236 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
or only indirectly with the former, bring in life itself, in stories, descriptions and
discussions.”^141 What brings Buber to this positive characterization of rabbis and
halakha is the prayer for rain, discussed in the tractate Ta’a n it:
The rain beats down through this treatise on fasting, not the ordinary familiar
rain, but the long-yearned-for rain that is now at last descending whose sound
testifies that it is the rain of God. At the same time it is not rain that might fall
anywhere, but definitely and incomparably Palestinian rain, autumn rain and
spring rain, which, like no other rain, is regarded not as the end of an assured
sequence of climatic events but as the eternal renewal of God’s mercy. Not only
what has come down to us here of what was said in the land itself but also of
what was said in Babylon, is concerned with Palestinian rain.^142This statement seems strange. Surely, we think, this is an occasion on which Bu-
ber does not mean to agree with his sources; he cannot possibly really believe
that rain in Palestine is different from rain anywhere else. In a sense, however,
he does. As he says of the prayer on the first fruits of the harvest (Deuteronomy
26:1–11), themselves symbolic of Israel’s role as the first fruits in God’s harvest of
the whole of humanity: “One must not completely spiritualize such a conception
and deprive it of the bodily substance without which the spiritual content would
have no real stability. No symbol has authentic existence in the spirit if it has no
authentic existence in the body.”^143 Palestinian rain is the symbol, but not merely
the symbol, of the connection between nature and history that is an essential part
of God’s revelation to the Israelites. It is to end a drought that Rabbi Akiva, the
legendary second-century teacher and martyr, invents one of the most influential
prayers in Jewish liturgy by addressing God both as avinu, “our father,” and as
malkeinu, “our king.” The first term is rooted in nature, the second in history; the
former expresses the individual’s relationship to God, and the latter the relation-
ship of the whole people.
In the first part of On Zion, “The Testimony of the Bible,” Buber says that
the importance of the prayer for the first fruits lies in its stress on renewal. One
thanks God for the renewal of the seasons and the recurrence of the harvest, be-
ginning with the words “I report this day unto the Lord thy God that I am come
into the country which the Lord swore unto our fathers to give us” (Deuteronomy
26:3). Thus, every individual, every year, reports as if they themselves had just
come into the country and received the gift of the land; the first fruits are brought
in acknowledgment of this ever-renewed gift: “The uniformly recurring seasons
with their blessings are bound to that unique historical act in which God led the
people with whom He had made the covenant into the promised land. The cre-
ation itself bears witness to the revelation.... [T]he report of the Mishnah (Bik-
kurim III) [tells] of the living unity—from the small peasant and the artisan right
up to the king—of a people experiencing and glorifying the blessings of Nature
as the blessings of History.”^144 This is reiterated in the various ways the Bible de-