It is to be remembered that the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem talked last week about “the threat of drought hitting the diocese”. According to the Water Information Center: Israel, Palestine, Jordan and even Cyprus are countries with extremely limited water resources. Desert weather makes water a most essential resource. Last Thursday – day by day – Patriarch Fouad Twal called on the faithful of the Holy Land to “pray for God’s blessing, that He has mercy on us, that He takes care of our needs – more particularly water – and that He rids our land of the evil of dryness.” The first Sunday of Advent, December 1, was in fact dedicated to prayer and fasting to invoke rain’s blessing. Already back in Advent 2010, the Patriarch had asked the faithful to pray for the blessing of rain, at a time when the area suffered from a very dry season. The two Chief Rabbis Yitzhak Yosef and David Lau have also called for mass prayers at the Kotel (Western Wall), considering that the season is unusually dry in Israel when normally, at this time of the year, rainfall would cover the entire country.
