by Jay Shachter

Jay Shachter was a Usenet contributor known for sending detailed private replies rather than posting publicly — "he often has valuable things to say in reply to net postings, but always chooses to end them by private mail." When David Sherman of the Law Society of Upper Canada asked why diaspora Jews begin saying v'ten tal u'matar on December 4, a day fixed by the solar calendar rather than the Jewish lunar calendar, Shachter sent him this response. Sherman published it to net.religion.jewish with permission.

What follows is a rare piece of Usenet halachic writing: methodical, historically grounded, and unafraid to say what many rabbis prefer not to say plainly. The custom has no legal basis. It never did. Several great medieval rabbis tried to fix it. They all failed. The Sages who built the law expected the Messiah before the drift became critical. He did not come.

It isn't always December 4. In the 19th century, it was December 3. In the 22nd century, it will be December 5.

Many people are confused about this one, so I feel obliged to reply to your question, since I am sure that nine-tenths of the replies on the net will be wrong.

V'ten tal umatar is a request for rain. It is not primarily a praise of God, Who is so mighty that among other things He causes the rain to fall — we do that elsewhere — it is a request for rain. As you probably know, prayer, as defined by the Torah, consists of three components: praise, request, and thanks, and they must be recited in that order. When the Sages implemented the Amida prayer, in the time of Ezra, they conceived of the first three benedictions as praise, the last three benedictions as thanks, and the middle benedictions as requests. The distinction may not be obvious to you, but that is how we should conceive the prayer — for example, the final benediction is not primarily a request for peace; it is primarily an expression of gratitude to God for bringing and continuing to bring peace.

Well, when do you ask for rain? Obviously, when you need it. Asking for something when you need it is, after all, a Scriptural precept, whereas reciting the Amida is only a Rabbinic precept. Asking for something when you don't need it is meaningless hypocrisy. When do you need rain? If you are a farmer, you need rain during the growing season. Even if you are not a farmer, you need rain during the growing season, because your food depends on farmers' growing their crops.

Seasons are not lunar events. They occur on the solar calendar. The question is not why Jews within the Exile begin asking for rain on a day determined (approximately) by the solar calendar. The question is: why do Jews in Israel begin praying for rain on a day determined by the lunar/solar calendar? Well, part of the reason is that Shmini Atseret is determined by the lunar/solar calendar, and people may want to be in Jerusalem for Shmini Atseret, and then they may need as much as two weeks to get home. We don't want to ask for rain in Israel while pilgrims are still on the road. The other part of the reason is that, the closer you get to the Equator, the less pronounced are the seasons. At the Equator there are no seasons at all. Although Israel is not a tropical country, the seasons are sufficiently mild that it's acceptable to be a few days off, solarly speaking, when you start to ask for rain. If the seasons were more pronounced, then the day would have to be precisely calculated in the solar calendar, regardless of whether that meant praying for muddy roads for the returning pilgrims.

Babylon is a bit further north than Israel (although not quite so far north as people think, because to travel from Babylon to Israel you first have to go northwest and then southwest to avoid the desert, giving people the impression that caravans from Babylon are coming from the north). In Babylon the seasons are more pronounced than they are in Israel. Also, you don't have to worry about pilgrims on the roads when Shmini Atseret comes late in the year. Therefore the Jews in Babylon did the logical thing, and decided that in their country they would begin asking for rain on a day determined by the solar calendar.

Now we get to the part about which many people are confused. I found much ignorance of this topic, even among yeshiva-educated people, even, in fact, among rabbis. The law, as it was enacted in Babylon, is that one begins to pray for rain sixty days after the autumnal equinox. Now, the first thing that anyone will notice who has a calendar, the ability to count, and curiosity — the last attribute appears to be particularly lacking among yeshiva-educated people — is that December 4 is not 60 days after the autumnal equinox. In other words, December 4 is the wrong date — in fact it is wrong by quite a bit.

Well, you see, we don't use the real autumnal equinox. We use a "statutory" autumnal equinox. The statutory equinox is based on the assumption that a solar year is exactly 365 and 1/4 days long. To calculate this year's statutory equinox, you just add 365 days and 6 hours to last year's statutory equinox. As you probably know, however, the solar year is really (approximately) 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. So the Julian approximation of 365 days 6 hours will gain approximately 1 day every 128 years — and you can therefore calculate from this year's statutory equinox just how many years we have been using this approximation.

The Sages knew that 365 and 1/4 days was just an approximation, and they knew that it would gain a day every hundred or so years. They could have been more accurate had they wanted to be. They deliberately chose the simplest reasonable approximation so that people could easily calculate the statutory equinox, because this was before the Hindu-Arabic number system. They did not want to make the law so hermetic that certain communities would not observe it correctly. Another thing they did, to simplify calculation, is to implement the concept of the "statutory sunset" which always occurs at 18:00. Thus, whenever the statutory equinox falls at 21:00 it is considered to have fallen after sunset, and whenever it falls at 15:00 it is considered to have fallen before sunset, regardless of when the sun actually sets in your location. You will notice that eventually the statutory equinox will fall so late in the year that we will have to start asking for rain after Passover — that is, we will have to start asking after the time when we have to stop asking. Our Sages expected that the Messiah would come long before that happened. After the Messiah comes, no Jew will reside in Exile, so the problem will disappear.

Now you know all about Babylon. What about Toronto? What about Chicago? What am I doing asking for rain in Chicago in the dead of winter, when nothing grows? The answer is that, theoretically, I shouldn't be doing so. The custom has arisen, among Jews all over the world, to ask for rain at the same time that the Jews in Babylon ask for rain. There is no basis in law for this custom. I will repeat that sentence, so you will know that I did not mistakenly say something I did not mean: there is no basis in law for this custom.

A community should pray for rain when it needs rain. Several outstanding rabbis attempted during the Middle Ages to correct this erroneous custom, but none succeeded. No such attempts have been made in the past couple of hundred years, because if the earlier rabbis who commanded the loyalty and respect of their communities failed to change their custom, then the custom is surely too ingrained to be changed by today's leaders. This is unfortunate, but when this state of affairs improves it will lead to the coming of the Messiah — after which, as stated earlier, the problem will disappear.

What do we do in the meantime? How can we pray for rain if we don't need it? How can we pray for rain if we not only do not need it, but also if rain would be absolutely harmful to the local agriculture? Well, you will notice that the times of the year when Jews in Exile pray for rain is a proper subset of the times of the year when Jews in Israel pray for rain. Whenever we are praying for rain in Toronto, they are also praying for rain in Israel. So, if you cannot sincerely ask for rain where you live — because it might cause harm to the crops — then think about Israel, not your own area, when you say v'ten tal umatar.

Colophon

Written by Jay Shachter (AT&T Bell Laboratories, Illinois) as a private email reply to David Sherman of the Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto, dated December 11, 1985. Sherman forwarded it to net.religion.jewish on January 7, 1986, with Shachter's permission: "Mr. Shachter often has valuable things to say in reply to net postings, but always chooses to end them by private mail rather than posting."

Preserved from the Usenet archive (UTZOO tape b57, net.religion.jewish/2896) for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

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