Prayer for Rain
Dear Friends,
The days after the big holidays always beg the question how we are to come down from the mountaintop. Can the ecstasies be sown into the rhythms of the mundane, the garden expanded to all the soil of the earth. So I’ve made soup every second or third day, the fridge is small – carrots lentil ginger clove pepper tomato mustard seed potato salt. I carved up one of the thousand logs on our porch into an arm of bells that were used to bless a wedding, now they jingle in unison. And I took up my oud again. Hadn’t touched it over the summer. After the holidays I’m filled with energy, music, the feeling of our theme, inanimate material prodigious ripe to be written into a container of song.
As we learned over the holidays, the new year celebrations culminate in a festival of water. And so I dug into the prayer book and found one of the oldest poems of the tradition. The oldest songs were water prayers, I learned, the primal necessity of life, enough water to live. And the melody came swift, and it rolls and moves like a stream, like the sound of the bells of a caravan of camels moving through the wilderness toward water. But the words were a mouthful, every phrase concluding with the word, mayim, water, and I sat in the basement for hours a day trying to get the words on my lips and the plucking of my hands to fall in line, while Zivar went crazy upstairs from the incessant repeating melody, played not so well.
The poem goes through all the images of the ancestors and their interactions with water, the wooing love meetings of shepherds beside wells, magic clouds, inconsolable mothers, womb’s opening like rivers, drum songs and dance by a sea of water. The chorus sings, on account of the goodness righteousness of the ancestors, don’t hold back water, because of them, bless us with abundant water. I must have sung the word mayim four thousand times this week. No mention of rain at all in the prayer for rain. But the return to the elemental. Rain only water in its perceived phase of activity. But really all of life plays out beside through above below in around the thirst for water.
With faucets and electric pumps it is easy to forget the blessing of water. And we are eroding. The forgetfulness is eroding consciousness, the destruction of the land and the waters a reflection of our own topology. For thousands of generations, this week began the season of rain song and rain dance. Let’s not be the ones to let the prayers go quiet.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman
ps – Translation below drawn from the traditional text, and new matriarch verses written by Jill Hammer and Ruth Gan Kagan. Here’s Yosele Rosenblatt; mine should be ready soon.
Remember the father drawn to you like water
You blessed him like a tree planted beside streams of water
Protected him saved him from fire and water
You sought him when he planted beside all the waters
For his sake don’t withhold water
Remember the girl how it came up to meet her, the water
She let her pitcher off her shoulder and gave water
For the camels too she drew from the well of water
Over her tent hovered a cloud full of water
For her goodness bless us with water
Remember the shepherdess who came with the flock to the well of water
Wailing bitter weeping she cries like water
Her sister's eyes soft from tears of water
You opened her womb like a river of water
For her sake don’t withhold water
Remember the one drawn in a basket of reeds from the water
They said, he drew and poured sated the sheep with water
When your people thirsted for water
He struck a rock and out came water
For his goodness bless us with water
Remember the one on guard in the reeds beside the river of water
She whispered to the newborns to save them from the darkness of water
With a drum and dance she sang beside a sea of water
By her merit you brought the gift of a well of water
For her goodness bless us with water