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. . . . “Where We Can Find God,” a prayer-poem inspired by passages appearing in David Frishman’s Hebrew translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. . . . A prayer for United Nations Day, the anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. . . . 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). . . .  Tags: political and religious anarchism, 58th century A.M., Yiddish translation, Hebrew translation, Pedagogical songs, Arabic translation, Universal Peace, 20th century C.E., children's education, זמירות zemirot, love your fellow as yourself, universalist, universalist prayers, Aramaic translationA prayer of intention before the meeting of the board of a philanthropic organization determining the recipients of the largess in their trust. . . . This is a macaronic poem for Yom Meturgeman. Macaronic poetry is poetry in multiple languages at once. In this case, the languages reflected are Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, Ladino, and English, with a repeated Hebrew refrain. Each language is meant to rhyme with the colloquial Hebrew as it would be read — i.e. though the Yiddish doesn’t rhyme with the modern Hebrew pronunciation, it rhymes with the traditional Ashkenazi one. . . . |
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