Fringes October 2026: Sh’mini Atzeret

We are kept alive by our praise of the powers of rain

We met for our annual Shemini Atzeret service – an older, agricultural tradition Fringes has brought back into our practice. Shemini Atzeret, the 8th Day of the Assembly of Sukkot, was the ancient holiday of the Water Drawing Ceremony. This was, according to Talmud, a huge celebration with music, parades, fire juggling, and the water pouring ceremony that ensured rain would fall in sufficient amounts to ensure crops and survival until next Sukkot.

In Jewish spiritual vocabulary, water is the central blessing that ensures life, and that defines life. The world is created by the parting of waters, the Jewish people are born when a mixed multitude fled Egypt through parted seas, life balance is restored by entering the mikveh, and after death the body is ritually washed with water before burial. The rain cycle of ancient Canaan defined every part of life and the liturgy that developed to sustain life. As a Reconstructionist Jew, I didn’t know there is a large body of liturgy for geshem/rain, as only one prayer from that is included in the prayer book. Diving into that tradition is an ongoing project, bringing back treasures like Af-Bri, the angel of rain, and the story of Honi the Circle Maker demanding from God the exact right amount of rain.

Central to this is the prayer for rain – we use the Sephardic version – is a beautiful creation of sympathetic magic. The very grammar of the poem ensures that what happens below will happen above, and that we can invoke rain through the power of our prayers. The tefilat geshem we use is below. If you’d like to see more of the traditional liturgy from the Ashkenaz tradition, click here; for Sephardi, click here.

Download our October 2026 liturgy slides here.

Our torah study text was about Honi the Circle Maker. If you want to know more about Honi, check out texts on Sefaria!

Music Today

Julia Watts Belser, “Blessings of the Breast and the Womb”