Lack of rain in Israel used to be a death sentence for its inhabitants—no water to drink, no crops, etc. Now, with modern technology (such as desalinization plants), a lack of rain is serious, but no longer life-threatening. Should we still institute fast days during a dry winter?

“I will begin with a blunt statement that presents what is to me absurd about fasting for rain in our day, namely that it is laughable to fast about rain when the sprinklers in yeshiva, in the houses of the rabbis, the residents and the public parks – in these sacred precincts, and in every place – work as usual.  How is it possible to fast about insufficient rain when we continue to water decorative gardens, and how is it possible to open the Holy Ark and cry out regarding the lack of water when we have not made every reasonable effort to minimize the need for water?

In a more intrinsic fashion, the matter is that Tractate Taanit relates to a reality in which diminished rain causes risk to life, literally, and the fast for rain is a prayer for survival in the clearest possible way.  But in a world without motorized transportation, with no capacity to convey water and food over distances with refrigeration, the absence of rain means famine, drought, and death G-d forbid.  If human beings and cattle have nothing to drink, and there is no food or pasture, there is risk to life.  However, in the modern reality, in which it is possible to desalinate water and import food, we are not speaking about continued existence, but rather about cost or about plenitude.  Desalinating water is expensive, but it removes the threat of death.

The truth of the matter is that the ongoing water crisis in the state is not an existential crisis but rather a crisis of standard of living.  If we would dry out the decorative gardens, and give up pools and sprinklers, we would lose important things that broaden a person’a mind, but we would not put our continued existence at risk.  Therefore, in large measure, we are speaking of a standard of living, something for the sake of which one may hope for more rain, but it is not correct to decree a fast because of the absence of sufficient water to maintain the current standard of living.

In simple words, a fast is a response to danger, and in the modern reality, the risk that absence of rain posed in the time of Chazal does not threaten us.”

Rav Lichtenstein makes another critical point later in his letter:

“Do we love at such a high level of Providence in our day, such that we are able to take natural events and translate them into spiritual guidelines?  The interconnection between nature and Providence is a complex question, and I am neither able nor desirous to establish fixed points regarding it, but it seems that prevention of rain for spiritual causes assumes a non-negligible level of Providence, and I am at the very, very least not certain that our current spiritual condition justifies this.”

I would add that the purpose of a fast is to improve the virtue of the Jewish people as a whole, which makes it hard to see the virtue of declaring a fast when one knows in advance that most Jews will ignore it, leaving aside the numbers who will mock.