On Writing a Prayer for This Moment

As many of you know, we’ve been using a new prayer for those taken hostage, those injured, and the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces as a way of liturgically acknowledging the Hamas massacre on Simchat Torah and subsequent war.

I, along with Rabbi Borodin, actually wrote this tefillah (or somewhat more accurately, combined pieces of several existing tefillot and added a few things along the way). As people ask questions about this tefillah and about how we’re making sense of this moment more broadly, I wanted to share the values that brought us to this particular tefillah.

First of all, we know the power of having the opportunity to name particular individuals about whom we are concerned in our tefillot, as we do every week in the mi sheberach lecholim, the prayer for those who are ill, that we recite every Shabbat. It was important to us to craft a tefillah that had the option for each individual to include the names of those whom they’re holding in prayer, as opposed to only speaking generalities.

And that’s why the simplest piece of this tefillah is so similar to that mi sheberach for those who are ill. With the opportunity to add specific names, we ask God to heal all of those who are ill or have been injured as a result of this conflict. The ethnicities, citizenships, and religions of those individuals are left intentionally unnamed. This is not only a prayer for healing for Jewish Israelis injured on October 7 and in the intervening weeks, it is also a prayer for the Bedouins, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and foreign workers who were injured, and it is also a prayer for the innocent Gazans who have been injured as the IDF attempts to root out Hamas and for those injured by backfiring terrorist rockets. We pray for the healing of all of them.

We also know that some people in our community have personal connections (and many more have second or third degree connections) to individuals who are being held hostage by Hamas, and that even more people in our community have loved ones serving in the IDF, including several of our past shinshinim who lived and worked here in the CBS community. We wanted to be able to name all of those different groups of people, hostages, injured, and soldiers in our prayers, which necessitated a tefillah that could offer a broad blessing to people in all of these categories.  

And so we settled on praying that God be filled with compassion for them, bring them from darkness to light, and return them to the embrace of their families in health and in peace. We intentionally chose not to use language of victory; because what we ultimately long for is not victory, but peace. And creating a durable and lasting peace will take much more than just military victory. 

With that longed-for future in mind, we close the tefillah with the hope-- even though it feels so distant at this moment-- that all the inhabitants of this sacred land may one day dwell “under their own vine and fig tree and none shall make them afraid.” The prophet Micah tells us that this is what God longs for, too. May it soon be so.