The pedagogical song “Hashem is Everywhere!” by Rabbi Yosef Goldstein (1928-2013) can be found in the context of his story, “Where is Hashem?,” the second track on his album מדות טובות Jewish Ethics Through Story and Song (Menorah Records 1972). In the instructions to reciting the lyrics, the singer points first to the six cardinal directions and lastly, by pointing inward towards one’s self. In so doing, one explicitly affirms the idea of the divine within ourselves and implicitly, in each other.

Variations of the original three lines culminating with “…walk beside me…” first appear in high school yearbooks beginning in 1970. The earliest recorded mention we could find was in The Northern Light, the 1970 yearbook of North Attleboro High School, Massachusetts. In the Jewish world of the early to mid-1970s, a young Moshe Tanenbaum began transmitting the lines at Jewish summer camps. In 1979, as Uncle Moishy, Tanenbaum published a recording of the song under the title “v’Ohavta” (track A4 on The Adventures of Uncle Moishy and the Mitzvah Men, volume 2).

“National Brotherhood Week” by Tom Lehrer was first released on his album “That Was The Year That Was” (1965). National Brotherhood Week in February was first established in the 1930s by the National Conference of Christians and Jews as a means of promoting the values of inter-religious tolerance and civic interdependence. The week gained federal support from President Franklin Roosevelt during World War Ⅱ as a means of combatting fascist and nativist objections to a vision of democracy built on the foundation of a multicultural civil society. By the time Tom Lehrer lampooned the civic commemoration in 1965, the McCarthyite oppressions of the Red Scare and Lavender Scare during the Cold War, the manufactured Vietnam War, lingering anti-Semitic prejudice and suspicion, the continued struggle for civil rights with its continued lynchings, the assassination of JFK and increasing political violence had all exposed National Brotherhood Week for many young adults as phony, a historical relic that had lost the import of any cultural imperative it might have once possessed.

Prayer delivered by Rabbi Uri Miller, President of the Synagogue Council of America, at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963

A prayer for Brotherhood Week, written in 1951.

This prayer by Rabbi Dudley Weinberg, National Chaplain of AMVETS after World War II, was included in the anthology, The Prayer Book of the Armed Forces (ed. Daniel A. Poling, 1951), pp. 79-80. The prayer was chosen for publication by the then National Commander of AMVETS, Harold Russell.

A prayer for peace from the end of World War II.

A civic prayer for the Sabbath occurring during Brotherhood Week (February 19th-28th) in the United States.

“Interdependence” by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) was originally written for the 50th Anniversary of the World’s Young Women’s Christian Association, 19 November 1944. The prayer was included by Rabbi Morrison David Bial in his anthology, An Offering of Prayer (1962), p. 55. It’s likely that Rabbi Bial first read the prayer in an anthology of prayer by Stephen Hole Fritchman, Prayers of the Free Spirit (1945), p. 38.

This prayer by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943) was first publicly read in 1942 in the course of a United Nations Day speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This “Special Prayer” for a Youth Service (11 April 1942) by the Hon. Lily H. Montagu (1873-1963) from the archives of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, London, was published in, Lily Montagu: Sermons, Addresses, Letters, and Prayers (ed. Ellen M. Umansky, 1985), p. 351. April 11th that year would have corresponded to the 24th of Nissan, i.e., a day following Passover 5702.

A prayer for intra-national peace during the interwar period (after World War I).

Y.L. Peretz rejected cultural universalism, seeing the world as composed of different nations, each with its own character. Liptzin comments that “Every people is seen by him as a chosen people…”; he saw his role as a Jewish writer to express “Jewish ideals…grounded in Jewish tradition and Jewish history.” This is Peretz’s lampoon of the popularity of Friedrich Schiller’s idealistic paean made famous as the lyrics to the climax of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Three stanzas adapted from “Worship” by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), appears as hymn number 73: “The Peace of Pity” in Rabbi Max Klein’s hymn book for Congregation Adath Jeshurun, Philadelphia, Hymns of Prayer and Praise (1926). Nowadays we might say “The Peace of Empathy” rather than “The Peace of Pity.” I’ve left the title unchanged in the body of the text.

“How beautiful it is to see,” by Penina Moïse, published in 1842, appears under the subject “Brotherly Love” as Hymn 41 in Hymns Written for the Service of the Hebrew Congregation Beth Elohim, South Carolina (Penina Moïse et al., Ḳ.Ḳ. Beth Elohim, 1842), pp. 44-45.

In 1785 Friedrich Schiller wrote his ‘An die Freude an ode ‘To Joy’, describing his ideal of an equal society united in joy and friendship. Numerous copies and adaptations attest to its popularity at the time. The slightly altered 1803 edition was set to music not only by Ludwig van Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony but also by other composers such as Franz Schubert and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Hs. Ros. PL B-57 contains a Hebrew translation of the first edition of the ode (apparently rendered before the 1803 alteration), revealing that the spirit of the age even managed to reach the Jewish community in the Netherlands. Whereas the imagery of Schiller’s original is drawn from Greek mythology, the author of the שִׁיר לְשִׂמְחָה relies on the Bible as a source. In fact, he not only utilises Biblical imagery, but successfully avoids any allusion to Hellenistic ideas whatsoever.

A crucial intention to align one’s davvenen practice with the command to love one’s fellow as oneself per Leviticus 19:18, as recorded in Minhagei ha-Arizal–Petura d’Abba, p.3b by Ḥayyim Vital.