Rav Avigdor Miller on the Benefit of the Blizzard

A:

And the answer is that these are all helpful.

You have to know that every blizzard performs services for nature.  Only if people are in the way or they put themselves in the way, which they usually do, that can’t be helped. Because a hurricane is doing very important work; it does a big pruning job on the trees.  Now these trees don’t have any gardeners or horticulturists who climb up on ladders and cut off extra branches that are not necessary.  But a hurricane does that.

And a big blanket of snow brought by a blizzard is in a certain sense a great blessing because all that snow turns into water.  Because we’re in the city so we don’t appreciate it but had you been a man in the country, you’d see that the blizzard of last winter produced a very big crop.  It’s the crops that benefit from blizzards.

There’s a story of a town out west that didn’t have any snow storms one year and so what happened?  Their water lines were five feet underground, but this year they froze.  Frozen solid because they didn’t have that blessed blanket of snow to keep the earth warm. Every winter there were blizzards that brought down a heavy blanket and they insulated the pipes, but now they were left without water.  It was an emergency.  The mayor declared an emergency.  The government sent troops there.  All because there was no snow.  Snow is a blessing.

Of course we prefer that we should just go our selfish way.  We don’t like big blizzards.  We don’t like any snow either; it’s a nasty thing when snow comes down. That’s what foolish people say. We would like fair weather all year around. And then we’d die of starvation.  So Hashem knows better.

And so all the forces of nature, even when they are extreme, you must know they are performing useful functions in nature.  The fact that it might be uncomfortable for you or get in your way, that doesn’t vitiate, it doesn’t obviate, it doesn’t take away the benefit from these phenomena.

May 8, 1980