Now to bed I do retire,
Rest to find and sweet repose;
Lord! my weary eyes aspire
Unto Thee before they close.
Thou, O Father, ever good,
Take my thanks for all Thy love,
For Thy care, for drink and food,
Which Thou gav’st me from above
Pardon ev’ry sinful deed,
Ev’ry evil I have done;
Let my tender age now plead
To Thy mercy, Holy One!
Let my childhood’s innocence
Last through life, unbroken, pure;
That, when’er thou call’s! me hence,
My salvation shall be sure.
“Evening Prayer for Children” is one of thirty prayers appearing in Rabbi Moritz Mayer’s collection of tehinot, Hours of Devotion (1866), of uncertain provenance and which he may have written. –Aharon Varady
Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project, which he founded and directs. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin, Ministarot Nakeniשְׁגִיאוֹת 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. Besides his transcription work, Varady occasionally translates prayers and contributes his own original work. (Varady also serves as editor and administrator of the Open Siddur Project website, opensiddur.org, and is an outspoken advocate for open-source in Judaism more of which can be read about in this interview in the Atlantic Magazine.)
Rabbi Moritz Mayer, born 1821 in Dürckheim-on-the-Haardt, Germany, fled to the United States and to New York as a political refugee of the 1848 revolution. In 1856, after a five year stint as a rabbi in Charleston, South Carolina, he returned in poor health to New York where he contributed frequently to the Jewish press, and translated various German works into English: Rabbi Samuel Adler's catechism, Abraham Geiger's lectures on Jewish history, and Ludwig Philipson's pamphlet, Haben die Juden Jesum Gekreuzigt? (the Crucifixion from the Jewish Point of View), et al. In 1866, he published an english translation of Fanny Neuda's Stunden Der Andacht. The following year, Moritz Mayer passed away. He was 45 years old.
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