And so we leave the frenetic holiday season and settle into the long haul until Chanukah. (Actually, I’ve just checked on the calendar, and that unbelievably long stretch of nothing appears to be just nine weeks! I’m sure it was longer in my youth.)

One of the last flourishes of the festival season on Shmini Atzeret/Simchat Torah is the prayer for rain. Although fairly short, this prayer is charged with significance. As an indication of the seriousness with which we are asking for God’s favourable judgement regarding rain for the coming year, the chazzan leading the prayer wears a kittel, the white cotton or linen robe worn on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur,

In a world where few of us are farmers, it is easy to underestimate the significance of rain, in the appropriate season and in the appropriate quantities, for an agricultural society. However, in 2022, when we are being warned that events in the Ukraine may lead to a world grain shortage, the potential impact of crop failure may soon be brought home to us.

The immediate effect of saying the prayer for rain is that we change the relevant one-line addition to the amida prayer that we say three times daily from ‘He causes the dew to fall’ to ‘He makes the wind blow and the rain fall’. You might expect that a reasonably intelligent human being would be able to make this switch without too much difficulty. However, the cumulative effect of reciting the summer formula three times daily, day in, day out, for the previous six months, embarrassingly often means that people make a mistake.

As the days go on, the mistakes (one hopes) become rarer; there is usually a point where you switch from being fairly sure you used the wrong formula to being completely unsure which formula you used (probably the most humiliating state), and then, some time later, being fairly confident you used the right formula. Of course, if one always recited the Amida with full mindfulness and intent, and if one always read every word from the prayer book, one would be much less likely to slip, but…

(Ed Note: Perceptive readers will have realised that, in the previous paragraphs, ‘people’, ‘you’ and ”one’ are all euphemisms for ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I’.)

The change in our prayers is utterly dependable. However, in Israel, the change in the weather is considerably less so. This year has been, in this sense, immensely satisfying. In the days following Simchat Torah, we have been blessed – even in edge-of-the-desert Maale Adumim – with rain. Those of us who were sufficiently on the ball to take down our sukka (or at least the decorations) soon after the festival managed to beat the rain, at least here, which made me, for one, feel very smug.

This is, incidentally, quite separate from the smugness I feel because I don’t actually have anything much in the way of a sukka to take down. Our sukka is defined by three sturdy and permanent walls and our pergola roof. Decorations are about all I have to put up and take down, apart from a straightforward symbolic removal and immediate replacement of a few pergola slats to represent placing the schach (roof covering.

The initial rain was a drop or two, nothing more. Then, on Thursday evening, just as Bernice and I were finishing supper outside in our backyard, I felt a drop of rain on my arm. This was followed by a long minute when Bernice was not fully convinced that the drop was no more than hallucination on my part – and, to be honest, even I was starting to have my doubts – but then there were a couple more drops. We decided a move inside would be judicious and, not long after we had cleared up, we had several minutes of light rain, even accompanied by a distant rumble of thunder, but no lightning.

It rained on and off through the night, with, this time, thunder and lightning, allowing me to calculate that the centre of the storm was nine miles away. What an excellent investment my copy of the Schoolboy’s Pocket Book was in 1961. Of course some of its information is now out of date: it still lists the Commonwealth’s monarch as Elizabeth, for example.

However, much of its information is still jolly useful for all sorts of projects: I find it hard to imagine, for example, going through life without knowing that the bending allowance for a metal sheet with an S.W.G. of 22 and a 1/16 inch rad. is 0.115. (Don’t write to ask me – I have no idea. And don’t write to tell me – I have no interest.) Suffice to say that if you ever need to know the frequency in Mc/s at which the BBC broadcast radio from Crystal Palace, or the system used for numbering steam engines on the Southern Region railway, I’m your man! But I digress.

For someone who lives in Manchester (or even Seattle), it is not easy to explain the impact of this first rain of the winter in Israel. It has its own name – yoreh – and, indeed, it seems to have its own ‘green’ smell as it freshens the plants in the garden. It is usually gentle, short-lived, temperate (where our mid-winter rains, even in Maale Adumim, can be skin-tinglingly, bone-chillingly icy, driven almost horizontal by fierce winds, and sometimes falling as stinging sleet or hail). It feels absolutely like the blessing that we pray for, holding, as it does, the promise – albeit not always fulfilled – of rain in its season throughout the winter and a good harvest next summer.

Our only personal skin in this game is a small garden of mostly green plants with an automatic drip-irrigation system and four trees – a loquat, a lemon, and small peach and necatrine (which last two yield only about 25 fruits between them). At a push you can count the synthetic grass, since it also looks considerably perkier after the rain. However, even for us, seeing, hearing and smelling the yoreh is deeply fulfilling.

Here I should pause to apologise to Micha’el and the family in Portugal. When I wrote on our family WhatsApp group on Thursday evening with the exciting news about our first rain, Esther chipped in enthusiastically from Zichron where it had also just started raining. The following morning, Micha’el informed us that Penamacor was on its third day of non-stop rain. As we say in the prayer for rain: ‘For a blessing and not for a curse.’

The rain (in its season) is only one aspect of the natural cycle of the year that is so central to Jewish liturgy and religious practice. This last shabbat we announced the new moon that will be born (as the Hebrew has it) on Tuesday morning, shortly after this post is due to be published. Growing up traditional but not observant in Britain, I admit to having had no idea when the new moon fell. Nor did I ever realise that the moon rose in different parts of the sky and at different hours, at different times of year. I never even noticed that the orientation of the crescent of the moon towards the beginning and end of each lunar month was different at different times of year.

I have just checked, and even my Schoolboy’s Pocket Book completely ignores this topic. (I think I shall ask for my money back.) All I will say in my defence is that, growing up in suburban Ilford, not much of the sky close to the horizon was visible. Of course, in the words of the music-hall song, ‘Wiv a ladder and some glasses, you could see to ‘Ackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in-between.’

Now, of course, we live in a city that offers unrestricted views over the Judean desert toward the Dead Sea, and, in the other direction, indeed from the window of the room where I am typing this, a view of the hills between us and Jerusalem, eight miles away. In Maale Adumim, and living a life more in harmony with the rhythms of the natural world, nature seems very much more immediate than it ever did in Ilford.

Meanwhile, in rainswept Penamacor, the brothers are keeping each other’s spirits up, despite being confined indoors with the sniffles.