This prayer of the guest chaplain was offered in the second month of the second session of the 80th US Congress. The prayer was published in the Congressional Record—House (1948): p. 1275. The source images of the prayer were copied by Howard Mortman and shared via his @CongressRabbi Twitter account. Providing on this prayer, Dr. Michael A. Meyer in Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (2020) wrote:

The greatest honor that accrued to Baeck during his visit was the invitation to deliver the opening prayer at a session of the U.S. House of Representatives. Although more than fifty rabbis had preceded him (the first being in 1860), it was a privilege not previously bestowed upon a non–North American rabbi.^[2] Find Howard Mortman, When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2020).  It was especially meaningful to Baeck that the date chosen— prob ably by chance— was the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Baeck had long admired the American Civil War president for his integrity and courage. When he visited Washington in 1930, he declared the Lincoln Memorial the most beautiful site in the city. While in New York, he spent some time in Harlem, “the local Negro area.” In 1940 in Berlin, he had read anew Lincoln’s “magnificent” Gettysburg Address, and had noted in a letter that at its end, Lincoln expressed the hope “that this nation, under God, shall have new birth of freedom.” To which Baeck added, with scarcely veiled reference to Germany: “The question is there. The answer?”^[3] Letter to Hans-Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau, 31 December 1940, in Werke 6: 611.  Now he was given the opportunity to express his great re spect for Lincoln and at the same time to include in his prayer a central ele ment of his own religious philosophy:

Encapsulated in this invocation is Baeck’s conviction that a transcendent element is always present as history’s driving force for good, though the source of that force be shrouded in mystery. In Baeck’s words: “It is not that which is limited, that which arises from the human world, but rather it is the divine that makes history.”^[4] Das Wesen des Judentums, in Werke 1: 258.  According to Baeck’s interpretation, when Lincoln said that “we cannot escape history,” he was saying in essence that we are unable to evade the divine moral imperative that, through responsive human action, drives history forward. After the tragedy that the world had just experienced, Lincoln’s words that we cannot escape history served Baeck as a prelude to his own fervent hope for a divinely inspired history that would move humanity toward a better time.

Source(s)

Prayer of the Guest Chaplain (Leo Baeck 12 February 1948)

This is a prayer-poem by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan based on the writings of Rabbi Leo Baeck, as published in the Sabbath Prayer Book (Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation 1945), p.426-7. Dr. Mel Scult writes:

In the early forties, Kaplan working on his 1945 prayer book, fashioned a poem based on the writings of Rabbi Leo Baeck the famous Reform rabbi of German Jewry. The poem based on Baeck in an altered version found its way into the prayer book as “Life is What We Make It.” Here are the concluding lines from the 1942 version: “For true religion is the will to life abundant, the will to face the world and change it, the will to face men and transform them, the will to bring forth the best out of the worst. This is true religion’s call to repentance and redemption. “Prepare ye a way for the Lord, a path in the wilderness for our God [Isaiah 40:3].” found in the Kaplan diary August 23, 1942 , and Communings of the Spirit, ed. Mel Scult, vol 3 page 105-106, and in the Kaplan 1945 prayerbook page 426.

Source(s)

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. Natalie Hamburger was the grand-daughter of the radical religious reformer Rabbi
Adolf Wiener, who had served the Jewish community of Oppeln until his death in 1895.

In Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (2020) p. 113, Dr. Michael Meyer writes,

Baeck’s final years in Berlin were—if anything—even more difficult than those that preceded them. Until March 1937, his wife, Natalie, had been his support. Their home had always been open to friends and students at the seminary. With her death from a stroke, arguably brought on by the extreme anxieties of the times, Baeck lost his life’s companion, and only a house keeper remained to serve his domestic needs. He called it “the hardest blow of these hard years.” Two days after Natalie’s death, he committed his thoughts to paper: “We shall now be without you, our life without the blessing of your life, without you, who were so pure, so true, so bright, so genuine, so pious. . . . You have returned home and left us behind without you. May God give strength to get through these days.” A friend who had often been in their home and had witnessed their matrimonial harmony wrote of their marriage that it had been “earnest, sacred, and deeply happy.”^[1] Hans-Hasso von Veltheim-Ostrau to Edith Andreae, 5 March 1937, cited in Karl Klaus Walther, Hans Hasso von Veltheim: Eine Biographie (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2004), p. 259.  For months after Natalie’s death, Baeck daily visited her grave in the Weissensee Cemetery of the Jewish community. On her gravestone, he asked that words from the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs be written in Hebrew: “But you surpass them all” (Prov. 31:29). According to an interview he gave after the war, each year on the anniversary of her death he suggested to his students at the seminary that they preach a sermon on women.^[2] Eric H. Boehm, “A People Stands Before Its God: Leo Baeck,” in idem, We Survived: The Stories of Fourteen of the Hidden and Hunted of Nazi Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 282–283. 

The prayer is archived in the Leo Baeck Family Collection, AR 25449, in the Leo Baeck Institute Archives (LBIA), graciously digitized and made accessible by the Institute at the Internet Archive. Many thanks to Rabbi Marisa Elana James for proofreading my German transcription. English translation is my own, but please feel free to correct or improve upon it. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

This is the prayer which Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck had disseminated to Jewish communities throughout Germany to recite on Yom Kippur, 10 October 1935. The German text here is as found in the archival notes of Helmut Grünewald, Ein Judenjunge durfte kein Deutscher sein (Bristol, 1998), pp. 20-21 in the collection of the Leo Baeck Institute.

The English translation is as published by Dr. Michael Meyer in Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (2020), pp. 106-107. Dr. Meyer writes,

…in anticipation of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, on October 6, 1935, Baeck formulated a second, yet more eloquent and powerful, message, this time containing words that the Nazi authorities could not ignore. He composed it shortly after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws and gave it the form of a prayer to be read publicly on the eve of the holiday…

A powerful refrain runs through Baeck’s message. Five times, he repeats that on the Day of Atonement, Jews express their conviction that they are not accountable to cruel human authorities; they stand before God alone. God alone is their judge. Only the Creator can judge their worth as human beings: “To Him we bow down, and we stand upright before humans”; we will not let the Nazi authorities define who we are. In language similar to what Martin Luther King would say when forced to remain silent during his march into Arlington Cemetery at the time of the Vietnam War, Baeck alludes to a “silent devotion” that “shall speak more urgently than any words are able.” Referring to this message after the war, Baeck recalled that one specific line in the prayer especially offended the Nazi authorities, since they could not help but see it as an attack upon them: “We say with a feeling of abhorrence that we see deep beneath our feet the lie that is turned against us, the libel that is cast upon our religion and its testimonies.”^[2] Leo Baeck, “A People Stands Before Its God,” in Eric H. Boehm, We Survived: The Stories of Fourteen of the Hidden and the Hunted of Nazi Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), 286. 

Eight hundred copies of Baeck’s prayer were sent out to synagogues throughout Germany, with the intention that when they would be read aloud, they would serve as a collective protest. Among those planning to read it was Max Warburg in Hamburg, who later wrote: “And since I would have thought myself cowardly had I caused it to be read by others while I took no share, I decided to deliver it in the synagogue of the Jewish Orphan Asylum.”^[3] Cited in Ron Chernow, The Warburgs: The 20th-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family, (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 435.  However, Baeck’s prayer was not read all over Germany, as he had intended. The Nazi authorities got wind of it and insisted that it not be read. Baeck had no choice but to order its destruction wherever it had been sent, as in the tele gram he wrote to the congregation in Potsdam: “By order of the Office of the Secret State Police I call upon you under no circumstances at no time and in no place to read the proclamation. Destroy it.”^[4] A photo of the telegram is in Avraham Barkai, “Im Schatten der Verfolgung und Vernichtung,” p. 84.  According to Baeck, his prayer had come to the attention of the Gestapo because one of the German rabbis had foolishly asked the minister of the interior of his German state whether there was any governmental reservation regarding its presentation. As punishment for the statement, Baeck was arrested, charged with failing to secure advance permission from the Gestapo, and briefly imprisoned. His release seems to have resulted because, at a time when the Nazi government was still sensitive to foreign opinion, a correspondent for the London Times learned of his arrest and reported it in his paper. Moreover, Otto Hirsch had assumed responsibility for sending out the prayer, whereupon he was then arrested, forcing Baeck to go to Gestapo headquarters to seek his colleague’s release. He told the imprisoners that he could not carry on the work of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (the National Representation of German Jews) without Otto Hirsch. At first, Baeck failed to gain his colleague’s release, but he succeeded on a second attempt. At that point, it was apparently still of some importance to the authorities that there be a representative body of the Jewish community with which they could communicate, even if its leaders did not act fully in accordance with their wishes.^[5] Kurt Jakob Ball-Kaduri, Vor der Katastrophe: Juden in Deutschland 1934–1939 (Tel Aviv: Olamenu, 1967), pp. 54–55. 

The text of this prayer can also be found in Y. Arad, Y. Gutman, A. Margaliot (ed.), Documents on the Holocaust, Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1981, pp. 87-88. For another English translation of this same prayer, find this resource at Yad Vashem.

Source(s)

Ein Judenjunge durfte kein Deutscher sein (Helmut Grunewald 1998), p. 20

Ein Judenjunge durfte kein Deutscher sein (Helmut Grunewald 1998), p. 21

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. Many thanks to Dr. Michael Meyer who noted this essay in Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times, note 151 page 245. The essay essentially reconciles the Stoic maxim “Know Thyself” with the rabbinic dictum “דע לפני מי אתה עומד (“know before whom you stand,” Berakhot 28b.7), the former famously placed at the entrance to the Temple at Delphi, and the latter a familiar inscription adorning many synagogues entrances, sanctuaries, and aronei haqodesh. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

This work is in the Public Domain due to its having been published more than 95 years ago.

This work was scanned by Aharon Varady for the Open Siddur Project from a volume held in the collection of the HUC Klau Library, Cincinnati, Ohio. (Thank you!) This work is cross-posted to the Internet Archive, as a repository for our transcription efforts.

Scanning this work (making digital images of each page) is the first step in a more comprehensive project of transcribing each prayer and associating it with its translation. You are invited to participate in this collaborative transcription effort!

Source (German)	Translation (English)
INHALTSVERZEICHNIS	TABLE OF CONTENTS
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