The Ground Decides How Much Rain

The Hook

The rain has not come. Seven final fasts have been decreed, and the whole town is standing in the main street in sackcloth, because the ark has been carried out of the synagogue and set down in the open. Ashes have been poured on the ark itself and on the Torah scroll. A man walks up to the Nasi, the head of the community, and puts ashes on his head, and then does the same to the head of the court, and then everyone else takes ashes and puts them on their own heads.

And then an old man stands up in front of the seated crowd and tells them that none of this is going to work.

Brethren, it is not sackcloth and fasting that will have an effect, but repentance and good deeds. And he proves it from Nineveh, where the verse does not say that God saw their sackcloth and their fasting, but that God saw their deeds. And he adds Joel: rend your hearts and not your garments. Which is a strange thing to say to a crowd that has already torn its garments and is sitting in the ashes waiting for you to lead them in prayer.

The Speech That Says the Fast Will Not Help

Notice where the ashes go on the Nasi. The Rambam specifies the place: where one puts on tefillin. The highest man in the community is publicly marked with ashes on the exact spot where he would ordinarily bind the words of the Shema to his head. And the reason is stated with no cushioning at all. So that they will be ashamed and repent. Nobody else in the crowd is singled out. Everyone else takes ashes and applies them himself, in private, at his own pace. Only the two men at the top have it done to them by another person, in front of the town.

Then the speaker. He should be a wise elder. If there is no wise elder, a man of wisdom. If there is no man of wisdom, then simply a man of stature, a person of presence. The Rambam builds the fallback into the law, which means he expects communities where no one qualifies and refuses to let that become an excuse to skip the rebuke.

And what the man says is the most interesting piece of liturgical furniture in the whole chapter, because it disarms the day. He does not say that the fast is worthless. He says the fast is not the cause. The sackcloth is not the mechanism. The town is not conducting a transaction in which suffering is exchanged for water. And having said that, the Rambam immediately proceeds to describe the most elaborate order of prayer in the entire Mishneh Torah, with six added blessings, seven soundings, and a procession to the cemetery. The disclaimer is not a retraction. It is a correction of the reader's assumption about what all this apparatus is for.

The Alter Rebbe makes the same move at length in Iggeret HaTeshuvah, where he takes teshuvah out of the hands of the body altogether. Teshuvah, he writes, is not fasting and not affliction; it is the return of the soul to its root, and the fasts that were once its instrument are secondary to a broken heart. He is not inventing that reading. He is drawing out the sentence the Rambam puts in the mouth of the elder at the very start of the day.

A Man With Children and No Money

Then the community rises to pray and has to choose someone to lead. If the man who gave the rebuke is fit to lead, he leads. If not, somebody else is chosen. And here the Rambam gives a list of qualifications, and almost none of them are about prayer.

He should be someone who prays frequently and reads Torah, Prophets and Writings frequently. That much is expected. And then: he should have children, and lack means, and have work in the field. Read those three together. He should be a man who is currently under pressure, who has mouths depending on him, whose income is uncertain, whose hands are in the same dirt the community is asking God to water. He is not asked to be a scholar. He is asked to be exposed.

Then the negative conditions, and they are unusually wide. None of his children may be a transgressor, nor any member of his household, nor any of his relatives who depend on him for support. His house should be empty of sin. And no unfavorable report should have been made about him during his childhood. He must be humble. He must be acceptable to the people. He must have a pleasant voice and a sweet one. And if he happens to be an elder as well, that is most desirable, and if he is not an elder, he is fit anyway.

The relatives clause is the one that should stop you. A man's own conduct may be spotless and his home may be in order, and if a brother-in-law who eats at his expense is known to be a transgressor, he is not the one who stands before the ark today. That is not a judgment about his soul. It is a statement about what this particular prayer is. He is not representing himself. He is representing a household, and the household is what has to be able to stand there. The story told of the Baal Shem Tov, that a shepherd boy who could not read was the one whose whistle opened the gates, is often heard as a rejection of qualifications like these. It is closer to the opposite. Both are looking past the performance to the life underneath it.

Seven Names and a Handbreadth of Rain

The prayer itself is built out of names. The chazan goes as far as the blessing of redemption and there he opens it up, inserting Zichronot and Shofarot verses that fit the trouble at hand, and the psalms of a man in a narrow place. I called to God in my distress. I lift my eyes to the mountains. Out of the depths. A prayer of the afflicted when he grows faint. Then supplications as far as his ability reaches, and then the seal: He who answered Abraham our father at Mount Moriah will answer you and hear the sound of your cry on this day.

Six more blessings follow, and each one closes the same way with a different name and a different place. Moses and our ancestors at the Red Sea. Joshua at Gilgal. Samuel at Mitzpeh. Elijah at Mount Carmel. Jonah in the belly of the fish. David and Solomon his son in Jerusalem. Seven answers, seven locations, and the community says amen after each of them exactly as it says amen after any blessing at all.

Look at who is on that list. Jonah is on that list, and Jonah is the man who was running away when the trouble found him. His prayer is included among the seven not because he was worthy of an answer but because he received one. The list is not a catalogue of merits. It is a catalogue of precedents, and precedent is what a frightened community needs. Somebody stood in a specific place, in specific trouble, and was answered. The blessing does not say God answers prayer. It says God answered Elijah at Carmel.

Then the trumpets, and here the Rambam is careful in a way that is easy to skim past. The seventh blessing returns to the ordinary order of the Amidah beginning with Heal us, the trumpets are sounded, and this order of prayer is followed in every place. But the elaborate version, where the attendant calls out Sound a teki'ah, priests and Sound a teru'ah, sons of Aaron, and the priests answer with seven alternating series while trumpets and shofar sound together, is done on the Temple Mount and nowhere else. Every community may pray this way. No community outside that courtyard may sound it that way.

And then the ending, which is the reason to read the chapter. After the prayers, everyone walks out to the cemetery and weeps there, as if to say, unless you return from your ways you are like these. Ne'ilah is added in every place. And then the last law asks the practical question. The rains have come. How much is enough to stop fasting? A handbreadth deep in parched ground. Two handbreadths in ordinary ground. Three in cultivated ground.

The Unifying Principle

The chapter refuses abstraction at every point where abstraction would be easier, and the last law is the proof. There is no threshold for how much rain counts as an answer. There is only a question about which ground you are standing on.

Parched, thirsty earth is satisfied by a handbreadth. Worked and cultivated earth, ground that has been broken and turned and is expecting to produce, needs three. The same rainfall is a full answer in one field and not an answer at all in the next. Nobody in the town could tell you whether the prayer was accepted by looking up. They would have to go out and dig.

Everything in the chapter has that shape. The rebuke refuses the abstraction that suffering purchases mercy. The qualifications for the prayer leader refuse the abstraction that a good voice is a good representative. The seven blessings refuse the abstraction of a God who answers in general, and give you seven men and seven places instead. And the trumpet order refuses the abstraction that a beautiful practice belongs everywhere. The Sfat Emet reads Elul as a season for preparing the vessel rather than for measuring the yield, and this chapter is that instruction in its plainest form.

Modern Application

Almost everyone has a version of the man who gave the rebuke: the moment before the effort begins when somebody honest says that the effort is not the mechanism. The trap is to hear that as permission to stop. The Rambam clearly does not, since he then lays out the most demanding order of prayer he ever describes. What the rebuke removes is not the work. It is the arithmetic. You are not paying for anything. You are becoming the kind of person who can ask.

The qualifications for the prayer leader are worth holding up against how we actually choose who speaks for us. Fluency, presence, availability. The Rambam wants a man with dependents and no cushion, whose relatives are accounted for, who is liked, who has never had a bad name, and who happens to sound good. The voice is last on the list and it is not omitted, which is the honest part. He knows the community has to be able to bear listening to him for a long day. He simply will not let that be the qualification.

And the ground. When you want to know whether something has landed, the temptation is to measure the rain. How much did I put in, how much came down, how long did it last. The chapter tells you to measure the soil instead. Ground that has been broken open and prepared for something needs more before it counts, and dry ground that has been waiting is satisfied with far less. Which means the honest question after any hard season is not what came, but what condition the field was in when it arrived.

The Closing

This chapter falls on Shabbat, the ninth of Elul, when the Alter Rebbe pictured the King as walking in the field, out where the working people are and not in the palace where an audience must be arranged. It is a fitting week for a chapter whose ideal prayer leader is a man with children, no money and work in the field, and whose measure of a divine answer is taken in the dirt with a handbreadth of rain.

The town was told at the very start of the day that the fast would not do it. Then it fasted, and prayed seven blessings full of other people's names, and walked out to the graves, and went home and waited. And when the rain finally came, nobody looked at the sky to decide whether it was enough. They went and knelt in the field and measured how far down it had reached. Go and ask what condition your own ground is in before you ask how much has fallen on it.