We are approaching the end of our time together.
In January, I handed in my notice.
Over the last few months, I have packed away my books and cleared my office.
On Wednesday, I will hand back my keys to the synagogue building.
Today is the last time I will stand up here and address you.
We are approaching the end of Pesach. In two days from now, we will carry out our final service of this festival. In the evening, we will start eating leaven again, and bring back out our toasters and bread machines.
We are also approaching the end of the rainy season. In ancient Israel, this time of year marked the transition from when they hoped for life-giving downpours to the dry heat of summer when they prayed for morning dew.
The rabbis could not agree on exactly when the change took place. The Mishnah asked when we should stop praying for the rain and switch to asking for dew.
Rabbi Yehudah said: “We should keep our prayers going until the festival of Pesach has ended.”
Rabbi Meir disagreed: “We should keep our prayers going until the end of the month of Nissan.”
Centuries later, in Babylon, Rav Hisda came along and said: “this is not difficult.”
Now, this is the Talmud. If I’ve learnt one thing from studying the Talmud, it’s that, when a rabbi comes along and says something isn’t difficult, what follows will be really confusing.
Rav Hisda says these rabbis do not actually disagree at all! They’re just talking about different things. There’s a difference, he says, between praying for rain, and mentioning rain in your prayers.
Clear? As muck.
You can see why this question made the rabbis feel anxious. Endings are hard. And knowing when one thing ends and another begins is important.
Don’t worry. Another rabbi, Ulla, comes in. He says the problem isn’t that Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Yehudah disagree with each other. It’s that there are two different ways of reading Rabbi Yehudah.
We are going to have to agree with Rabbi Yehuda, says Ulla. We’re just not sure what he means.
Rabbi Yehuda says that prayers for rain end when Pesach ends. And we agree with him.
But hang on a minute! When does Pesach end?
A whole new raft of rabbis enter the discussion, each with conflicting opinions.
Personally, I would have thought Pesach would end at evening on the eighth day. The rabbis do not even consider this as an option.
No – their first suggestion is that Pesach is the first day, so that is when we should shift our prayers.
But we don’t put requests into our prayers at festivals. They’re like Shabbat – they’re God’s days off from being bothered by us. So that can’t possibly be the day we stop asking for rain. We weren’t going to ask for anything then anyway.
So maybe, instead, after Pesach means after the need for slaughtering a paschal lamb has passed. In Temple times, the paschal lamb was killed just before the Pesach festival started.
So the prayers for rain end when we would have slaughtered the paschal lamb.
But that would mean Pesach ends before Pesach starts!
And the Talmud is even more confused now, because we no longer have a Temple and we live in the Diaspora and we are still nowhere closer to knowing when one prayer for rain stops and another one starts.
Clear? But Rav Hisda said it wasn’t difficult!
OK I have chosen a really complicated bit of Talmud to hang this sermon on. I still don’t understand it myself. Maybe that’s just because the changes of seasons really are confusing.
Perhaps the Talmud doesn’t quite want to resolve the question. They want to leave us hanging, so that there is always a slight liminal time when one season is ending and another is beginning.
Transitions are hard. In fact, this sugya of Talmud keeps coming back to the same stock phrase: this isn’t difficult. It seems to say it so often because it knows that it is.
This obviously matters to me, because I am standing here in liminal time, in the gap between having been a rabbi here and not being one anymore. It is important to say, with surety, that there is an end date. I won’t be preaching here again.
But I think we can learn something from the Talmud too. The Talmud knows that sometimes dew comes in winter and sometimes there are heavy downpours when it’s dry. All water is part of a bigger cycle of seasons.
The rain teaches us how transitions carry within them all that has gone before and all that is yet to come.
Seasons and rainfalls are strange, transitory moments. We can read great meaning into them.
Having a clear sense of when one passes into another matters. So let’s make this our moment of acknowledging a shift.
This is our last time praying on Shabbat together. It is my last time preaching from here.
You will continue to grow in this community, and I will go and minister elsewhere.
And, just like the passing between the winter and the summer rains, we will always be part of the same water cycle. Our rains will be part of each other forever.
I will hold onto and cherish the droplets I carry from Oaks Lane. Your piety, your care for the sick, your love of music, your attention to detail, your Yiddish soul.
I pray that some of the best of the waters I poured here will stay, and that you will find some use in them too, after I have gone.
It has been a privilege.
Shabbat shalom.
Sim Lev 