climate of the Land of Israel shaped Israel’s doctrine of Providence.

Smith goes on to argue that the climate itself was not determinative. Many other peoples in the region experienced the same climate, but they did not develop the same theology. So it was the combination of the climate with the Israelite ideas of God that were both necessary for this theology to develop.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself – this is all very interesting and historical, but we know very well that God does not use the climate to reward or punish humans.

I would like to close by challenging that dismissal in two ways. First: I challenge anyone who has experienced extreme weather to not admit that there is a little part of them that attributes some kind of divine role in that weather event. A massive hurricane or freak windstorm, a beautiful double rainbow…these experiences touch most of us in ways that defy our rational thinking. Even the insurance companies still call such events “Acts of God.”

Second challenge I want to offer anyone who might dismiss the idea that God is connected to weather is from a rabbinic teaching about how God waters the earth.

The rabbis read a verse in Genesis at the beginning of the Garden of Eden story (2:6): “a flow would well up from the ground and water the whole surface of the earth.” At the beginning of creation, this verse teaches, all the waters of the earth came from below, from underground. There was no rain from above. But Rabbi Ḥanan of Tzippori taught that God reconsidered this approach. God decided instead that the earth should be watered not from below, but from above, for four reasons:

1. To prevent powerful people from taking all the water for themselves
2. To wash away harmful dew that accumulates on crops
3. So that high areas (tall mountains) could receive water just like low lying areas; and
4. This is the one I want to leave you with: so that everyone would direct their eyes heavenward.

By deciding that the earth would be watered with rain from above, we are all compelled to pray for rain. Rain, we might say, is the consummate generator of humility. Anytime that humans think we can take over the world, whenever we think we are as powerful as God, the climate comes to prove otherwise. We could use a dose of this humility in our generation.

Other Sermons and Talks from the Bimah
See the blog category: Sermons & Talks

Video Archive
The archive of all Shomrei videos is available on our YouTube Channel at shomrei.org/video