SHEMINI ATSERET: And the Most Important Creation on Planet Earth

Tonight, Friday, October 2, we begin Shemini Atseret, the holiday that marks the arrival of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and, of course, in Israel. From this day on we add to our Tefila a special line praising God for creating rain. In the modern world most of us no longer live on farms and ranches but in cities and suburbs, and it’s hard to appreciate how vital rain is. For most of us, rain is more of a nuisance than a blessing. So I would like to share a few facts about rain that will help us understand a little better the beautiful Tefila mashib haruach umorid hageshem (= You are the One who makes the wind blow and makes the rain fall on the earth).

LIFE

What makes our planet unique in the universe? One might say: life. As far as we know, there is no other planet with life in the solar system or in the Milky Way. But there is another essential element, a prerequisite for life, which HaShem created before He created life. It is what scientists look for when they search other places in the universe, like Mars, for traces of life. You will probably think of water, and you will be partly right. Water is life, and life as we know it on our planet is impossible without water.

LIQUID WATER

To be more precise, a planet can only be habitable if it has liquid water. Traces of water (H2O) have been found on other planets, but frozen, as ice. On a planet like Jupiter, or on its moons, temperatures are extremely low, and water cannot stay liquid there. Our planet is privileged to be the only celestial body with liquid water. This is thanks to the Intelligent (Divine) Design of the Earth’s mass, the sun’s mass and, above all, the precisely calculated distance between our planet and the sun. All of this keeps the Earth neither too hot, where water would evaporate, as on Venus, nor too cold, where water would freeze, as on Mars.

FRESH WATER

But liquid water alone is not what sustains life on our planet. “Ordinary water,” meaning sea water, or the water some speculate once existed on Mars (this has not been confirmed), is salt water. It cannot support life as we know it for the creatures of dry land. The vast majority of plants, insects, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals, ourselves included, need water without salt to survive.

That precious liquid is called fresh water. Fresh water is what makes life on our planet possible. And where does fresh water, that life-giving elixir, come from? The only source of fresh water on our planet is rain, or precipitation, which includes snow and hail.

According to Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed 2:30), the Creator set up the water cycle, the mechanism that produces rain, on the second day of Creation, when He separated the upper waters (the clouds) from the lower waters (the oceans). Rabbi Moshe Chefets, in his book Melekhet Machashevet (pp. 10-11, Vienna edition), and Rabbi Menashe ben Israel, in his book The Conciliator, among others, explain it the same way.

THE SECOND DAY OF CREATION

John Lynch, author of the BBC book The Weather (p. 84, 1996), describes clouds in his own words very much the way the Torah does: “We live on a water planet. The seas dominate the world… there is an ocean around us [sea water] and an ocean above us [the clouds].”

The Creator devoted the Second Day of Creation to setting up the miraculous mechanism that turns ocean water into the most precious liquid in the universe: rain.

HOW UNLIKELY WATER IS

Rainwater is water with very little salt. Of all the water on planet Earth, only 2.75% is fresh. Of that, 2.05% is frozen in glaciers. Another 0.69% is groundwater, which, like the glaciers, was originally produced by rain. Only 0.0101% of all the water on Earth is fresh surface water, spread across all the lakes and rivers. That incredibly small share, 0.0101% of all the water in our world, is what human beings and every other creature on dry land use to survive. And its only source is rain!

The second day of Creation was devoted to setting up the process that turns ocean water into the scarcest, most exotic and most precious liquid in the universe. That is why our Chakhamim considered rain one of God’s greatest blessings to mankind.

THE ELIXIR OF LIFE

The only source of fresh water in the entire universe is the rain that forms in the atmosphere of planet Earth.

“Imagine an entire planet where the universe’s finest liqueur is boiled out of fermenting seas by a brilliant yellow star, distilled in the skies, and rained back down on the land, forming lakes and rivers of the inebriating brew. The planet, of course, is Earth, and the liqueur is fresh water.” (L. O’Hanlon, Discovery)