The 9th blessing of the weekday Amidah asks Hashem to bless the year, and in particular, the yearly produce, by blessing the earth and watering it appropriately. “Satisfy us with its goodness and bless our year like other good years.”
It is the simplicity of this blessing that is so breathtaking. One could easily imagine one of our ancestors, thousands of years ago looking over an empty field in Israel, facing the uncertainty of the future, knowing that life and death, success or disaster is dependent on what that ground before him/her does. “Satisfy us with its goodness and bless our year like other good years.” In fact, one could imagine all of their ancestors doing the same thing.
We are somewhat insulated from that experience, because food isn’t grown before our very eyes, and if there is a drought here or a flood there, we will simply get our food from somewhere else, and so what if we have to pay 15 cents more for a tomato from New Zealand. But imagine if there was no “somewhere else.” Imagine that it was only that one field in front of us.
Trust me, this was a prayer that was recited with great kavannah.
And imagine, then, that same field just bursting with life, filled with all the goodness that could come “like other good years.” The blessing thereby becomes a call for wonder.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of G-d and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin…the beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
Just as an aside, we should remember that the growth of produce is a special source of wonder when we are talking about Israel. There are more plant species in Israel than in California, which is 20 times Israel’s size. For our ancestors, then, Israel was like a cornucopia, with the help of G-d endlessly supplying for our needs. Wegman’s and Shoprite are less bucolic, to be sure. But no less filled with wonder.