ON PRAYING FOR RAIN AFTER SUKKOT
Someone on Facebook who lives in a rainy ecosystem said it felt weird to her to pray for rain after Sukkot because rain is a given. She understood why you would pray for rain in Israel, but in London?
I think this is a case, amongst many, many others, of taking our ancestors too literally. Of course, if you live in London, or Seattle or the mid Atlantic, praying for rain isn’t what you need to do. But praying for an ecosystem in balance certainly is.
The great majority of us live on good land, land that will take care of us if work with it as compared to over/against it. We also need to be in some kind of alignment with the divine, however we define that. The gift of good land is what makes our lives possible.
Our civilization, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, is utterly out of alignment with the more than human world. We treat most of the other beings who make up the more than human world as mere things to be used for our own convenience. We are out of balance. The consequences of being out of balance are readily available for us to see—devastating floods, terrible droughts, wildfire, whole species of trees dying because of invasive predators, hurricanes etc etc.
What there is to do, in my opinion, is pray for what is needed in your ecosystem, with the acknowledgement that we certainly do not deserve it as a species. So in my case, after Sukkot I start to pray for snow and cold. It’s not that I like snow or cold. In fact, I’m grateful for warmer than average winters where we receive rain but not snow. As someone who liked Seattle winters over midwestern ones once said to me, “you can’t shovel rain.” But I live in an ecosystem that is designed to have winters. I pray for winter to actually happen.
So pray for what should happen, if the land, the people and the divine were actually aligned. In Israel, that’s rain, by us that’s snow and some cold. Be at home enough in your ecosystem to know what balance looks like and pray for it.
