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A MESSAGE FROM THE RABBI
A Prayer for the State of Israel
1) Avinu Shebashamin
(2) Rock and Redeemer of Israel
(3) Bless the State of Israel
(4) The first of the flowering of our Redemption
(5) Shield it with Your love
(6) Spread over it the shelter of Your peace
(7) Guide its leaders and advisors with Your light and Your truth.
(8) Establish for them Your good counsel.
(9) Strengthen the hands of the defenders of our Holy Land
(10) Cause them to inherit, our God, deliverance
(11) Place the crown of victory upon them
(12) Give the land peace
(13) And everlasting joy to its inhabitants
In our daily morning and evening minyans, and during Shabbat services, we say the Prayer for the State of Israel. It is important, now more than ever, to vocalize our hopes for our homeland. Reading and internalizing the prayer is a good exercise for anyone who is concerned for Israel’s present and future. So, even if you just read it, please go back and read it again. This time, read it for comprehension and understanding. Read it to determine what the author(s)’s intention was. I will give you a good 15 minutes to look at it and digest it.
Okay, the fifteen-minute timer has just beeped and, thankfully, I have turned it off. (It was one of those annoying beeps designed to make you think that a truck is backing into your living room). How did the poem/prayer make you feel. Hopeful? Optimistic? Safe? Perhaps you felt nothing? Is there any verse that moves you? Is there any verse that you don’t understand? Would you rather be reading a summer novel, or the sports pages?
It was apparently written in September 1948, after the formation of the nascent State of Israel. According to Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin, it was written by the Chief Rabbis of Israel at the time: Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog and Rabbi Ben Zion Uziel. It was apparently slightly edited at that time by S.Y. Agnon, the renowned Israeli author who received the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in the 1966. What we have in our Siddur Sim Shalom (quoted above) is the first 13 verses of the prayer which represents about 1/3rd of the total. (It ends at a point when the prayer begins to ask for the ingathering of the Jews in the diaspora and I imagine that in 1948, diaspora Jews were not comfortable with this concept.)
At any rate of the prayer, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote:
A key element of the prayer is the phrase "the first flowering of our redemption."(verse 4 above). It means that the restoration of Israel as a sovereign nation in its own land was not merely an event in secular history. It was the fulfillment of the prophetic vision--first stated by Moses…..[ in] Deuteronomy--that Israel would one day be gathered from "the furthermost lands under the heavens," an astonishingly precise prediction of what actually happened. According to the third-century Babylonian teacher Shmuel, "The only difference between this world and the messianic age is subjection to foreign powers" (Berakhot 34b). In this view Israel's independence was in itself a redemptive moment, a return to Jewish self-determination, self-government and self-defense under the sovereignty of God alone.
In a time when Israel and the Jewish people are under continual siege, and every day brings a new complication, the prayer’s simplicity and its request that Israeli’s be left to live in peace and joy is an intense reminder that, as far as we have come, we are not much closer to the dreams Israel’s founders conjured.
Print the prayer and hang it on your refrigerator, your message board, or wherever it will prompt you to read it and consider it. Better yet, join us for minyan on Monday and Thursday mornings, Friday evenings, or Shabbat mornings to hear it read, or to read it yourself with the community. Am Yisrael Chai.
Shabbat Shalom – Rabbi Michael S. Jay
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