God Our Eternal Home (CCAR 1923)

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (transcription), Unknown and Central Conference of American Rabbis [CCAR]

Shared on:

11 April 2026 under the Creative Commons Zero (CC 0) Universal license a Public Domain dedication

Categories:

Homes & Community Centers, Well-being, health, and caregiving

Tags:

20th century C.E., 57th century A.M., alienation, עבודה זרה avodah zarah, בצלם אלהים btselem Elohim, English vernacular prayer, interconnectedness, teḥinot in English

Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	One thing I have asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. For He concealeth me in His pavilion in the day of evil. He hideth me in the covert of His tent; He lifteth me up upon a rock. (Psalms 27:4-5)
	How lovely are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! My soul yearneth, yea, even pineth for the courts of the Lord. (Psalms 84:2-3)
	For a day in Thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. (Psalms 84:11)
	Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting Thou art God. (Psalms 90:1-2)
	Unto thy Rock, my soul, uplift thy gaze, His loving-kindness day and night implore. Remember thy Creator in the days Of youth, in song His glorious name adore. He is thy portion through earth’s troubled maze, Thy shelter, when life’s pilgrimage is o’er. Thou knowest that there waits for thee always A peaceful resting-place His throne before. Therefore the Lord my God I bless and praise, Even as all creatures bless Him evermore. (from “Shaḥar Avaqshekha” by Shlomo ibn Gabirol, as adapted by Alice Lucas)
	Home offers shelter and peace. Home is the sanctuary within which life’s fiercest struggles abate. There, more than anywhere else, individuality has free play. Outside of the home our wishes must be curbed, our tastes overriden, our convenience ignored; but in the home, the multitude is excluded, and our individuality reassumes its dignity.
	God is our eternal home because, unlike finite man who ignores much and heeds little, the Infinite ignoreth naught and heedeth all. Our individuality is precious and indispensible unto Him.
	“All I could never be All men ignored in me This I was worth to God.”^[1] Lines from Robert Browning’s poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra” first published in Dramatis Personæ on 28 May 1864.
	Unto the Divine Father naught is outcast, naught strange, naught negligible. The weakest and the obscurest are significant unto Him. The psalmist has said: “We are the people of His pasture and the flock of His hand” (Psalms 95:7). “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that reverence Him” (Psalms 103:13). “Though father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up” (Psalms 27:10).
	Closely linked with our consciousness of every individual’s worth is our consciousness of immortality. We are prone to deny immortality only in moments of weariness and despair, when we lose sight of human dignity and worth. A heightened sense of the preciousness of the individual to God brings with it a clearer intimation that the soul is deathless. If we are cherished children to our Father, then are we immortal. The moment we sense God as our home, we know Him to be our eternal home.
	O Thou whose mercies are infinite, open our eyes to the beauty and worth of every human soul. Heal our blindness. Enable us to peer beneath the outward appearance to the realities within. Give us that grace of mind and nobility of character that can penetrate beneath all that is unpleasant and forbidding in our fellowmen and can see that precious core of individuality whereby humanity becomes divine and all hearts are linked together because [they are all] linked unto Thee.
	Yea, in Thee we are at home, Eternal One, and only in Thee. Though we seem homeless amid life’s storms, Thou alone are acquainted with all our ways. Thou wilt not abandon our soul to the grave, Thou wilt show us the path of life. In Thy right hand are pleasures for evermore. Amen.

“God Our Eternal Home” is the forty-fourth prayer found in ברכה ותהלה Blessing and Praise: A Book of Meditations and Prayers for Individual and Home Devotion (CCAR 1923), pp. 146-148. Unfortunately, we do not yet know of a resource providing clear attribution of authorship for any of the prayers in this volume.

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Notes

Notes
1	Lines from Robert Browning’s poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra” first published in Dramatis Personæ on 28 May 1864.

Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Unknown

Sometimes the best we can do in attributing a historical work is to indicate the period and place it was written, the first prayer book it may have been printed in, or the archival collection in which the manuscript was found. We invite the public to help to attribute all works to their original composers. If you know something not mentioned in the commentary offered, please leave a comment or contact us.

Central Conference of American Rabbis [CCAR]

The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), founded in 1889 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, is the principal organization of Reform rabbis in the United States and Canada.

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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)

God Our Eternal Home (CCAR 1923)

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