Polar Vortex

As I write this we are in the midst of another cold spell. The wind whips across the open fields and the air is a frigid blast from the polar vortex.  The sun shines on the frozen landscape and tires crunch on ice on the roads. Our lives feel disrupted as events are canceled, schools and businesses operate on two-hour delays or are closed altogether. Even our membership that relocates to the warmth of sunny Florida for the winter reports that it is cold - they have had to put on sweaters and turn on the heat!

In the Talmud, tractate Avodah Zarah, “Our Rabbis taught:When Adam, the first human, saw the day getting gradually shorter, he said, 'Woe is me, perhaps because I have sinned, the world around me is being darkened and returning to its state of chaos and confusion; this then is the kind of death to which I have been sentenced from Heaven!' So he began keeping an eight days' fast. But as he observed the winter equinox and noted the day getting increasingly longer, he said, 'This is the world's course', and he set forth to keep an eight days' festivity. In the following year he appointed both the days before and the days after the equinox as festivals.” (Bavli Avodah Zarah 8a).

When it is cold and dark, when the days are short and the nights are longer, we often feel like the first Adam. He worries that the world is returning to the chaos that preceded creation, concerned that warmth and light are disappearing. But when he sees that the light is returning, that the days are growing longer, his fears are eased, and he celebrates both the days leading up to the equinox as they grow shorter, and the days following, as the hours of light lengthen.
 
There is a reason that we talk so much about the weather this time of year. When it’s -5 with a windchill of -25, when the bitter wind whistles outside and the cold air makes it hard to take a breath, we notice much more than when the weather is pleasant and does not disrupt our plans. It is harder to see the changes that are taking place day by day when it is dark and cold. But Adam’s story teaches us that even when things seem dark and cold around us, not to despair, because the sun will shine again, the days will lengthen, and what has been growing slowly will blossom in days to come.

Snow Women of the Wall, Jerusalem

We aren’t the only ones experiencing colder than normal winter weather.