Sometimes it rains, and other times

The sky withholds the rain.

Sometimes my garden grows and

Other times everything shrivels and dies.

Torah says this is no accident.

Moses tells us we will be rewarded or

Punished through the agency of weather

For our adherence to or shunning of HaShem’s

Laws.

It isn’t always obvious or blatant,

But the weather has the power to make us

Live or die.

Rivers in flood, tornadoes devastating towns,

Children dying from lack of clean water,

Oceans turning acid and fish disappearing.

Whole forests vanishing because no frost kills the

Bark beetles in the winter time.

But which laws must we follow?

Is it the law of Leviticus on who to marry

Or what not to eat or that we should not mix

Fabrics of our clothing?

I think what Ha Shem means is much simpler that that.

I think he means what he said to Adam in the Garden.

About the whole earth.

That we are to “tend it and keep it.”

As a farmer or gardener loves the earth

And its living things.

I look at the news and I worry that we

Have forgotten that charge,

We have failed in our stewardship

And a day of reckoning is approaching.

I would like to think we have time to

Change our ways and turn back to

Ha Shem’s instruction.

I would like to think that He is longsuffering

And slow to anger.

That he loves to forgive.

But I am losing confidence in that theory.

Adam and Havah were evicted from the Garden

I worry that we may be next.

Written by Jeffrey Dorn – Miami, Florida