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.