A Prayer for Release and Healing [upon the implementation of the Gaza war peace plan], by Rabbi Menachem Creditor

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12 October 2025 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

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	At long last, beloved souls are coming home.
	After two years of torturous captivity, we dare to breathe— through tears, through trembling, through prayer. We pray for their bodies, broken and starved. We pray for their minds, wounded by terror and isolation. We pray for those whose lives were mercilessly destroyed that their families should be able to bury them with dignity. We pray for all of the hostages’ families, who have lived in the unbearable space between hope and despair for over two years.
	We pray, too, for the entire State of Israel, a family of millions aching together, holding each other through the unspeakable. And we pray for Am Yisrael, the global Jewish people, that we might be strong enough and tender enough to receive our siblings and our parents and our children with full hearts—to enfold them in love, to honor their trauma with patience, to surround them with unending care.
	The work ahead will be long. The healing will not be easy. But we are a people of covenant, commanded to choose life and to repair what pain has shattered. May we be worthy partners in the sacred labor of return. May this complicated homecoming ignite the long, hard work of repair— for them, for us, for all of Israel.
	Amen.

“A Prayer for Release and Healing” by Rabbi Menachem Creditor was shared through the Open Siddur Project’s Facebook discussion group, and elsewhere on social media on 12 October 2025, in anticipation of the final living hostage’s release on 13 October 2025.

Menachem Creditor

Rabbi Menachem Creditor serves as the Pearl and Ira Meyer Scholar in Residence at UJA-Federation New York and was the founder of Rabbis Against Gun Violence. A frequent speaker in communities and campuses around the United States and Israel with over 1 million views of his online videos and essays, he was named by Newsweek as one of the fifty most influential rabbis in America. His 22 books and 6 albums of original music include the global anthem "Olam Chesed Yibaneh" and the anthologies When We Turned Within and None Shall Make Them Afraid. He has been involved in the leadership of American Jewish World Service, AIPAC, the Rabbinical Assembly, and the One America Movement, an organization dedicated to bringing together Americans of different faiths and opinions. He and his wife Neshama Carlebach live in New York, where they are raising their five children.

Stable Link: https://opensiddur.org/?p=63941

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“No cease without release,” a sign held at the March for Israel, Washington, DC 14 November 2023 (Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA)

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃ (תהלים צ:יז) · "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)

A Prayer for Release and Healing [upon the implementation of the Gaza war peace plan], by Rabbi Menachem Creditor

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