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Our Father who art in heaven, on earth, and all over the universe; hallowed by Thy name; Thy kingdom come with the dawn of creation; and being established upon principles universal and everlasting, its laws enforce themselves with equal force in all climes and in all-generations. | |
Wherefore Thy will must be done in heaven, among the celestials, even as it is among the mortal sons of men on earth. | |
Thou hast made us the rulers of this mundane world, constraining nature’s subservience to our will, and by those means thou kindly givest us our daily bread, | |
while on the other hand, the imparting of thy divine spirit guides us in the enactment of laws to secure our social happiness, and deliver us from all evil. | |
For the performance of that sacred and high privilege, we are assembled before thee in this Sinai of our sovereign State. And as once the son of Amrom upon the smoke-enveloped peak of Horeb proclaimed humanity and justice to the constitutents of thy then chosen people, summoning down the lightnings from their native heavens, even so each of thy sons present is standing here in the capacity of a Moses, and may be thy will to imbue their minds with the flashes of thy wisdom, and grant them the visitations of thy divine spirit, so that while representing the will of the people, they may equally represent the will of thee who art our Father and Lord. |
This is a civic prayer for opening a legislative session that was published in The Republican Banner (Nashville, Tennessee) on 22 December 1872 under the title, “A New Version: The Lord’s Prayer with Variation.” The article introduces the prayer as follows: “The following prayer, rendered by the editor of the Jewish Independent of Louisville, at the opening of the Wisconsin Senate, February 15, 1872, appears in the Independent of last week.” I have been unable to locate a copy yet from the archives of the Wisconsin Senate or this Louisville, Kentucky based newspaper. The identity of the guest chaplain who may have offered this prayer remains unknown.
Since the “Lord’s Prayer” is nearly universally well-known to Christians, we cannot help but wonder whether the Nashville Banner’s inclusion of this “variation” in the context of a Jewish paper and a northern legislative body may have been intended to be sensational — portraying something akin to blasphemy and sacrilege — to its southern readers in the period of Reconstruction. Although the author of the prayer is not given, its purported publication in a Jewish paper suggests that whoever offered it was a matter of Jewish interest. Either that, or this prayer was offered as an implicit example of Jewish predilection to offending or subverting Christian values. In the 1870s, the inclusion of rabbinic guest chaplains was still fairly novel, and in some states, controversial. In January 1873, Jews in Nashville organized against a resolution in the state Senate that might have restricted officiating chaplains to Christians only. As found in “The Hebrews and the Tennessee Legislature” (Courier-Journal, 14 January 1873, p. 3):
The Union and American publishes an open letter by the citizens of Nashville to the Tennessee Senate, as follows:
We the undersigned, citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, took always pride in the idea of belonging to the great nation which is at the head of the civilized world.
We have therefore been and are still ready to sacrifice at all times, if necessary, our life blood and all our treasures to promote the well being of our blessed Union, as well as that of our own State. Allow us now to put to you the humble question, by what right principle or authority did you exclude the Jewish ministers from being invited to open your sessions with prayer? Can, you show any precedence that the Jewish ministers have been excluded from opening with prayer the National Congress, assembled in Washington, D.C., or that of any State in the Union, where Jews reside and have organized congregations and are guided by authorized rabbis? On the contrary the history of the United States confirms the right of the Jewish minister to officiate as the chaplain of the Senate.
What is your reason that you, as the representatives of the whole people of the State of Tennessee, deprive us, who are members at the body politic as yourselves, of our civil and religious rights?
We should think that the Almighty, All-wise, All-kind, and Municipal God, who is the cause of all causes, who is worshiped by the Jews, is also worshiped by our Christian citizens, and that God is the father of all whom He has gifted with an intelligent soul, and hears the prayers of all without any difference of denominations or sect. We hope and wish that you will adopt the suggestion of Hon. Mr. McKenna to strike out of the resolution the word ‘Christian’ so that the Jews may not be excluded.
At the same time we inform your honorable body that we have here an organized Jewish congregation, where officiates an authorized minister, who is second to none of any other denomination.”
–Aharon Varady
Source(s)
A New Version- The Lord’s Prayer with Variations (Republican Banner, 22 December 1872)
“A Civic Variation of the Lord’s Prayer offered in the Wisconsin Senate (15 February 1872)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 Universal license.
Aharon N. Varady (editing/transcription)
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