Today is the first day of the Hebrew month of Kislev. When Noah emerged from the ark after the floodwaters receded, the world lay before him like a canvas washed clean. Though he exited the Ark itself in the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, the establishment of God’s eternal covenant with humanity occurred on the first of Kislev with the appearance of the rainbow.
That rainbow carries a message that resonates through every generation. In fact, Jewish law requires us to recite a special blessing upon seeing a rainbow, acknowledging that God remembers the covenant he made with Noah.
Yet paradoxically, Jewish tradition warns us against gazing at the rainbow too intently. If we are required to make a blessing upon seeing a rainbow, why shouldn’t we gaze at it?
Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir offers a profound answer by explaining what a rainbow truly is. When sunlight passes through a fine mist of water droplets, something remarkable happens. The cloud doesn’t block the sun—it reveals it. What normally appears as simple white light suddenly bursts into a spectrum of brilliant colors. The rainbow doesn’t create this light; it merely unveils what was always there, hidden within the sun’s rays.
Rabbi Meir presents this as a metaphor for our material existence. Think of how clouds typically function: they obscure the sun, casting shadows over the earth. Similarly, an unrefined obsession with material concerns becomes a dense cloud that blocks our awareness of God’s presence. We go through life sensing something spiritual, feeling some higher purpose, but we can’t quite identify its source. We live under overcast skies.
Then there are those rare souls who achieve the opposite extreme—people so removed from worldly matters that they perceive God’s light directly, like staring into the unfiltered sun. But this isn’t the path intended for most of humanity.
Noah represents the middle way, and this is why the covenant was made specifically with him. The Torah introduces him as “a righteous man who walked with God” (Genesis 6:9). Noah didn’t flee from the physical world; he engaged with it. He built an ark with his own hands, gathered animals, planted vineyards. But his involvement remained refined, measured, and purposeful.
Consider the difference: a person hoarding wood for pure self-enrichment is creating a dense cloud. Noah used the same physical wood, the same material existence, to save all life on earth—transforming that material into a transparent mist that revealed his higher purpose. As Rabbi Meir explains, like the delicate mist that creates a rainbow, Noah’s relationship with the material world became transparent enough to reveal the divine spectrum shining through it.
This is the covenant of Kislev: that the world would never again need destruction because righteous people would demonstrate how to live in the world while revealing God’s presence through it. Material existence need not be a fog that obscures; it can be a lens that clarifies. This message resonates powerfully as Kislev progresses toward Chanukah, when the Maccabees showed us the same truth—that engaging the physical world with righteousness allows divine light to shine through the darkness.
But here comes the warning: don’t stare at the rainbow itself. Rabbi Meir points out that when we become so enchanted by the beauty of this world that we forget it merely reflects something infinitely greater, we’ve made a critical error. We start believing the rainbow generates its own light, that meaning originates in matter itself rather than in the divine source illuminating it. This is like worshiping the beautiful creation instead of the Creator, mistaking the vessel for the light it contains.
The blessing we say upon seeing the rainbow captures this perfectly. We don’t praise the rainbow—we acknowledge that God remembers His covenant. We look through the phenomenon to perceive the promise behind it.
As we begin Kislev today, on the very day the sages tell us the rainbow covenant was established, we’re reminded of this delicate balance. Like Noah stepping into a renewed world, we too can choose to live with refined engagement—fully present in our material reality while remaining transparently aligned with its spiritual source. The challenge isn’t to eliminate the clouds of daily life but to refine them into mist fine enough that God’s light shines through in all its glorious colors. When we get this right, the physical world stops being an obstacle and becomes instead what it was always meant to be: a revelation of divine splendor, a rainbow proving that destruction need never come again.
The first of Kislev arrives as an invitation to live as Noah did—by recognizing the divine source of all material blessings, we become a prism revealing God’s light.
