The Mystery of the Angel of Rain

Back in the days when this column appeared in another publication, I once devoted it on the occasion of Sukkot to a discussion of Af-bri, the oddly named angel mentioned by the 7th-century liturgical poet Eleazer Hakalir in his prayer for rain, recited in Ashkenazi synagogues on the holiday’s last (or in the Diaspora, penultimate) day. Sukkot falls at the time of year when Israel’s rainy season begins after the long, dry summer. Had it started to rain, in the days of traditional agriculture, before Sukkot, the end of the crucial grain harvest—in which the reaped grain was threshed and winnowed before being stored away for the coming year—would have suffered. Had it rained during the holiday itself, both the many pilgrims who came to pray on the Temple Mount and the many who stayed home in their sukkot would have had a drenching. Had it not begun to rain soon after Sukkot was over, plowing the fields before sowing the next year’s crop would have been delayed. Hence, the prayer’s timing.

Replete with biblical and midrashic allusions, Hakalir’s rhymed and linguistically complex poem begins with an introductory stanza. As translated by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in the Koren Siddur, this begins:

Af-bri is the name of the angel of rain,
Who overcasts the sky,
Forms clouds and precipitates them, making them rain
Water to crown the valley with green.