10/12/2026
Chodesh tov!
First day of new presidency ✔️ First day of Cheshvan ✔️
Rabbanit Yaffa Aranoff shares her nature themed intention for Cheshvan 🌱:
After all the chagim of Tishrei, Cheshvan offers something new: the return to routine, week after week.
Being able to settle into the rhythms of everyday life is a blessing, and essential if we are to accomplish the things that matter to us. But there is also a danger in becoming so immersed in the humdrum that we lose our sense of thirst for something beyond it.
Cheshvan is also the month when, in Israel, we begin to pray for rain. And I think rain can serve as a symbol for the balance we yearn for between routine and spiritual awakening.
I think of Rabbi Eliezer’s teaching (Rosh Hashanah 11b) that the Flood began on the 17th of Cheshvan, and the Talmud’s question: if Cheshvan is naturally a month of rain, what was so different about the rain of the Flood? The answer is that the Flood was not simply rain. It was rain that had become overwhelming, associated by the Sages with רתיחה, intensity, heat, excess.
Rain is good. Too much rain is not.
The same might be said of routine. We need the reliable mainstays of work, family, friendship, learning, and daily responsibilities. Routine gives shape to our days and allows us to build things slowly, steadily, over time. But a life that becomes entirely predictable can also become spiritually dry. The ordinary should give us stability without becoming monotony.
And so, as Cheshvan begins, perhaps we can think about the kind of routine we would like to build. Not a life without intensity, but a life with the right balance between the everyday and the transcendent; between geshem, the rain that nourishes our physical world, and the things that nourish the neshamah. Between the predictable rhythms of our days and the moments of connection to Hashem, to Torah, and to the people around us that remind us why those rhythms matter.
We pray for rain—not a deluge, but rain that falls in its time and measure, enough to replenish the earth and make growth possible.
And perhaps we can enter routine with the same kind of discernment: grateful for its steady rhythms, while remaining thirsty for something more.
