Eternal One,
I hope you are listening to me because I am listening to You.
A phrase from the week’s Torah reading is sticking out in my mind.
I am thinking of it because I pass by it every day.
Many of us do if we have a mezuzah in our doorway.
“It will come to pass that if you hear and follow the commandments that I am giving you this day, to love the Eternal your God, and serve God with all your heart and soul, then I will give you rain in its season.”
You know, Divine Rainmaker, we don’t get much rain here,
And we are reasonably sure that it’s not because we haven’t loved You with all our hearts and souls.
But we do our best to practice the tenets of our tradition.
And here we are now, in difficult times, still trying to recover in the wake of violent acts
That were motivated by hatred and a desire to cause havoc in the lives of others.
What message do You want us to hear on this day?
I would hardly think that You, our Creator, would ask us to
Do anything to detract from the earth’s natural beauty
Or to jeopardize its future.
I could not fathom that You would direct us to sow division among people
In ways that would marginalize any one person or group.
I still believe that You want us
To appreciate the majesty of Your cosmos and our world.
To discover the love embodied in Your Torah.
To nurture the love that lies within each of us and share it with others.
And to engage in acts of deliverance for people in dire straits.
You lead us
To remember from whence we came so we can know where we are going.
To emulate your acts of healing and freedom in all that we do.
And to raise ourselves up by performing acts and kindness and godliness.
You inspire us
To practice the underlying values of Shabbat for preserving creation and ending slavery of any kind.
To be humble and grateful for the gifts we enjoy every day.
And to do all we can to engender in our world the peace that you fashion in the highest heavens.
That is what I hear You saying in the here and now.
These are echoes of the prayers we recite every Shabbat.
These are principles of our heritage to which we should be loyal at all times, above and beyond the whims and judgments of anyone who might not quite understand who we really are.
Following your teachings will offer us blessings
even if those blessings are not in the form of raindrops.
May the wisdom that our people has passed down from one generation to the next
Continue to preserve and strengthen
the foundations of our lives, individually and together.
Keep us safe, Eternal One, and be our hope.
Amen.
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