Raining Down

When it rained on Noah and his family, it rained for forty days and forty nights. This was no mere case of scattered showers: “All the fountains of the great deep burst apart, and the floodgates of the sky burst open” (Bereshit 7.11).

Last Wednesday, the Jewish calendar turned over to the winter season, the rainy season. In our daily prayers, we stop calling on God as the one who “brings down the dew” and instead address God as the one who “brings down the rain.”

Right on cue, the rains fell in Jerusalem. Friday afternoon, as I rushed home to dress for Shabbat, the Jerusalem sky became dotted with grey rain clouds, low and patchy, leaving swaths of blue sky and rays of yellow sunlight. I thought, if I were a deer, I could jump gracefully between the rainy spots and avoid getting wet. It was the kind of sky and rain and mood a photographer relishes—all shadow and contrast.

I don’t really like the rain. Perhaps I should rephrase. I don’t like going about my daily chores and activities in the rain. If I could sit by my window and look wistfully at the interplay of grey and blue in the sky and imagine stories from the forms of the clouds, I would love the rain. But I don’t like umbrellas or wet cuffs or ugly waterproof shoes or feeling cold and clammy.

It’s raining in Jerusalem, and it will be on and off for the next few days. And, from what I hear, this is what winter in Jerusalem is, or at least, this is how it begins. It is the season of the rains.

And even though I don’t really like the rain, the rain in Jerusalem is different. In Israel, there’s really no fall (I do miss the drama of the leaves’ changing in Massachusetts, in New Hampshire, in the Hudson Valley, and in Prospect Park). But the change of seasons here happened, and happened noticeably. During the summer, I almost never saw a single cloud in Jerusalem. Now, clouds and rains are becoming an expected part of the horizon. It’s making me think about rains and seasons differently, in a more agricultural way. These are the rains that will nourish the crops I will purchase at the shuk later in the year. These are the rains that will determine the success or failure of much of the economic life of Israel and her citizens and residents.

Of course I know that rain everywhere is crucial to human sustenance. But I am simply more aware of this fact in Jerusalem, where I cannot readily find every type of fruit or vegetable in the local market, where my dinner table follows more closely the seasons of the year.

Rains can also be floods, of course, but even the flood we read about this coming Shabbat in the story of Noah ends with a promise, a covenant. Part of that promise is God’s reassurance to us that the rhythm of the world will continue: “So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease” (Bereshit 8.22).

For the first time in my life, I am praying for rain. I don’t mean that I am engaging in some kind of “rain dance”; I don’t believe that I need to ask God for rain else we face a drought. Rather, I am including in my daily prayers an acknowledgement of the importance of the rhythm of the seasons—even the seasons I don’t enjoy. I am grateful for the rain. I am grateful that the year has a rhythm we can at least in part predict, that the seasons repeat and endure. There’s something comforting about the rains in Jerusalem, and something comforting about the fact that they rolled in right on cue.

In Joel, the prophet urges us to be glad: “Rejoice in the Lord your God, for [God] has given you the early rain in kindness, and now makes the rain fall as before—the early rain and the late—and threshing floors shall be piled with grain, and vats shall overflow with new wine and oil” (Joel 2.23).

Perhaps this is the wine I’ll drink at Passover, at my table in Jerusalem, the Holy City, in Israel, an ancient land of deserts and mountains—a thirsty land that needs the rain falling outside my window.