a day of rain

On Wednesday night I woke up to the sound of thunder and blurted out from my slumber, “It’s raining!” I was truly excited, even while barely conscious. The last measurable rainfall in Philadelphia was on September 28, 2024, which was 30 days before the city broke a 150-year record for dry days. 

My excitement is both agriculturally and spiritually warranted. According to Rava (a fourth generation rabbi in Babylonia), A day of rain is greater than the day on which the Torah was given! (B.T. Taanit 7a).

Rabbinic prayers for rain are about the need for water and the harvest it makes possible, but they also become a paradigm for praying for what we most need and want in this world.

This week I noticed in myself a raw desire for the world to be different than it is and for the trajectory to be drastically different. My inner voice laments, “This is not how I want things to be. This is not the way the world should be. This is not the world I want my kids to grow up in.” I know this to be a stage of grief. I am so sad that I am willing to bargain for a better world. 

I have come to appreciate this as one of the core purposes of prayer. Prayer is a place we can bargain with God, a space to envision the world we wish was. 

In this week’s parsha, Chayei Sarah, Isaac takes a verse to regroup after his betrothal to Rebekkah. Genesis 24:63 reads, 

וַיֵּצֵא יִצְחָק לָשׂוּחַ בַּשָּׂדֶה לִפְנוֹת עָרֶב

“As evening nears, Isaac goes out into the field to talk.”

Who is he talking to? 

For the rabbis, Isaac is talking to the Divine. They teach, ain sicha ela tefilah – the mention of a conversation is a way to describe prayer (B.T. Brachot 26b). In fact, Isaac is teaching us one important way to pray. We need only begin a conversation. Be it aloud or in our hearts. Be it in the city or in the field. And most importantly, let it be in the middle of your day, in the middle of everything. This echoes the teachings of Rebbe Nachman who described prayer as a practice of hitbodedut - of being alone and in conversation with yourself. 

I know so many of us feel like we don’t know how to pray. Maybe we don’t know the words or the melodies or the choreography. Maybe we don’t know who or what we are speaking to or what the point is, what to make of the Divine.

In her poem Ordinary Immanence, Jessica Jacobs writes, 

“…Many years, many states away, in a far
                     more spacious place, at the braking
of a garbage truck, at the creak and hoist
of its mechanical arm pinioning a block’s-length
                                                  of bins to hoist and dump, I look up
from a book and know (the truck outside
rumbling away, my waste fraternizing with the waste
                     of my neighbors) that I want
to believe in God. Just like that—a new door
in a room I thought I knew by heart…”

There was a point in my life when I actively chose to believe in God and to learn to pray. And it has been a huge resource and source of resilience. In the rhythm of the ancient words is a chance to pray for shalom, for my own livelihood, for goodness and blessings and healing. Which also creates a chance for me to imagine them, to place my attention on them. While I cannot control or change many external circumstances, I do have agency in what I pay attention to internally. In this broken world, paying attention to beauty, gratitude, and goodness improves the quality of my days. And that makes me better able to access compassion, patience and hope as a parent, a partner, an activist and a rabbi.  

The poem concludes, 

“How do you listen for a sound you’ve never heard?
                     Or, more precisely,
                                for a sound you know so well
                                                                you’ve never heard it?”

As the days get shorter, the inauguration closer, and a need for a ceasefire persists, may you too feel able to take a walk and pray for what you need most and what you feel the world needs most. May sounds of the city be a container in which to express your grief and your fears. And may the spacious sky invite your gratitude and your courage.