Cheshvan: the Month the Deep Opened

Marcheshvan has no festival. It arrives after a month crowded with them and offers nothing, which is how it earned the mar, the bitter, on the front of its name.

It is also the month the deep opened.

The date the flood began

בַּחֹדֶשׁ הַשֵּׁנִי בְּשִׁבְעָה עָשָׂר יוֹם לַחֹדֶשׁ נִבְקְעוּ כָּל מַעְיְנֹת תְּהוֹם רַבָּה

In the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, all the fountains of the great deep were split open. Bereishit 7:11

Reckoned from Tishrei, the second month is Marcheshvan, which is how the tradition that counts the year from the autumn reads this verse. The flood does not begin with rain falling. It begins with the tehom being split from below, and only afterwards does the sky open.

The rain prayer sits inside the resurrection blessing

Every year, around that same date, the rain cycle begins and the request for geshem is inserted into the Shemoneh Esrei. Not anywhere in it. Into the second blessing, which is the blessing of מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים, the One who revives the dead.

The same blessing carries the line about dew the rest of the year: מוֹרִיד הַטָּל, He brings down the dew. Dew and resurrection are not neighbours in the siddur. They share a blessing, three times a day, every day.

The prophet puts them in one verse too.

כִּי טַל אוֹרֹת טַלֶּךָ, וָאָרֶץ רְפָאִים תַּפִּיל

For Your dew is a dew of lights, and the earth will give birth to the dead. Yeshayahu 26:19

Unlike rain, which arrives with force, dew is a silent phase change that happens when uncontained vapour meets a cold surface. It is the gentlest delivery mechanism in nature, and the siddur assigns it to the raising of the dead.

A dedication the month is still holding

The First Temple was finished in Marcheshvan.

בְּיֶרַח בּוּל הוּא הַחֹדֶשׁ הַשְּׁמִינִי כָּלָה הַבָּיִת

In the month of Bul, which is the eighth month, the house was finished. Melachim I 6:38

The dedication was not held then. Solomon waited and held it in Tishrei, the seventh month (Melachim I 8:2), so the building stood complete through a month that got no ceremony for it.

Marcheshvan has been holding that dedication for three thousand years. The month with no festival is the month with one outstanding.

Why Yosef is its master

Yosef is the only person in the Torah blessed with the tehom, and he is blessed with it twice, once by his father and once by Moshe. A month that opens with the deep splitting belongs to the man who went down into one and came back up carrying what was in it.

He gathered grain like the sand of the sea against a famine nobody else could see coming, which is the same posture the month asks for: the contraction precedes the abundance, and the bitter drop is the beginning of the flood of blessing.

For the eighth month, pumpkin seed oil: pressed from the harvest of the eighth month, sweet where the month is called bitter. That it falls in the season when the nations mark the thinning of the boundary between the living and the dead is not lost on anyone. The sparks hide where you would least look for them.

Argued in full in Kol Tehom, free in English and Hebrew. The oils are here.

Keep reading

• Tehom  the only man in the Torah blessed with the deep, twice
• Baka  the verb that splits the deep, the sea, the dawn and the grave
• Luz  the bone that rebuilds a body, and the city death cannot enter

The map shows how all of it connects.