If good people have terrible years, does keeping the mitzvot really bring rain?
The paragraph is blunt. Listen to the commandments and God sends rain in its time. Turn away and the sky closes. If you have watched good people go through bad years, you have every right to ask whether the world works like that. The sources ask it too.
The Ramban (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, Spain, 1200s) starts with who the verse is talking to. It speaks to the whole people. God does not do rain miracles, he says, "except according to the deeds of the majority of the people." An individual, in contrast, lives by his own merit. Then he sets a limit. Miracles, for good or for bad, are done only for the completely righteous or the completely wicked. Everyone in between gets what comes in the ordinary way of the world, according to how they live.
The Rambam (Maimonides) asks how to read every "if you listen, then" promise in the Torah. He says they are all true and will happen. But the good things are not the real reward, which is the World to Come. They are there to clear the road. If a people keeps the Torah with joy, God removes what blocks it, such as war, hunger and sickness, so that people are free to learn and do mitzvot. The curses are the road closing: God takes away the comfort that fed the rebellion, and trouble comes that keeps people from earning the World to Come.
The best-known case, a boy who fell to his death on his way back from doing two mitzvot, is told in the Eilu Devarim and Yigdal prayers. Rabbi Yaakov's answer: the reward for a mitzvah is not paid in this world, but in "the world that is entirely good."
So these sources do not say that one person's mitzvot buy that person's weather. They say that a whole people's way of life shapes what its land and society become, that the good things are tools for a bigger goal, and that the full account is longer than one year. They do not explain why a particular good person suffers.
Ramban on Devarim 11:13,Rambam, Laws of Repentance 9:1,Kiddushin 39bIf God handles the rain, can I skip the hard work and just focus on Torah and prayer?
The verse says "you will gather your grain, your wine and your oil." Gathering is work. The Gemara noticed this and asked what the verse is teaching. Two sages of the Mishnah, Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, gave opposite answers.
Rabbi Yishmael points to a different verse, where God tells Yehoshua (Joshua, Moshe's successor) that the Torah "shall not leave your mouth." Taken literally, that would mean learning all day. "You will gather your grain" tells you otherwise: live by the way of the world. Work and learn.
Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai disagrees. Who can plow, sow, harvest, thresh and winnow, each in its season, and still have time for Torah? His answer: when Israel does God's will, their work is done by others. When they do not, they do it themselves, and that is what "you will gather your grain" describes. In his reading, the phrase in our paragraph is the lower level.
Abaye, a later sage in Babylonia, sums up how it turned out. Many people acted like Rabbi Yishmael and it worked out for them. Many acted like Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and it did not. Rava told his students not to come to his study hall in Nisan and Tishrei, the busy farming months, so that they would not be worrying about food all year.
The Sifrei, an ancient commentary on Devarim, reads the next lines this way: "You have done what is on you, so I will do what is on Me," and then comes the rain. Rashi repeats it. That sounds like a division of work. The sources disagree about how much of the work is yours.
Berakhot 35b,Sifrei Devarim 41; Rashi on Devarim 11:14I do not bow to statues. Why do I say "don't worship other gods" twice a day?
Fair question. Nobody you know bows to a statue. But look at what the paragraph actually describes. It does not start with idols. It starts with being full: "you will eat and be satisfied. Beware lest your heart be tempted."
Rashi says: once you are eating and full, watch out that you do not kick against God, because no one rebels against God except out of fullness. He proves it from Devarim 8, which says that when you have eaten and your herds have grown, your heart grows proud and you forget Hashem. The Gemara has a saying in the same spirit: a lion does not roar from a basket of straw, only from a basket of meat.
Then come the steps. Rashi, quoting the Sifrei: once a person pulls away from the Torah, he goes and attaches himself to idol worship. He reads King David the same way. David says people drove him out and told him "go serve other gods." Nobody said that, Rashi points out. David meant: pushed away from the Torah, I am close to serving other gods.
Why call them "other" gods? The Sifrei gives several reasons. One, which Rashi picks: they are other to the people who serve them, because a person cries out to them and they never answer.
So the sources read this verse as a path, not a list of statues: comfort, forgetting, drifting from learning, then bowing to something that cannot answer. They do not say what counts as a statue today.
Rashi on Devarim 11:16; Sifrei Devarim 43,Devarim 8:12-14,Berakhot 32a