Unfortunately, flooding is a big news item this July 2025. The July 4th flooding along the Guadalupe River in the Texas claimed 130 lives (including young children at a summer camp, families in trailers, others vacationing etc) with many people still missing and unaccounted for (at the time of this writing). Not to mention the very significant property losses.
Closer to us, in mid-July, areas of NYC and NJ had flash flooding that turned roads and subway stations into flowing rivers. Homes, cars and businesses flooded. There’s much discussion online and in the news about prevention, early warning and response, what government could/should do different or better, and the preoccupation of pointing fingers and the big question of who and which agency or policy is to blame.
I’m no meteorologist or climate scientist, neither am I a political maven or junkie and am no expert on government policy. All that is important, of course, but it’s not the point of this post. Hopefully the powers that be and all who can do something about it learn lessons from this to help prevent and mitigate such future flooding disasters.
The Baal Shem Tov taught, and Rebbe often reiterated and emphasized, that things we see/hear/experience in the world around us, ought to be a lesson for us. There has to be a life message and a spiritual teaching in it, too.
So what’s to be learned as a life-message from all this flooding?
1) Storm water and surges needs somewhere to go! Don’t clog or block the Channels! See this post we once shared on Yom Kippur about the Clogged Drain on Great Dane Drive. Speaking of which, many thanks to the UAlbany Grounds Department who keep at it diligently, ensuring campus road-drains are cleared of leaves and debris so storm runoff can drain properly.
We’ve learned a great deal about this during zoning approvals (2003-2008) and site work (Summer 2008) for the construction of the new, bigger and better Shabbos House (2008-9). Our parking area is porous pavement, and the large rocky basin behind Shabbos House is a storm-water recharge basin with layers of stone, retaining walls and drywells.
2) The pipes and waterways (and people!) need enough Bandwidth! We wrote this post on “Broaden the Channel, Allow for More Flow!” during the extreme flooding one year south of us in the Hudson Valley and northeast of us in Vermont. If the area is too constrained, if the pipes are too small (as they were on Western Ave corner Fuller, just down the street from us, near Stuyvesant Plaza) then everything pools and backs up. This is a lesson for people, too. We need to broaden our channels, our mindset, our hearts, and increase our own bandwidth.
3) There’s a discussion in the Talmud about flooding and finders-keepers regarding items swept away in a flood. After an earlier instance of Texas flooding (this time in Houston), we shared this post on Flooding and Finders-Keepers piece of Talmud as a lesson regarding the flooding effects of peer-pressure and being swept up in a tide of public opinion etc.
4) Here’s a post we shared titled “Wet Feet” that was inspired by one of Chani’s chaperoning/photographing of a C-Teen trip. It focuses on the Talmud story of Choni the Circle-Maker praying for rain, specifically the right kind of rain, the Goldilocks Zone of rain, not too much, and not too little. Just right!
5) And some thoughts on “Is there a Good Flood?” especially in light of all this devastating flooding…