“The world was unformed and chaotic, there was darkness across the surface of the deep. . . And on that day, all the fountains of the great deep burst apart, and the floodgates of the sky broke open. . .” (Genesis 1:2 and 7:11)

This past week, the weather around the Los Angeles basin, where we had inadvertently spent the night because of a flight diversion, seemed very much like these descriptions from Genesis. For days, the region had been inundated with violent winter rains and their resulting floods, and all this on top of parts of the region still badly scarred from the fires of early 2025. The loss of life and property has been staggering and unbearable.

This past Erev Shabbat — late Friday afternoon — the rains abated, which permitted........

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