Summer is over, now it's official: not only have we passed beyond the threshold of 21st September, the official (physical) date of the end of the summer, but on Friday night we had our first rain here in the country. Real rain. It started around 3 or 4 pm and it was so loud that I woke up.
The first rain is quite an event here, because during the summer months it never ever rains. I remember that in my first years in Israel it wasn't easy for me to adjust to this fact. The landscape in the countryside, which in spring time has grown so intensely green, bit by bit dries out and turns yellowish, then brown, until the grass and the vegetation almost disappears. The air is constantly loaded with dust, cars are always coated with dust. Then, when the first rain comes, the air becomes clear, everything looks cleansed and the cars are all of a sudden all clean.
At the same time a new type of clouds have shown up in the sky, these days: puffy clouds, like cotton wads; someone around said that these clouds look like a forgotten piece of theater decor.
Even though the rain has gone and temperature has been raising again since yesterday, the humidity is much lower and it no longer feels like summer heat.
This is about the time when people start taking down their winter clothes from the upper part of their wardrobe, for those who live in one of those cramped houses so typical for Israel.
Rain seems to have been a meaningful issue in Ancient Hebrew: the fact that there exist several words for different kinds of rain displays that very clearly. "Rain" in modern Hebrew is "geshem". In Ancient Hebrew, we find the terms "Yoreh", early rain - the first rain in autumn; "Malkosh", late rain - the last rain before summer, and "Matar", plain rain, from which the modern Hebrew word "mitriyah", umbrella, is derivated. It seems that the word "geshem" in the Scriptures means "heavy rain" - it is mentioned in the story of Noah's flood (for those who like to read more about this, see: http://jhom.com/hebrew/rain_h.htm).
In its basic meaning, so it seems, "geshem" means "substance", in the sense of "that which is substantial" - and it seems to be related closely linked to the Arabic "jism", which means "material form, body". But this is another story.
