We met for our annual water/rain service, using the history of Shemini Atzeret to reflect on our connections to the natural cycles that sustain all life. Far more so that most of our services, this one is based in Jewish textual history – Rashi on Genesis 2, Af-Bri the angel of rain, Honi the Circle Maker, Talmudic arguments about whose prayer for rain counts and why. We also do the Tefilat Geshem/Prayer for Rain in its traditional form and an original adaptation into English that plays with the sound patterns and reflexive theology of the original. Shemini Atzeret reveals our deep cultural roots in agricultural, sympathetic magic: we will celebrate and pour water in order draw down the joy of benevolent rain from the heavens.
Scroll down to see our slides with the Tefilat Geshem!
Read our liturgy here: Fringes October 2025: Shemini Atzeret is a Prayer for Rain
Shemini Atzeret
What, exactly, is Shemini Atzeret, a holiday once central and urgent and now mainly just one of those terms that fly by with no explanation? The name means “Eighth Day of Assembly.” It falls on the 8th day after the first day of the festival of Sukkot (harvest), but is its own separate holiday. Because of complicated patterns of sukkot being different numbers of days in different places, Shemini Atzeret may be the same day as Simhat Torah – a holiday added by the rabbis that wrote celebrating Torah over the top of earlier agricultural Judaism. The holiday was, at least in rabbinic description, a huge celebration, with street parties, juggling, lanterns, and a central water-pouring ceremony. (Note – rabbinic writings came long after the fall of the Temple, so can’t be treated as actual history). In our inherited liturgy, Shemini Atzeret is the day that the prayer for dew, in the amidah, becomes the prayer for rain, which tracks with the seasonal pattern in ancient Israel/Canaan/Palestine. Without the rainy season, people would starve the next summer, so it made perfect sense to end the harvest festival with fervent prayers for the rains to begin.
As always, music is central to our prayer life. Here are a few of the songs we used today:
Julia Watts Belser, “Blessings of the Breasts and the Womb”
Sweet Honey in the Rock performing Pete Seeger’s “Step by Step”
Molly Bajgot, “Tefilat Geshem” (Buy the album on Bandcamp, it’s great!)
Fringes Tefilat Geshem
