Q&A: What is the meaning of "Who causes the dew to fall"?
What is the meaning of "Who causes the dew to fall"?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I’d be happy to understand what is meant by "Who causes the dew to fall," which we begin to recite on Passover throughout the summer until Simchat Torah.
I googled it and didn’t find an answer.
Is dew really more common in the summer than in the winter, and this is just my ignorance? What’s the idea here? Why didn’t they come up with a different blessing for the summer?
Or does "dew" not mean what we mean by it today?
I’m looking now at dew on the windows and on the leaves outside, and for some reason I barely see it in the summer..
Answer
See an overview here: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%98%D7%9C
It seems to me that it emerges from there that dew is indeed formed mainly in the summer. But in any case, it is clear that in the summer it is more noticeable, so it makes sense to refer to it in the summer.
Dew in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) sometimes also means light rain (I don’t remember where; probably in Micah, in the haftarah of Balak). That is, a kind of drizzle. In that sense, the expression "causes to fall" fits it. Maybe they assumed that the ordinary dew you see in the morning on plants is also formed from such rain when nobody notices. It would come down in the winter too (according to their view), but then it is negligible compared to the rain, so its blessing—and the might of God revealed in bringing it down—is negligible compared to the blessing and might of the rain. In the summer there is no masking effect of the rain, so all that remains is to bless and extol God (to speak of His might) for the dew alone.