A Passover Prayer [for Jews in the United States], by Rabbi Norman Salit (ca. 1920s)

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (transcription) and Norman Salit

Shared on:

8 April 2023 under the Creative Commons Zero (CC 0) Universal license a Public Domain dedication

Categories:

7th Day of Pesaḥ, Social Justice, Peace, and Liberty

Tags:

20th century C.E., liberty, 57th century A.M., American Jewry of the United States, bigotry, Americanism

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Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	God of our fathers, on this Festival of Freedom we assemble in Thy house to sing Thy praises. We remember again Thy goodness of yore. Thou didst free us from the yoke of Egyptian bondage.
	But Thou didst more, when Thou caused us to wander in the wilderness and earn the freedom we had been given. This feast of Passover comes to us as perennial reminder that Liberty has ever been one of Thy greatest gifts, one of mankind’s most precious blessings. And therefore it has been that the Jew has always made his home where liberty was not, so that liberty might make its home where the Jew was.
	Enable us, O our God, to guide and elevate our own emancipation. Make us to be active instruments in the gaining of wider freedom and in the pursuing of it on higher levels. Grant us dissatisfaction of spirit, so that we may seek to free our souls for greater grasp and deeper vision, becoming liberated in more than body, and so that we may take eager hold of our own lives and institutions and earn, as in the days of long ago, that truest liberty which Thou hast put within our reach.
	Make us loyal to Thee and to Israel, and therefore to the land in which we live. Make America loyal to itself and therefore to Thee and Thy significance. Bring the deathless spirit of Passover again to the leaders and masses of our country, and make them mindful of the early American motto that “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”^[1] From “ Bradshaw’s Epitaph” printed in The Pennsylvania Evening Post, December 14, 1775, and widely (although possibly improperly) attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Grant that we of America crush our own tyrants of bigotry and hatred, which are fathered by fear and mothered by ignorance, and that we of Israel in America live the better for the country of our flag by doing the more for the country of our faith. Amen.

“A Passover Prayer” was written by Rabbi Norman Salit and published in Rabbi Jacob Bosniak’s לקוטי תפלות Liḳutei Tefilot: Pulpit and Public Prayers (1927), pp. 46-47.

Source(s)

Notes[+]

Notes
1	From “ Bradshaw’s Epitaph” printed in The Pennsylvania Evening Post, December 14, 1775, and widely (although possibly improperly) attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

. Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication . 1.0 . Universal .

“A Passover Prayer [for Jews in the United States], by Rabbi Norman Salit (ca. 1920s)” is shared by the living contributor(s) with a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 Universal license.

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.)

Norman Salit

Rabbi Norman Salit (June 8, 1896 – July 21, 1960), born in Brooklyn, New York, was a lawyer, Conservative rabbi, and community leader who served as the president of the Synagogue Council of America. In 1916, he graduated with a B.A. from City College; in 1919, he graduated with a J.D. from New York University; in 1920, he received his rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; and in 1922, he graduated with a M.A. from Columbia University. From 1919 to 1924, he served as the rabbi at Temple Adath Israel in the Bronx and from 1924 to 1929 as the rabbi at Congregation Shaaray Tefila in Far Rockaway, Queens. From 1933 to 1937, he was head of the Queens County Bar Association Committee on Legislation and Law Reform. In addition to being admitted to practice law in New York, in 1938 he was admitted to the bars of the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Treasury Department. During World War II he was the executive director of the Wartime Emergency Commission for Conservative Judaism. In 1949, he received a Master of Hebrew Letters from the Jewish Theological Seminary and in 1956, an honorary Doctor of Letters from the same institution. From 1953 to 1955, he served as president of the Synagogue Council of America. In 1957, he received a Doctor of Humane Letters from the Philathea College in Canada. He later served on the board of overseers of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, as president of the Long Island Council of the American Jewish Congress, on the executive council of the New York Board of Rabbis (1951-1958), as counsel for the Rabbinical Assembly of America, and as a member of the executive committee of the Zionist Organization of America.

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“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” (rendering of the late 18th century revolutionary motto by Benson Lossing for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, July 1856)

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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