A Prayer for Israel [after the war begun on Shemini Atseret 5784], by Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein (10 October 2023)

Contributor(s):

Daniel Raphael Silverstein

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11 October 2023 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

Categories:

Medinat Yisra'el (the State of Israel)

Tags:

Religious Zionism, 21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., English vernacular prayer, 2023 Israel–Hamas war

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Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	Infinite Source of life, Power and Guide of our ancestors, You have given us the gift of being alive. You constantly breathe the breath of life into us.
	For millennia we have wrestled with You, the Infinite Mystery, and with our fellow humans, and succeeded in being ourselves.
	We have succeeded through many vast seismic shifts of history, empires rising and falling, global conflicts, and multiple attempts to eradicate us by seemingly mighty foes.
	Throughout this long, dramatic, journey, we have succeeded in sharing our gifts with the world.
	First and foremost, we shared the gift of our relationship with You, the intimate embodied knowledge that everything is One, that everything is Love.
	We shared the gift of our prayers, our prophecies, our stories.
	We shared our Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, which is so full of our messy humanity, our failings, our vulnerability, which have been the soil for so much human growth and evolution.
	And on through the centuries, we helped humanity to evolve, by sharing our opposition to all tyrannies, all absolutes, all forms of idolatry, and all dichotomies.
	We insisted on the unity and sanctity of all existence.
	We shared these gifts all over the world, in myriad languages and contexts.
	But our success has not been without cost. It aroused fierce enmity among some of our human brothers.
	Two thousand years ago, after more than 1200 years of almost unbroken autonomy in the Land of Israel, we lost the privilege of governing ourselves, and we were scattered among the nations.
	For two millennia, our blood was spilt without mercy at the whims of tyrants, despots and hypocrites.
	We were regularly used as scapegoats, as bogeymen, as a distraction from any inconvenient truth.
	Eventually, in the crucible of modernity and industrialized mass-murder, it became clear to us: This cannot go on. We must be responsible for our own survival.
	We cannot leave the question of our very lives in the hands of those who have proven, so many times, that they are all too human.
	We are human too.
	And we have failed in so many ways, and we will fail again. But now, for the first time in two thousand years, our failures are our own.
	Our lives are once more in our own hands, in partnership with You, the all-loving Source.
	We have, somehow, returned to our land, from every corner of the earth.
	We have, somehow, revived our ancient language, and begun to rediscover who we are, when we do not live in constant fear and oppression.
	We are just beginning.
	Our young country is the site of miracles that You have wrought, through our hands.
	There is still much enmity toward us in the world, but we are no longer powerless in its wake.
	We stand strong on the land of our ancestors, and our children, in service of life.
	Our tiny population has made innumerable contributions to human healing and evolution, with Your help.
	We are still wrestling with You, and with humans, and succeeding.
	Please, Infinite Source of Life, help us to keep wrestling.
	Help us to keep evolving ourselves, and our world, toward the Loving Oneness that we were sent to embody.
	Help us to love ourselves so that we can love others.
	Help us to become our best selves, and to share our fullest gifts with the world.
	Help us to overcome all obstacles that stand in our way.
	Help us to befriend all those who might join us in lovingly serving life.
	Help us to prevail over those who are devoted to darkness, cruelty and death.
	Help us to be Your vessels, and to bring Shalom – a Peace of Wholeness that incorporates vast diversity – to the entire world.
	May the loving awareness of You Fill the earth like water fills the sea. (Cf. Habakkuk 2:14)

This prayer for Israel was written by Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein and first shared via his Facebook page on 10 October 2023, in the aftermath of the massacres by HAMA”S and its allies on 7 October 2023. He added, “A dear teacher of mine asked me to try and compose an appropriate prayer for this moment.”

. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike . 4.0 . International .

“A Prayer for Israel [after the war begun on Shemini Atseret 5784], by Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein (10 October 2023)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Daniel Raphael Silverstein

Daniel Raphael Silverstein is a rabbi, educator, meditation teacher and MC/poet. He lives in Israel with his family, where he directs Applied Jewish Spirituality, an online portal which makes the transformative spiritual wisdom of our tradition accessible to all who seek it.

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Works of related interest:

ISS-40 Israel and Gaza at night (2) (credit:
Alexander Gerst on 22 July 2014)

תְּפִלָּה לִשְׁלוֹם הַמְּדִינָה | Prayer for the Peace of the State of Israel [during the war begun on Shemini Atseret 5784], by Rabbi Ofer Sabath Beit Halachmi (2023)

Prayer for the wellbeing of the State of Israel (Rabbi Mira Regev, HaTenua haReformit 2023) - Hebrew

תְּפִלָּה לִשְׁלוֹם הַמְּדִינָה | Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel [during the war begun on Shemini Atseret 5784], by Rabbi Mira Regev (HaTenuah HaReformit 2023)

The Kedem family: Tamar, Yonatan, their 6-year-old daughters Shahar and Arbel and their 4-year-old son Omer. They were all murdered in Kibbutz Nir Oz.

הושע נא | Hosha-na [after the war begun on Shemini Atseret 5784], by Rabbi Annie Lewis (10 October 2023)

Screenshot said to show members of an Israeli family being kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza, October 7, 2023. (Channel 12 screenshot)

תְּפִלָּה לְפִדְיוֹן שְׁבוּיִם | Prayer for the Redemption of Israelis Taken Captive [during the war begun on Shemini Atseret 5784], by Rabbi Ofer Sabath Beit Halachmi (2023)

New life springing up in the Jerusalem hills (credit: Daniel Raphael Silverstein, CC BY-SA 2023)

A prayer for a country poised between demise and rebirth, by Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein (Applied Jewish Spirituality 2023)

Prayer in response the war that broke out on the morning of Shemini Atseret, 5784 (Knesset haRabbanim b'Yisrael and the Masorti Movement in Israel 2023)

תפילה לנוכח המלחמה שפרצה בבוקר שמיני עצרת, תשפ”ד | Prayer in response to the war that broke out on the morning of Shemini Atseret 5784, by Rabbi Gil Nativ (Masorti

Prayer at a time of war - Marheshvan 5784 (Masorti Movement in Israel 2023) - Hebrew

תפלת מי שברך לעת מלחמה מרחשוון תשפ״ד | Mi sheBerakh prayer for Israel at a time of War (Marḥeshvan 5784), by the Masorti Movement in Israel (2023)

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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