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

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (editing/transcription) and Norman Salit

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

Categories:

Sukkot, Social Justice, Peace, and Liberty

Tags:

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

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Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	O God of Israel, on this Festal Day, our memories journey back through many crowded centuries, to the long heroic marches of our fathers, through the wilderness. Weary these wanderings were, before Thy people entered the land promised them by Thee, and weary they have been since from it they were torn.
	Yet, though footsore and body-broken, their sufferings were borne by reason of the deathless spirit that flamed dauntless within them. Men speak now of the Jew’s ability, but only because men could always speak of Israel’s survivability, and this they could only because the death of Jewish bodies fed the strength of Jewry’s soul.
	Of this unbreaking spirit, the Succah is the symbol, and the lulaḇ and the esrog. Fragrant and flexible, open and protecting, linked with earth and aspiring to heaven, we have attained as has no other people the secret of harmony between Thine abode and ours, the making of Heaven and Earth not enemies but comrades.
	Maintain within us, O God, this Succah soul, so that as Time and Experience waste their puny strength against us, only adding to our force instead of breaking us down, we and our children may partake of the vision that stirred the spirits of our fathers in the desert when their bodies were most bowed.
	Give to us the pillar of cloud-like vision by day, the pillar of fire-like inspiration by night, and thus in our relations to the land in which we live, teach us, O Lord, to bless this country, to love its inner genius, to grace its farms and cities, to strive for the betterment of its institutions, and to realize in so doing that underlying truth which alone can give us power to do this,— the truth that we can never love America more by loving Israel less. Amen.

This untitled prayer was written by Rabbi Norman Salit and published in Rabbi Jacob Bosniak’s לקוטי תפלות Liḳutei Tefilot: Pulpit and Public Prayers (1927), pp. 35-36 (in the section titled “Prayers for Succoth”).

Source(s)

. Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication . 1.0 . Universal .

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

Aharon N. Varady (editing/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