Palestinian Rain | 237scribes the relationship of humanity to the earth: from the linguistic connection
of man, adam, to earth, adama, to the “cosmically ethical” conception of the way
the land itself suffers for the sins of the people.^145 The sinful people cause the land
to experience a certain inner decay, which Buber identifies by the Hebrew verb
chanaf. This verb is often rendered “pollute” (as both the New Revised Standard
Version and the New Jewish Publication Society translations have it), but Buber
prefers the sense “to be out of joint,” which he derives from the Arabic cognate
chanifa, “to suffer from a sprained foot.” Blood puts the land out of joint, says
Numbers (35:33); sexual sins put the land out of joint, according to Jeremiah (3:1).
Especially grievous are sins having to do with the soil itself: profiteering in the
sale of the harvest, illicit acquisition of land, and failure to observe the Sabbatical
year. The land’s Sabbatical is equivalent to the people’s Sabbath: “Just as all living
beings in the community are liberated from the authority of all except the one
Lord on the Sabbath... the idea is that the earth is for a time to be free, so as not
to be subjected to the will of man, but left to its own nature, to be like no-man’s-
land.... [T]he repose of the field signifies a divine repose and its freedom a divine
freedom.”^146 The land is owed its Sabbatical; the failure to observe it (and there is
no sign that it was ever observed) leads to the people being vomited out, so that
the land will have its due in their absence: “The land is to become free at last by
being emptied of human beings.” This exile, however, is followed by the promise
of return. The land rests in the people’s absence, and if the people also repent of
their sins, then both they and the land can turn back to God together. This is the
meaning of the promise: not that God will always favor his people, but that he
will never abandon them completely; there will always be another chance to cre-
ate the Kingdom. The promise is easily misunderstood because one can err on the
side of either absolutism, which breeds pride and overconfidence, or contingency,
which leads to fear. The truth of the promise lies in between:
Absoluteness and historicity seem to be mutually exclusive; where they are
fused in a people’s faith, a reality of the spirit arises, which, as we know from
the message of the Bible, carries the breath of the Absolute far into the future
history of the human race.... The Promise means that within history an abso-
lute relationship between a people and a land has been taken into the covenant
between God and the people.^147This historical action and reaction, which in Kingship of God Buber had called the
Reichsdialektik, has its parallel within the land in the falling of the rain.
The biblical perspective that God does not distinguish between natural and
supernatural continues into the Mishnaic period. Buber cites several rabbinic
texts that compare rainfall to birth and resurrection:^148 “All at once we find our-
selves in a world of faith in which rainfall and resurrection belong together... the
rain is no more natural than the resurrection and the resurrection is no more mi-
raculous than the rain.”^149 Thus, some sages rank any day of rain greater than the