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Divine One – Source of the spirits for all [mortal] flesh
We are before you as spirits rent and weary from sorrow
Pity us, humanity, created in your image
Guide us in this time of fracture and tragedy,
fear, death and panic
Please, please, we beg that you turn our own mercy and love
over the judgement, vengeance, and evil that lies within us.
For the pain is so severe, searing, screaming, that it only seeks inconsolable retribution
May the Image of Divinity within our crushed hearts rise and shine like the dawn,
That we way yet still believe we deserve to see Hashem’s goodness,
and the goodness of humanity, in the land of the living. Amen
This prayer was offered by Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed in the days following the attacks of Ḥamas and its allies from Gaza on southern Israel beginning Shemini Atseret 5784 (7 October 2023). The English translation was made Rabbi Zac Kamenetz and Rabbi Marc Margolius.
Rabbi Zac Kamenetz, based in Berkeley, California, is the founder and CEO of Shefa: Jewish psychedelic support, and a co-founder of the Jewish Psychedelic Summit. He holds an MA in Biblical literature and languages from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. and received rabbinic ordination in 2012. He is a qualified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) instructor,
Marc Margolius (translation)
Rabbi Marc Margolius is Senior Core Faculty member at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, a center for training rabbis, cantors, educators and lay leaders in Jewish mindfulness practice and transforming Jewish life. He hosts IJS’s daily online Jewish meditation, directs programming for alumni of its clergy training program, and teaches online programs integrating mindfulness with middot practice. He has authored two years of mindfulness and middot-based study and practice teaching on the weekly Torah portion. Previously, he served as rabbi at West End Synagogue in NYC and at Beth Am Israel in Penn Valley PA (1989-2002), where he helped develop a model of the synagogue as a Shabbat-centered community constructed around intergenerational learning. Rabbi Margolius was ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (1989), and is a graduate of Yale Law School.
Melila Hellner-Eshed
Melila Hellner-Eshed, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow of the Kogod Research Center at Shalom Hartman Institute and the Director of Maskilot, an intensive two-year program for female doctoral candidates, now opening its fourth cohort. She also founded and co-directs the Rabbinic Students Seminar, a interdenominational program for rabbinic students spending a year in Israel. She has been a professor of Jewish mysticism and Zohar in the Department of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for over two decades. She received her degree from Hebrew University under the tutelage of Professor Yehuda Liebes. At the Hebrew University, Melila also taught in the honors teacher-training program Revivim and in the Amirim honors program for liberal studies. For the past three decades, she has been a central figure in the Israeli renaissance of study of Jewish texts by Israeli adults of all paths of life in various frameworks. She has been teaching and working with Jewish communities in North America, Europe and the former Soviet Union for many years. Her publications include A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar, (Hebrew, Alma and Am Oved Publications, 2005 and English, Stanford University Press, 2009). Her book Seekers of the Face – From the Secrets of the Idra Rabba in the Zohar was published in Hebrew in 2018, forthcoming in English from Stanford University Press. Melila also serves on the faculty of the Institute of Jewish Spirituality in the U.S. and is active in the ‘Sulha’ – a reconciliation project that brings together Israelis and Palestinians.
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