Who Has Mercy on the Earth

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 65.

We're moving down the chain of Baruch She'amar, and today we land on two phrases that, honestly, every one of us needs to hear more often. Listen to how wide they are.

Baruch m'rachem al ha'aretz - blessed is the One who has mercy on the earth. Baruch m'rachem al hab'riyos - blessed is the One who has mercy on the creatures.

Not "blessed is the One who has mercy on the Jewish people." Not "on the righteous." Not even "on human beings." On the earth. On the creatures - all of them. Every living thing.

I want you to feel how big that is. We tend to imagine God's compassion as something selective - He's merciful to the good people, to the ones who deserve it, to us. But the siddur, right here in the middle of our morning praise, throws the doors wide open. God's mercy isn't a reward handed out to the deserving. It's a quality that permeates all of creation. It rains down on the field that grows the wheat and on the worm in the soil and on the bird that eats the worm. M'rachem al ha'aretz. He has mercy on the earth itself.

There's a pasuk that captures this perfectly, and it's one of the most quoted lines in all of Tehillim. In Ashrei - which we'll get to in this very section - King David says: Tov Hashem lakol, v'rachamav al kol ma'asav. God is good to all, and His compassion is over all His works. Look at those two little words: lakol - to all. Al kol ma'asav - over everything He made. Not over the worthy. Over everything. Every creature He ever fashioned is held inside His mercy.

Now here's where this becomes practical for us, because in Judaism a praise of God is never just admiration from a distance - it's a model we're supposed to copy. The Gemara has a name for the way we're meant to walk in God's ways: just as He is merciful, so you be merciful. If His compassion reaches the animals and the earth, then ours has to reach there too.

This is the root of one of the most beautiful mitzvos in the Torah - tzaar baalei chaim, the prohibition against causing pain to any living creature. We're commanded to feed our animals before we feed ourselves. We're told to help an animal struggling under its load, even one that belongs to someone we don't like. The Torah cares about the suffering of a bird, of an ox, of a donkey. Why? Because we serve a God who is m'rachem al hab'riyos - merciful to the creatures.

And the Gemara makes a stunning promise about this. It says: kol hamerachem al habriyos, merachmin alav min hashamayim - anyone who has mercy on God's creatures, Heaven has mercy on him. The compassion you show flows back. When you are gentle with the world - with an animal, with the earth, with the small and the voiceless - you open a channel, and that same mercy comes pouring back down on you from Above.

The Chassidic masters take it even deeper. They teach that there's a spark of the Divine inside everything - in the animal, in the plant, even in the stone. When you treat creation with care, you're not just being nice. You're recognizing the Godliness hidden inside it. Cruelty, the opposite, is a kind of blindness - it can't see the holiness in front of it.

So here's what I want you to carry out of davening this morning. The next time you're tempted to be careless with something small - to step on the bug, to waste, to be rough with a creature or with the world - remember this phrase. Baruch m'rachem al ha'aretz. We worship a God whose mercy has no edges, no borders, no list of who qualifies. And our job is to be a little more like Him today than we were yesterday.

Tomorrow: we reach the closing bracha of Baruch She'amar - Baruch Atah Hashem, Melech mehulal batishbachos - the King praised in songs of praise. We'll wrap up this gateway blessing and step into the psalms themselves.