The prayer for rain, which we will be reciting at the weekend, is one of the most sombre moments in the liturgy. The ark is opened and the chazan will have donned the white kittel associated with the High Holy Days.
But there has always been something incongruous about saying it at this time of year. Often the skies would be leaden outside and sometimes a heavenly downpour drumming on the windows would remind us of its superfluousness. Even more than the sweet fragrance of the etrog, for me the definitive smell of Succot is that of dripping leaves. On occasions autumn would brew up a storm that would untether a less secure succah and send it billowing across the garden like a sailboat on a green sea.
Shouldn’t we rather be saying a prayer for sun, we would invariably joke. Of course, the prayer is geared to the seasons in the Land of Israel when farmers would be hoping for enough rainfall to sustain their crop in the coming year. We also begin to insert into the Amidah the phrase “who causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall” – some congregations also include “who causes the dew to fall” during the summer. But I can’t think of an equivalent “who causes the sun to shine”: in the hot Middle East the rabbis of antiquity would have seen no need. It might have been a different story if the Promised land had been Scotland.
But this year the prayer for rain will have a new immediacy, coming on the back of an unseasonably hot summer, which we are told was not a freakish once-in-50 years event but the sign of climate change. In summers past the lowering clouds would often threaten a planned outing but this time we were left yearning for cool drops of rain to break the grip of the heat. Not once did I have to say, “I wished I’d packed my umbrella.”
Who could not empathise with the prophet Jonah, whom we read about on Yom Kippur, seeking respite from the unforgiving sun? As the hosepipe ban kicked in, we became horticultural Noahs, having to decide which of our plants to visit with a relieving watering-can. The deputy chairman of Reform UK might have said to look on the bright side and think of the positive impact of the weather on English bubbly but many of us would be worrying about blighted harvests and the rise in food bills.
If these heatwaves become the norm, we may have to appoint our own communal circle-drawer – after Honi, the talmudic character who drew a circle around himself and refused to budge until the Almighty had granted his petition for rain. The floodgates opened – the water gushed down so thick and fast that the Judeans had to take to the hills to escape it. I confess, I would skim over the warning in the Shema, “and He shut up the heaven and there be no rain” without much thought, but eco-theology is now forcing us to confront their meaning in our own time. Likewise, I would follow the melody of the prayer for rain and join in its refrain, “send water”, but not pay too much attention to the actual words.
As elsewhere in the liturgy, it invokes the merit of our ancestors to support our cause. But the imagery in places is sobering. In the case of Isaac, for instance, “You told his father to slaughter him – to spill his blood like water.” This is echoed later when we remember the offspring of the Israelites, “whose blood was spilt for You like water”. A reference that has a new resonance for us since Shemini Atzeret has been indelibly stamped as the yahrzeit of the victims of October 7.
I can’t say I’m comfortable with these allusions to martyrdom. But there is a more hopeful note we might bring to mind, from the words of Joel, which we chanted only the other day in the haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: “Be glad, children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord, your God/ For… he causes the rain to come down for you.”
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