Be it ours to shed sunshine — a selection from “A Free Man’s Religious Worship” by Bertrand Russell (1910)

Contributor(s):

Mel Scult and Bertrand Russell

Shared on:

5 May 2023 under the Creative Commons Zero (CC 0) Universal license a Public Domain dedication

Categories:

Congregation & Community, Well-being, health, and caregiving

Tags:

20th century C.E., Ethical Humanism, Humanist, 57th century A.M., Prayers as poems, English vernacular prayer, Early Reconstructionist

The well known philosopher Bertrand Russell had little use for organized religion and in general was quite skeptical in his religious beliefs. I am not a regular reader of Russell but apparently Mordecai Kaplan read him from time to time. In the early 1940s he came across a short essay which Russell wrote many years before entitled “A Free Man’s Religious Worship.” Kaplan mentions the essay a number of times in the diary and I am struck by the fact that Kaplan quotes and focuses on what he considers to be some positive statements in this essay. As a consequence I have been reading Russell and here offer some inspiring statements from this essay.

I have taken the liberty of selecting my own statements from this essay. Russell is referring here to all our fellow human beings and our obligations to all others. It is obvious that in true reconstructionist fashion we could use these statements as a prayer. To pray from Russell would be an inspiration from Kaplan.

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Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	Be it ours to shed sunshine on the path of our fellow human beings, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair.
	Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need — of the sorrows, and difficulties, and perhaps blindnesses, that make for the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves.
	And so when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire was kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

Versified selection by Mel Scult of lines from an essay by Bertrand Russell: “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Philosophical Essays (1910), pp. 59-70. (This selection begins on page 69.) The essay was later published in Mysticism and logic, and other essays (1917). This prayer was first published by Dr. Scult in his Mordecai M. Kaplan group on Facebook, 28 April 2023.

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. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike . 4.0 . International .

“Be it ours to shed sunshine — a selection from “A Free Man’s Religious Worship” by Bertrand Russell (1910)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Mel Scult

Mel Scult, professor emeritus of Jewish thought at Brooklyn College, received his M.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He has taught at Brandeis, Vassar College and the New School for Social Research. Scult is the author of a biography of Mordecai Kaplan, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century, The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan and Communings of the Spirit-The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan Vol II, 1934-1941. He has co-edited, with Emmanuel Goldsmith, Dynamic Judaism: The Essential Writings of Mordecai Kaplan and The American Judaism of Mordecai Kaplan.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS[66] (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. He was one of the early 20th century's most prominent logicians, and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism." Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic. Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I, but also saw the war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as a necessary "lesser of two evils". In the wake of World War II, he welcomed American global hegemony in favor of either Soviet hegemony or no (or ineffective) world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons. He would later criticize Stalinist totalitarianism, condemn the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War and become an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963).

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." –Psalms 90:17