Prayer Lesson 29 – Geshem, the Prayer for Rain

In Israel, there is a rainy season and a dry season. The dry season stretches through the six months from Passover to Shemini Atzeret. The rainy season begins on Shemini Atzeret, and lasts until Pesach.

How rainy is it? Well on an annual basis, Jerusalem gets more rain than London—but all of it within six months. So when it rains, it really does pour.

In our prayers, we mark the transition from dry to rainy season with a special prayer called Geshem (literally, “Rain”). The prayer has an interesting structure, making reference to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, and the twelve tribes of Israel. In very clever poetic fashion, the prayer uses water imagery to describe these characters (for example, Abraham was “drawn after You, G-d, like water”), or else links them to historical events involving water (for instance, Jacob, who crossed the waters of the Jordan River on his way back to Babylonia).

The prayer concludes with the wishful description of G-d as “the One Who causes wind to blow and water to descend.” This phrase is added to every Amidah prayer we recite for the next six months, until Passover (when a parallel prayer for Dew, Tal, is recited).

The central thrust of Geshem, relating the character and history of our people to water, is significant. We’ve all heard that Eskimos have 50 words for snow (it’s true, by the way). Such linguistic richness obviously reflects the ubiquity of the phenomenon in the Eskimo world. So, too, our people’s emphasis on water. Israel is situated at the meeting point between well-watered arable land and desert wilderness. No wonder water played such a tremendous role in our people’s imagination.

Equally important is the fact that we pray in accordance with the seasonal weather patterns in Israel, not here in New Jersey or anywhere else. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg described it, linking our prayers to Israeli realities “was the Jews’ way of maintaining an unbroken tie, a statement that as Jews they were living on Jerusalem Standard Time, not Greenwich Meridian or Central Mountain time.”