Cheshvan: The Scent of Rain
Tishrei leaves us with the sound of the shofar, the fragility of the sukkah, and the Torah rolled back to its beginning.
Then comes Cheshvan.
In Tanach, the month is called Bul, while the name Marcheshvan arrived with the Jewish people from Babylonia. The familiar explanation that mar means “bitter” because the month contains no festival came later.
Yet Cheshvan is far from empty.
It waits for rain.
At Shemini Atzeret we begin praising Hashem:
מַשִּׁיב הָרוּחַ וּמוֹרִיד הַגֶּשֶׁם
Who causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall.
Amidah
But in the Land of Israel, we do not immediately begin asking for rain.
We wait.
The Mishnah records that Rabban Gamliel sets the request for rain on the seventh of Cheshvan—fifteen days after Sukkot—so that the last pilgrim returning from Jerusalem could reach the Euphrates.
Even the prayer for rain must make room for another person.
Cheshvan is a month of waiting, and in waiting we begin to notice what we usually miss.
Sefer Yetzirah associates Cheshvan with the sense of smell.
There is a particular scent when rain first reaches dry earth. Sometimes a scent catches us before we even know why it is familiar, taking us back to a place, a person, or a moment we thought we had forgotten. In an instant, we are standing somewhere we have not stood for decades.
The room may be gone. The person may no longer be there.
But the scent remains.
We cannot see a fragrance or hold it in our hands, yet it can carry us where sight cannot. Even something as fleeting as fragrance has its own berachah.
According to Rabbi Eliezer’s chronology, recorded in Seder Olam Rabbah, the Mabul began on the seventeenth of Cheshvan. For forty days and forty nights the rain fell, stopping on the twenty-seventh of Kislev, but Noach’s waiting was far from over.
The waters slowly receded.
It was not until the twenty-seventh of Cheshvan the following year that Hashem told him to leave the teivah.
Noach stepped onto dry ground and built an altar. Then the Torah tells us:
וַיָּרַח ה׳ אֶת־רֵיחַ הַנִּיחֹחַ
Hashem smelled the pleasing fragrance.
Bereishit 8:21
After a year defined by water, the Torah gives us a scent.
And then a promise: never again would a Flood destroy all life. Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night would not cease.
Yet the Torah remembers a Cheshvan when rain brought destruction. We pray for rain in its proper time and measure—rain that nourishes rather than destroys.
The letter associated with Cheshvan is nun (נ).
Nun has the numerical value fifty. We count forty-nine days of the Omer before reaching Shavuot, and seven cycles of seven years before the fiftieth year of Yovel. Yet nun is absent from the alphabetical sequence of Ashrei. The Gemara explains that the letter evokes nefilah—falling.
But the very next letter brings the answer:
סוֹמֵךְ ה׳ לְכָל־הַנֹּפְלִים
Hashem supports all who fall.
Tehillim 145:14
There are rains we wait for in our own lives. A prayer unanswered. A relationship that needs healing. A hope we have carried for years.
Then the first drops fall.
Sometimes, before we can even see the rain, we can smell that it is coming.
חודש טוב
