Rain Falls Equally: Summary of Shemini Atzeret Meditation & Prayer Mini-Retreat (5783)
Integrating personal, collective, ancestral and ecological significance, closing this season of Hebrew holidays.
Connecticut river from Mt. Sugarloaf, Wabanaki land, MA USA. Photo by the Author.
I wanted to hold a simple day of practice for Shemini Atzeret, a day of significance to integrating the personal, collective, ancestral and ecological, closing this season of the Hebrew holidays. So I invited others to join me on a mini-retreat with silent meditation, dveykus music and prayer.
We opened with a wordless niggun (hassidic melody) attributed to Rabbi Aharon of Staroszele, an 18th century hassidic rabbi from Ukraine-Poland region, and a disciple of Rabbi Shneur Zalman Maladi. It’s a long, beautiful and haunting tune, and I accompanied it with a frame drum, resonant and deep. Folks gathered in onto the zoom space.
After a quick introduction to the sources of the day and its location on the annual holiday cycle, I called out other aspects - the ancestral remembrance, the prayer for rain, the fact that it confuses people - is it part of the Sukkot? or Simchat torah? What day does it fall on differs where it is observed. I welcomed this confusion - Atzeret means to gather, as well as to stop - full stop. Stop understanding, stop figuring, stop ideating, stop creating. The genius of this day is that it is inserted right when the weekly reading of the torah ends and the cycle of reading begins - full stop.
Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot. Efforting, practicing, davenning, meditating, yearning. we’ve done it all. Now, we can drop it all. Full stop.
A colleague, a leader in an American jewish community told me the other day that he is ‘Jewed out’ following leading the high holidays ending with Yom Kippur. Great, I said, Shemini Atzeret gives us the permission to stop. Everything, including being a Jew. drop. it. all.
Someone once asked me if I ever stop being a Jew. I answer yes, when I stop thinking about being a Jew. Zen training drilled into me - I am what I think. When that is dropped, or penetrated, what remains is a porous experience, nameless, alive, vivid. The precious self, or selves, when acknowledged, loved, take the back seat.
Shemini refers to the eighth day following Sukkot, but its an odd day out - the number seven is central to Jewish cosmology, with seven creation days, seven weeks of Omer, seven lower Sefirot and on and on. Shemini is eighth - in a way, it doesn’t fit anywhere - or rather, it is outside. This day, the stop it offers, is to step outside of the stream.
Closing the introduction, I chose the song Bakasha by contemporary Israeli musician Noam Ben David, invoking a simple request for the capacity we yearn for, to begin the meditation.
אנא פתח שערייך
שמע קולי קטן כגדול
זרע אמונה בלב האנשים
אמונה בעצמם ביכולתם ובך אלוהים
Ana Petakh Sha’arekha
(Please open your gates)
sh’ma koli, katan k’gadol
(hear my voice, small, as grand)
z’rah emonah, b’lev ha’anashim
(seed faith in the hearts of people)
Emonah be’atzmam, b’yekholtam u’bkha elohim
(faith in themselves, their capacity, and in you, great mystery)
Today was a day to spool all the yarn - threads, tendrils of self, into the center, be simple, naked, present. Nothing special, returning to an adorned direct experience of life, embodied.
We meditated for about two hours with several breaks in between. Something else is cultivated in this silence - awakening and reliance on Yekhida, a mysterious thing that hassidic zoharic teaching suggest we all share, translatable to both singularity, togetherness and a ‘unit.’ It calls us from our inner being to nurture.
Three bells marked the opening of a sitting period, two bells marked the ending.
Before the third period began, I suggested:
Forget about mystery
Forget about ancestors
Forget about meditation
Forget about presence
Just forget.
Two hours of shared silence both eased, and electrified the field. While some where navigating challenging circumstances in their personal lives, being with them, instead of being them, allowed for a new orientation. I invoked the teachings of Reb. Zalman, given to me from Rabbi Shohama Wiener who was in attendance, regarding ‘Arrow Prayer.’ An orientation that can heal, generate, affect reality - prayer, manifested, when pointed collectively, like an arrow.
Rabbinic teaching posit that the entirety of the high holidays is to bring us to this point with the clearest mind - so we can invoke the rains - something that the Judaean agrarian ancestors relied on for their survival. Rain is held in higher regard even than torah, as it benefits everyone, equally - crucial for this very real earth that sustains us. Climate change is real, some attendees has just survived Hurricane Ian that slammed into the western coast of Florida, USA. Praying for rain in a time of climate collapse requires a pause.
We invoked balance of weather, and the healing of earth. The prayer for rain, according to the Sephardi (Spanish, middle-eastern) tradition is short, repetitive and resonant. We acknowledged the legacy that Arab Jews of color have left us tomes of poems and liturgical invocations. With the frame drum beat as our backdrop, we invoked the prayer, in english first. We took turn reading each prayer, between each sentence we repeated, “Adama, Adama”
There’s more.
The Lotus sutra teaches:
It [wisdom, awareness] rains equally everywhere
Falling alike in the four directions
Pouring without measure
Saturating all the lands.
As the drum continued reverberating, I repeated the prayer in Hebrew:
Adama, hebrew of earth, is also the soil of our minds - the rain of awareness soaks it, nurtures it. Calling on the earth of this, right here, this reality, affirms it. This prayer calls for integrating the abundance of elemental rains, with the outpour of awareness on the terrain of our minds, everywhere. There is something with a full stop that allows the rain, the mist, to be felt. With nuance. With attention.
Bringing the four hour mini-retreat to a close, to return to the stream of time and relations outside of this retreat, we recited a shortened Ashrei prayer, and closed with chanting the last two lines of Pslam 23, (following a melody I picked up earlier this week sung by Zazoo Bar Shalom, another contemporary Israeli musician.)
אַ֤ךְ | ט֤וֹב וָחֶ֣סֶד יִ֭רְדְּפוּנִי כָּל-יְמֵ֣י חַיָּ֑י
וְשַׁבְתִּ֥י בְּבֵית-יְ֝הוָ֗ה לְאֹ֣רֶךְ יָמִֽים:
Akh tov va’khesed yirdefuni kol yamei khayai
V’shavti b’veit havaya le’orekh tamim
— But goodness and mercy will follow me through all my life
and I have sat / returned to the refuge of presence for prosperity
