Daily Talk
The first words spoken on the great fast days for rain are not a prayer. They are a speech telling the assembled town that the fast will not help them. The Rambam then spends the whole chapter building the liturgy anyway, and ends it by measuring how far the water sank into the dirt. Why bother with the sackcloth at all?
The Ground Decides How Much Rain
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About This Talk
Chapter 4 sets out the order of prayer for each of the final seven fasts decreed for lack of rain, beginning with the ark carried into the street, the community gathered in sackcloth, ashes placed on the ark and on the Torah scroll, and ashes laid by another man on the heads of the Nasi and the chief justice at the place of the tefillin so that they will be ashamed and repent, and then a wise elder rising to tell the fasting town that it is not sackcloth and fasting that have an effect but repentance and good deeds. It then rules who may lead the prayers, requiring a man who prays and reads often, who has children and lacks means and works in the field, whose children and household and dependent relatives are free of transgression, who is humble and liked and sweet of voice, and stating that an elder is most desirable but that a younger man with these virtues is fit; and it lays out the prayer itself, opened at the blessing of redemption with Zichronot and Shofarot and the psalms of distress, followed by six added blessings each sealed with one who was answered, from Abraham at Moriah to David and Solomon in Jerusalem. It closes with the trumpets sounded at the seventh blessing in every place, the calling and the seven alternating series reserved for the Temple Mount alone, the walk out to the cemetery and the Ne'ilah recited everywhere, and the measure that ends the fast, a handbreadth of rain into parched earth, two into ordinary earth and three into cultivated earth.