by Joseph G. Rosenstein
October 1997
This week, we will start the Torah cycle once again withBereish*t, the initial chapters of the book of Genesis. Each year, aswe review the Biblical accounts of the beginning of the world and ofthe human species, we must find metaphors for ourselves which embraceboth the Biblical narrative and the facts of science. Fortunately,that is not hard to do.However, in our review of Bereish*t, we generally fail to realizethat our ancestors were less puzzled by the origins of the universeand the origins of the species than by the origins of anotherphenomenon -- rain. Where did that rain come from?
Today we understand that the water in the sky gets there by theprocess of evaporation, but that explanation was not available to ourancestors. So, like other ancient peoples, they developed anexquisitely simple explanation for the rain. They said that thesource of the rain was a pool of water somewhere up in the heavens.Since we couldn't see that source, it had to be located above thevisible skies. Why then didn't all the water come tumbling down?There had to be a solid barrier above the sky which kept the waterfrom falling. So how did it rain? It rained through small openingsin the barrier.
This construction is described very explicitly in Genesis 1:6-7as being God's major effort on the second day of creation. "And Godmade the firmament, and divided the waters which were under thefirmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it wasso." The metaphor of a firmament retaining large quantities of wateris soon afterwards used to explain the rapid accumulation of thewaters of the flood, where the Bible notes, very dramatically, that"the windows of the heavens were opened". The rain was so voluminousthat small openings would not account for it. So in addition to thesmall holes through which rain normally flowed, there were also largerholes ("windows of the heaven") which when opened would account forthe voluminous rain that led to the flood.
This account of how things work unfortunately cannot bereconciled with the facts that we know. As with the ancients, rain ismore present in our everyday life than questions of origins, and eachdrop of rain negates the account of Genesis. There are no watersabove the firmament; indeed there is no firmament.
This does not pose a problem for those of us who understand theTorah as a document written by human hands, albeit with divineinspiration. For those who see the Torah as written by God, however,the text must be problematic. Even the Rabbinic category of "theTorah is written in human terms -- bil'shon b'nei adam" doesn't applyhere, since that refers to simplifications, not to elaborateconstructions.
A more serious problem is that the Bible's metaphor clearly takesrain out of the realm of natural phenomena and places it under God'sdaily control. If the waters above the firmament are to be released,someone must release them; if they are to be withheld, someone mustwithhold them. When angry, God can produce floods or droughts.
In our understanding, it rains when specific atmosphericconditions apply. As we have become more adept at describing thoseconditions, we have also become more adept at predicting rain, and atexplaining the absence of rain. We no longer see rain as dependent onGod's will, we no longer believe that God signs off on each rainfall.
Still more problematic is that if rain is subject to God's will,then, since God does not act whimsically or arbitrarily, the presenceor absence of rain must be a consequence of our actions. Thus, ourancestors believed, out of cosmological necessity, in a retributiveGod, in a God who punishes. Nowhere is this view more clearlyexpressed than in the verses of Deuteronomy 11:13-21, which is thesecond of the three paragraphs of the Sh'ma, recited each morning andevening by observant Jews. The reward for following the commandmentsis that the "rain will come at the proper season" and, consequently,"you will have an ample harvest". On the other hand, if God'scommandments are ignored, "God will hold back the heavens, and therewill be no rain"; as a result, "the earth will not yield its produce"and "you will soon disappear from the good land which God is givingyou."
Since for our ancestors, "nature" included the firmament and thewaters above the firmament, it was "natural" for them to believe in aGod who held the keys to rain, and who used rain for reward andpunishment. It is no longer "natural" for us to do so.
How then can we understand the second paragraph of the Sh'ma? Analternative approach is to replace the language of "punishment" withthe languange of "consequences". This is the subject of anotherdiscussion, but here for example is how we might read the verses inDeuteronomy:
Copyright 1997 -- Joseph G. Rosenstein
Permission is granted to copy and recirculate this article, but onlyin its entirety, including the title and copyright portions.Send your email comments on this article to joer@dimacs.rutgers.edu.
This article appeared in The Jewish State -- The Weekly Newspaper forCentral New Jersey's Jewish Communities.
