Why Rain Comes From Above, a new anthology of essays by masterful scholar and teacher Dr. Devora Steinmetz, offers a way of engaging imaginatively with the texts of our tradition. Steinmetz explores how we might read these texts not literally—as if they express propositional truths—and not metaphorically—as if they give expression to our deeply-held values—but rather as exercises in religious imagination. She argues that as canonical texts and as foundational texts of our tradition, biblical and rabbinic sources exert a powerful hold on us and leave space for us to engage with them; our challenge is to step inside the stories, images, and teachings of our tradition and open ourselves to the experiences and understandings they afford us.
In the essay that gives this collection its title, Steinmetz demonstrates that, in biblical and rabbinic sources, rain is not merely a meteorological phenomenon; it is, rather, an instrument of Divine justice. She begins with a midrash on the creation story that makes the claim that God originally intended for the earth to be watered from below, like the spring that welled up from the earth in the Garden of Eden. By causing rain to come down from above, God encourages human beings to direct their gaze heavenwards, aware of their dependence. Moreover, the Talmud presents the lack of rain as a punishment for failing to share our gifts with others, a reminder that rain—which falls alike on the rich and the poor—is a great equalizer. When we share the blessings that God bestows, God showers down blessing upon us. Rain is thus a way for God not just to judge our behavior, but also to ensure that the world is a place of justice.
Steinmetz explores the midrashic idea that rain causes people to direct their eyes upward, which, she argues, parallels the biblical image of God looking downward at humanity to determine whether to give or withhold rain. As Steinmetz puts it: “This reciprocal gaze suggests a kind of mirroring, in which people look upward to understand and emulate the just way in which God shares God’s gifts, and God looks downward, judging human action and responding justly.” Her argument, reminiscent of Israeli scholar Dr. Penina Neuwirth’s image of a cosmic water cycle in which human prayers rise up to the heavens like mist and God’s blessing descends on the earth like rain, demonstrates the centrality of rain in Jewish theology, a role that is not just literal or metaphorical, but richly symbolic and pregnant with meaning like a saturated cloud.
In another thought-provoking essay, Steinmetz explores the symbolic meanings associated with the nation of Amalek, which attacked Israel at their most vulnerable moment, when they were weak and tired after just having left Egypt. Amalek, as refracted through the midrashic imagination, represents the conviction that the way we are now—weak, exhausted, straggling— is the way we will always be. And Amalek represents everything that holds us back from the promised land toward which we direct our steps. Steinmetz shows how the Exodus story is a revisiting of the Genesis story, with God battling the forces of evil not to create a world, but to establish Divine dominion. She compares the biblical creation story with ancient Near Eastern myths in which the deity had to subdue the chaotic forces of the sea in order to create the world. She shows how echoes of this cosmic battle survive in the biblical text as well—in the references to God’s destruction of sea monsters in the book of Psalms, and in the subjugation of Amalek, who represents God’s primordial foe. Biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg has argued that midrash represents the biblical unconscious, giving voice to desires and anxieties that lie just beneath the surface of the text. But in this chapter, Steinmetz shows how the unconscious rears its head in the text of the Bible itself, with Amalek as the force of evil.
Despite repeated references to the religious imagination, Steinmetz’s book is animated by a sense of moral imagination and a vision of a world governed by justice. In the last of the six essays in this anthology, “The Hidden and the Revealed,” Steinmetz focuses on a verse from Deuteronomy (29:28) spoken by God just before the people enter the promised land: “The hidden things are for the Lord our God, but the revealed things are for us and our children forever to do all of the words of this teaching.” The “hidden things” is a reference to those sins which an individual conducts in secret, and which it’s possible that no one may ever discover. Drawing on an episode from the book of Judges, Steinmetz explores what it means for the members of a community to be maximally responsible for one another, such that all are implicated in the sins of individuals. She invites us to imagine the ways in which we are all intertwined in a web of responsibility for the communities of which we are a part. By the end of this highly accessible and engaging book, we are left with a sense that rain may be the instrument of Divine justice from the heavens, but a sense of communal responsibility is a source of justice that wells up from human beings on earth.