Tired of people who can’t tell their ḳiddish (blessings for the Sabbath) from their ḳaddish (prayer for the dead)? Well, it sets Samuel L. Jackson off too! But he found a way of making a bracha (blessing) and mourning the dead at the same time. Now I can’t vouch for the origins of his nusaḥ (custom) but it sounds very effective! Most people haven’t noticed, the only real part from the Bible is that last section, the first part is actually his own spiel:

A prayer for the well-being of the Navy personnel assigned to the newly built Sa’ar 5 corvette, INS Eilat, in 1993.

The “Pledge of Allegiance to the Family of Earth” was offered by the Women’s Foreign Policy Council (co-chaired by Bella Abzug and Mim Kelber). The earliest publication of the pledge that we were able to located is as found in the article, “Earthlings Unite” by Nina Combs in Ms. Magazine, vol. 18:1&2 (July/August 1989), p. 19.

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).

A Hebrew translation of the lyrics to Harry Nilsson’s “One” (1967) as sung by Aimee Mann (1995)

The mi sheberakh for the IDF composed by Rabbi Shlomo Goren in the context of the Suez Crisis and Israel-Egypt conflict of 1956.

A prayer for intellectual honesty before study.

A bilingual Hebrew-Italian prayerbook compiled by the chief Rabbi of Rome according to the Nusaḥ Italḳi.

In September 1948, while editing Rabbi Yitshak haLevi Hertzog’s new Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel, S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970) drafted this adaptation.

This is the prayer for the welfare of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the United States offered by the sixth rebbe of ḤaBaD, Yosef Yitsḥaq Schneersohn (“נתקנה ע״י כ״ק אדמו״ר שליט״א מליובאװיטש“), in advance of Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur in 5701 (1941).

This is Rabbi Dr. Leo Beack’s prayer for his wife Natalie Baeck née Hamburger (1878-1937), dated 7 March 1937. Natalie had died two days prior on 5 March.

Rabbi Leo Baeck’s essay on prayer “Gebet im Judentum,” was published in the “Judentum und Gebet” issue of Bne Briss (September/October 1935), top of page 82.

In this song written in rhymed Yiddish verse, Rabbi Gerstein celebrates the day of 11 May 1920, the date upon which determined the fate of the Ottoman Empire after World War Ⅰ was concluded and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 reïfied in favor of Jewish national objectives in the Land of Israel.

The prayer for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and King Petar Ⅱ as found in Rabbi Salom Freiberger’s Siddur Rinah u-Tefilah: Molitvenik (1938).

The blessing upon preparing one’s hands for attaining a state of ritual purity before a sacred activity.