Dry, cracked earth. Plowed fields etched with brown furrows, not a single green shoot emerging among them, beneath a cloudless sky. The protruding ribs of hungry children.
For countless generations, long before desalination plants and modern water systems, this was the greatest nightmare facing most human beings – and the people of the Land of Israel in particular.
In a world whose very existence depends on the chemical compound known as “water,” rain – the arrival of that water from the distant, unknowable heavens to our land – has always been a sign of life, a kind of signal from the universe saying: There’s a chance you can survive.
And what happens when the rain does not come? We raise our eyes to the heavens and ask for it.
The sky above Jerusalem is clear, almost yellow. The streets are still slightly warm. A traveler arriving in the city without knowing the date on the calendar might have thought it was still summer. Perhaps even spring. But the empty wells and the somber faces of the city’s Jewish, Muslim, and Christian residents tell a different story.
It is December 1855. And still, no rain has fallen.
The city, which had known neither wealth nor abundance for centuries, was facing the very real threat of hunger and thirst, along with an equally serious danger of disease outbreaks caused by the poor sanitary conditions that water shortages made even worse. Today, we would call it a humanitarian disaster. Back then, it was simply called a drought. And it was one of the most frightening words in the world.
The followers of the three monotheistic faiths gathered to pray, each community in the part of the city assigned to it and according to its own traditions.
Still, the rain did not come.
Then the city’s Muslim pasha made the Jewish community an unprecedented proposal – or perhaps a demand. Ordinarily, Jews were forbidden from ascending the Temple Mount, but now the pasha invited them to come and pray beside the Foundation Stone, within the Temple Mount compound, at the site of the Temple.
To everyone’s surprise, the Jewish community did not seize the opportunity. The city’s rabbis ruled that, since Jews of their generation had no way of attaining the ritual purity required by Jewish law, entering the Temple site was forbidden. Instead, they proposed – and requested permission – to go and pray at another site to which they were also denied access: the tomb of King David.
Permission was granted, for a limited period, and on December 17, 1855, an excited group of Jerusalem’s Jews set out for the Tomb of David.
The rain began to fall before they even reached their destination.
There is no written record of this story in the Jewish community, nor in the writings of Jerusalem’s Muslim residents. The person who recorded it in writing and brought it to print was the British consul James Finn, in a book about his years of service in Jerusalem, later translated into Hebrew by Aharon Amir: Stirring Times: Or Records from Jerusalem Consular Chronicles of 1853 to 1856.
The interesting detail that the esteemed consul does not mention is that this was by no means an isolated historical occurrence. Jewish prayers for rain, and even appeals by members of other religious communities asking Jews to pray for rain, have a long history. That history begins with a holiday whose connection to water and rain is not always remembered: Sukkot, and especially its final day, Shemini Atzeret.
Even before the holiday arrives, Jewish tradition establishes an explicit and unequivocal connection between water, rain, and prayer.
The first mention of rain in the Bible is, in fact, a mention of its absence:
“When no shrub of the field was yet in the earth … because the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no human being to till the soil.”
-Genesis 2:5
In the Talmud (Tractate Chullin 60b), this verse is interpreted to mean that the plants were actually waiting for the arrival of human beings to ask for rain: “Until Adam came and pleaded for mercy on their behalf, and rain fell and they grew.”
So when should we pray for rain? According to the calendar, the most logical time is just before the rains are actually expected to arrive – after the fields have been sown, in late autumn.
Indeed, according to Jewish tradition, on Sukkot “the world is judged concerning water” (Tractate Rosh Hashanah 1:2). And according to Jewish law, on the final day of the holiday, Shemini Atzeret, a special prayer for rain is recited, and the mention of rain is introduced into the daily prayers with the words of praise, “Mashiv ha-ruach u-morid ha-geshem” (“He makes the wind blow and brings down the rain”). This mention continues in the three daily prayers until the beginning of spring, at Passover.
In addition to this mention, the Amidah, the central prayer recited three times a day, contains a regular request for rain: “V’tan tal u-matar livracha” (“Grant dew and rain for a blessing”). This, too, is recited three times a day throughout the winter, but according to tradition, the request begins a little later, on the seventh of the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, about two weeks after Sukkot ends. The unusual reason for this delay is consideration for the pilgrims who would travel to Jerusalem. After the holiday, they needed to make their way home, often to places very far away, and rain could make the journey less pleasant at best and genuinely dangerous at worst.
Thus, although the High Priest in the Temple would pray that, in general, during the winter, the prayers of travelers who did not want rain should not be heeded, for statistically, such requests could make it impossible for rain to fall – in this particular case, we wait a little longer and allow the pilgrims to return home in peace. This waiting period for the pilgrims applies to the regular, daily wording of the prayer. Nevertheless, the transition between summer and winter is already marked on Shemini Atzeret by a one-time, special, and ancient prayer: the Tefillat Geshem, the Prayer for Rain.
In early machzorim, or festival prayer books, as well as in various Jewish communities, a longer version of the prayer can be found. It is generally attributed to Rabbi Eleazar HaKalir, a liturgical poet who left behind hundreds of piyyutim, or liturgical poems, associated with different days in the Jewish calendar. His identity and the period in which he lived have long been the subject of extensive and ongoing scholarly debate.
Today, however, Ashkenazi communities in Israel tend to focus on the piyyut that concludes this longer prayer. It begins with the words “Zechor av nimshach acharecha kamayim” (“Remember the father who followed You like water”), and is sung to different melodies according to the traditions and customs of each community. Interestingly, this particular piyyut was probably not written by HaKalir, but by another, unidentified liturgical poet who apparently lived many years after him.
The National Library holds several recordings of the piyyut, including a recording by the renowned cantor Yossele Rosenblatt.
The piyyut is divided into six stanzas, each devoted to one of the patriarchs and leaders of the Jewish people, all of whom were connected in some way to water: Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. Moses. Aaron. The final stanza is devoted to the entire people of Israel. Beyond the recurring plea for life-giving water at the end of each stanza, the piyyut conveys something deeper between the lines: the history of the Jewish people is inseparably intertwined with this very plea for water. With something we cannot produce ourselves. Something on which we are entirely dependent, a power beyond our own.אחר.
As noted above, from the end of Sukkot onward, rain becomes an inseparable part of Jewish prayer. And it seems to be equally inseparable from the history of the Jewish people, wherever they lived.
From the Talmudic stories of Honi the Circle-Maker, who drew a circle around himself in the ground and declared that he would not leave until rain fell (it did rain, although not quite in the way he had hoped), to more recent stories of organized prayers in the synagogues of Morocco, held at the king’s request only a few years ago.
In one case, the Jews of the city of Aragon in Spain were even taken outside the city walls and forbidden to return until the rain came (and it did).
Over time, the prayer took on new forms. In the early Hebrew kibbutzim, new prayers for rain were composed and became an integral part of the emerging holiday traditions. The beloved Hebrew songwriter and poet Levin Kipnis wrote a children’s song called Prayer for Rain, which was later set to music by Yitzhak Edel and became popular among kindergarten children.
Rain, rain, a dear child prays too
Rain, rain, God in heaven, send it to us
Hear our voice, God in heaven, and come down to earth,
Rain, water!
***
Like everything else in the world, rain, which brings life with it, can also be a curse. A disaster. Massive floods and extreme storms are among the deadliest forces of nature.
And so, each year, the Prayer for Rain concludes with these words:
For blessing and not for curse.
For life and not for death.
For plenty and not for famine.
