Notes from Cheshvan: The Water, the Waiting, and the Work of Beginning Again

On the quiet month after the High Holidays, the flood in Parshat Noach, and learning to let transformation take root.

There is something about Cheshvan that feels like tucking yourself in.

After the fullness of Tishrei, with its holidays, gatherings, prayers, meals, and seemingly endless opportunities to show up as our best selves, we arrive in a month with no holidays at all. The calendar quiets down. The invitations slow. The table can finally be cleared, the good dishes put away, and the house returned to its ordinary rhythms.

And I wonder if we’re meant to notice that quiet.

The High Holidays are a time of spiritual intensity. We spend weeks preparing our hearts, asking for forgiveness, making commitments, gathering with our communities, and praying to be inscribed and sealed for a good year. During the Days of Awe, we’re especially conscious of the relationship between ourselves and our Creator. We examine who we’ve been and who we want to become.

Then Sukkot arrives, and we’re invited into joy. We eat outside, welcome guests, and celebrate the temporary structures that hold us. There’s a beautiful teaching that during this season, the King is in the field — that the Divine is especially accessible to us, meeting us where we are.

It’s a beautiful time of year. We’re spiritually awake, paying attention, trying to live with greater intention.

And then comes Cheshvan.

No grand occasion to prepare for. No holiday meal to plan. No new ritual to learn. Just the ordinary business of being alive.

It’s easy to experience this as a comedown.

In fact, Cheshvan is often called Mar Cheshvan. The word mar means bitter, and one traditional explanation connects the name to the absence of holidays this month. After all the sweetness of Tishrei — the apples and honey, the communal meals, the joy of Sukkot — Cheshvan can feel a little bare by comparison.

But lately, I’ve been wondering whether we might understand this month differently.

What if the quiet isn’t a loss of sweetness, but a different kind of sweetness altogether?

What if Cheshvan is the month when we get to tuck in, turn inward, and allow everything we’ve experienced to finally land?

The sweetness of letting things take root

I’ve been thinking about seeds.

A seed can be full of possibility, but possibility alone doesn’t make a garden. The seed needs to be planted. It needs darkness, moisture, time, and the right conditions to begin growing into something that wasn’t visible before.

So much of that work happens underground, out of sight.

We don’t dig up a seed every few days to check whether it’s becoming a flower. We don’t expect it to bloom immediately after planting. We trust that something is happening in the darkness, even when we can’t see evidence of it yet.

I think there’s something here for us after the High Holidays.

We can spend an entire month praying, reflecting, gathering, and imagining the people we want to become. We can make beautiful commitments and feel genuinely moved by the possibility of a new year.

But what happens when we return to our regular lives?

When the children need breakfast, the mess piles up, the inbox fills, and the world begins asking things of us again?

This is where the real work begins.

It’s one thing to feel connected to our values while we’re sitting in synagogue or sharing a holiday meal. It’s another to remember those values when we’re tired, distracted, running late, or responding to someone we love in a way we wish we hadn’t.

The question isn’t just whether we felt something during Tishrei. It’s whether that feeling can find a home in the rest of our year.

Can the prayers become the way we speak to ourselves? Can the forgiveness we asked for shape how we repair our relationships? Can the joy we were commanded to experience become something we make room for on an ordinary Tuesday?

We don’t want to spend the High Holidays reaching toward transformation only to forget everything once the calendar moves on.

We want the work to take root.

Every year, I imagine us climbing a spiral staircase. We return to familiar teachings, familiar prayers, familiar seasons, but hopefully we meet them from a slightly different place. We carry what we’ve learned with us. We become a little more integrated, a little more able to live what we say we believe.

We’re not simply circling the drain. We’re climbing.

And sometimes, the most important thing we can do to keep climbing is to stop moving long enough to let everything settle.

That’s the gift I want to receive from Cheshvan: not emptiness, but space. Not inactivity for its own sake, but the kind of quiet that allows something meaningful to become part of us.

A month of water

There’s another layer to Cheshvan that I can’t stop thinking about: water.

Cheshvan is associated with the beginning of the rainy season in the land of Israel. In our prayers, we begin asking for rain, recognizing our dependence on something we cannot manufacture ourselves. We can prepare the soil and plant the seeds, but we cannot command the heavens to open.

We have to ask. We have to wait. We have to receive.

And there’s a lovely interpretive connection here: mar, in addition to its familiar meaning of bitter, can be associated in a wordplay with a drop of water.

I love this image of a single drop.

One drop doesn’t look like much. It’s easy to overlook, easy to dismiss. But water is never just water. It nourishes, softens, carries, cleanses, and changes the landscape over time.

A drop of water can be the beginning of something.

And this week, as we enter Cheshvan, we’re also reading Parshat Noach.

The timing feels almost too beautiful.

In the story of Noach, water becomes the defining force of an entire world. The flood comes after a generation consumed by corruption and violence. Noach, described as a righteous man in his generation, is instructed to build an ark to preserve life through the coming destruction.

The rain falls for forty days and forty nights, while the waters remain over the earth for much longer. The familiar world disappears beneath them.

And then, slowly, the waters recede.

Eventually, dry land emerges. Noach and his family leave the ark. Life begins again.

At the end of the story, a rainbow appears as a sign of the covenant between the Creator and all living creatures: a promise that the earth will not again be destroyed by a flood of this kind.

When I place these two moments side by side — Cheshvan’s first drops of rain and Noach’s world-covering flood — I find myself thinking about the many ways water can change us.

Water can nourish a seed so that it can grow. It can also overwhelm an entire landscape.

It can be gentle and life-giving. It can be powerful and frightening. It can wash something away, or create the conditions for something new.

And sometimes, before we can see what is coming next, we have to move through a period when everything feels submerged.

The quiet of the flood

I imagine the days inside the ark.

The rain has fallen. The familiar world is gone from view. Noach and his family are enclosed with the animals, waiting for the waters to recede.

We don’t know exactly what those days felt like from the inside. The flood itself was undoubtedly devastating. But I find myself imagining the strange suspension of time that might have followed: the waiting, the uncertainty, the sense that the old world was no longer accessible and the new one had not yet appeared.

There is nowhere else to go. Nothing to rush toward. The work is to preserve life and wait.

I think many of us know something about that feeling, even if our circumstances are nothing like the flood.

There are seasons when life asks us to reconsider the direction we’re going. Sometimes that comes through a loss or a disappointment. Sometimes it’s a transition we chose but didn’t fully understand until we were inside it. Sometimes we simply wake up and realize that the way we’ve been living no longer feels sustainable.

The old structures don’t quite fit, but the new ones haven’t taken shape.

We may feel as though we’re between worlds.

And our instinct, particularly in a culture that rewards productivity and immediacy, is often to get out of that uncertainty as quickly as possible. Find the next plan. Fill the calendar. Fix the feeling. Make something happen.

But what if some seasons require a different response?

What if we need a little time in the ark?

Not because suffering is inherently good, or because every difficult experience has a hidden purpose we’re obligated to discover. Some things are simply painful, and we don’t need to romanticize them.

But we can recognize that not every season is a season of visible growth. Sometimes the work is to protect what matters, stay close to what sustains us, and give ourselves enough time to discover what comes next.

We don’t always need to emerge immediately.

We can be in the middle of a transformation without knowing what the transformed version of our lives will look like.

And we can trust that the fact that we cannot yet see the land doesn’t mean there is no land ahead.

Building an ark out of words

There’s a beautiful connection to explore in the Hebrew word teva.

In the story of Noach, teva means ark. In another context, teva can also mean word. They are distinct meanings, but the shared word opens a door to a lovely interpretation: what if our words, too, can become a kind of ark?

What if the words we return to can help carry us through the waters?

For me, this is where prayer enters the picture.

Prayer can be a way of orienting ourselves when everything around us feels loud or uncertain. It can be a structure we return to when we don’t know what else to do. It can give language to feelings we haven’t quite figured out, remind us of truths we’ve forgotten, or simply create a moment of connection in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day.

And prayer doesn’t have to be elaborate.

You can speak directly to Hashem in your own words. You can sit with a question you don’t yet know how to answer. You can ask for help, express gratitude, or acknowledge that you’re struggling.

Or you can return to the prayers our ancestors have carried across generations.

There’s something deeply moving to me about that inheritance. Long before we were here, people were praying these words. They carried them through their own seasons of uncertainty, joy, grief, and renewal. They passed them on, and now we can reach for them, too.

We don’t have to invent every spiritual practice from scratch.

We can step into a current that has been flowing for generations.

And just as an ark creates a container for life to be carried through the flood, a prayer practice can create a container for us. Something steady enough to return to, even when the rest of life feels unsettled.

It doesn’t mean the waters disappear. It means we have something to hold on to while we move through them.

Twelve seconds before the world begins

Around a year ago, I began saying Modeh Anievery morning.

It’s a short Jewish prayer of gratitude traditionally recited upon waking, before we even get out of bed. We thank the Creator for restoring our souls and giving us another day.

The practice takes about twelve seconds.

Twelve seconds before the emails, the notifications, the demands, the breakfast requests, and the mental list of everything I need to accomplish.

Twelve seconds to acknowledge that I am here. That I have been given another day. That before I do anything, I can begin by receiving the life in front of me.

I don’t think twelve seconds sounds like much.

But over time, those twelve seconds have become a way of entering my day differently. Instead of immediately reaching outward toward everything that needs my attention, I begin by turning inward and upward. I remember that my life is not only a series of tasks to complete. It is something I’ve been given, something I get to inhabit.

And that small shift matters.

This is what I’m thinking about as we enter Cheshvan. We don’t necessarily need another ambitious routine or a long list of resolutions to carry us through the year. We might simply need one small practice that helps us stay connected to what we learned during Tishrei.

One prayer before we open our eyes. One moment of gratitude before we reach for our phones. One breath before we respond. One ritual that reminds us who we want to be.

A single drop of water.

A seed beginning to take root.

A small ark we can return to when the waters rise.

Over time, these small moments can become the structure that holds a life.

The rainbow is not the end of the story

I love that Noach’s story ends with a rainbow.

After the flood, the world is not simply restored to exactly what it was before. The people who emerge from the ark step into a world that has been changed. Life continues, but it continues under a covenant that acknowledges both the fragility of creation and the commitment to preserve it.

The rainbow doesn’t erase what happened. It appears after it.

And perhaps that’s part of what Cheshvan can teach us.

Beginning again doesn’t always mean returning to the person we were before, or recreating the life we had before something changed. Sometimes it means allowing ourselves to be shaped by what we’ve experienced and choosing, with whatever wisdom we have gathered, how we want to move forward.

We can’t always control the changes coming toward us. But we can participate in the way we meet them.

We can tend to the soil. We can make room for the rain. We can build our arks from the practices, relationships, and words that sustain us.

And we can remember that the quiet season isn’t necessarily a season in which nothing is happening.

Some things are growing underground.

Some things are being washed clean.

Some things are waiting for the waters to recede.

And some things are simply asking us to be still long enough to notice that a new beginning is already possible.

Cheshvan may be the month without holidays, but perhaps that is precisely its gift. It gives us space to bring the holiness of the holidays into the rest of our lives — into our kitchens, our conversations, our morning routines, and the small choices that shape who we become.

The sweetness of Tishrei doesn’t have to end when the calendar turns. It can settle into something quieter, steadier, and more enduring.

So this Cheshvan, I’m trying to resist the urge to fill every empty space. I’m trying to let the work of the High Holidays land. I’m making room for prayer, for stillness, and for the possibility that even when life feels submerged, something new is taking shape.

Because the waters will change. The seasons will turn. And there is always the possibility of beginning again.

A small Cheshvan practice

Before you open your eyes tomorrow morning, take a moment to say Modeh Ani, or simply offer a few words of gratitude in your own way.

Ask yourself:

What am I still carrying from the High Holidays that I want to let take root?

Where in my life might I need to stop rushing and allow something to settle?

What words, prayers, or daily practices could become my ark in this season?

You don’t need to have all the answers.

You only need to make a little space for them to emerge.

I’m wishing you a nourishing, peaceful Cheshvan — a month of gentle rain, deep roots, and the quiet courage to begin again.