Chayeh Sarah-Mevorchim D'var Torah: Delivered by Stuart Kaufman, November 15th

Shabbat Shalom, and a special welcome on this Shabbat to our newest

members. I am Stuart Kaufman, a long-time Nehar Shalom member, and I

can attest that you do not have to be a rabbi to offer words of Torah at a

Shabbat service, and that we have many opportunities during the year for

members to stand before you, as I am doing this morning.

Very early in this morning’s Torah portion, Chayeh Sarah, we meet

Abraham coming to terms with his wife Sarah’s death in Canaan and his

struggle over where to bury her. The challenge for Abraham is that he is a

Ger V’Toshuv, something akin to a resident alien, and he does not have the

right to own land. And we see how Abraham respectfully honors and

negotiates with the landowner Ephron, wiselly refuses a gift that could be

taken back, and purchases the ancient plains and burial caves for all time.

These earliest Jews, like many who came after them, rarely enjoyed full

rights of citizenship, and they owed their safety and protection to the

monarchs who ruled over those territories. And so it became the custom of

our ancestors to recognize and thank those monarchs in their Shabbat

prayers. Some of my earliest synagogue memories growing up in the post

war 1950s featured the prayer for our country as a proud moment following

the Torah service. Everyone, including members who would never stand for

the Yitgadal prayer, patriotically stood up facing the bimah, which was

flanked by oversized American and Israeli flags, and the reading was often

led by generous donors to the congregation, The message of the prayer

was that we want our elected leaders to rule wisely and fairly with divine

inspiration and without bigotry towards the Jews. We asked our leaders to

safeguard our biblical ideals and to rule with those ideals.

Over the past year of the current US presidency, I have been increasingly

curious about this prayer; when did it start, how did it evolve, and what

does it mean to the Jewish community now, when we are no longer a Ger

V’Toshuv and enjoy full citizenship and land ownership rights. To no

surprise, I am not the very first to study this subject, and I owe special

thanks to Prof. Jonathan Sarna, Professor Barry Schwartz from Haifa and

Professor Alan Shuchat from Newton, among others, for their research.

The study of the prayer for our country provides not only some useful

history lessons but also shows how the form of the prayer can serve as a

kind of barometer for how the Jewish community feels about its security at

that time.

I learned that the prayer for our country does go back a long way. The

earliest mention of the prayer is in the book of Jeremiah during the

Babylonian exile. As early as 594 BCE, the prophet Jeremiah calls on the

people to pray for the welfare of Babylon, since if the city prospers, so will

the Jewish exiles. After the return to Jerusalem, the Prophet Ezra notes

that the Jewish people were who were rebuilding the temple were

encouraged to pray for the life of the king and his sons. There are similar

references in Maccabees and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and later in the

Mishna, where the king is the Roman emperor.

While we don’t have any surviving text of the exact prayer before the

Middle Ages, we do know from compilations such as Kol Bo that

congregations would regularly bless the king on Shabbat after the Torah

reading.

For students of French history, you will recall that the 14th century was the

period of the French popes, who had broken away from the Vatican. They

were based in Avignon and for the first time offered Jews their papal

protection and allowed them to live safely inside any of the four walled

cities in southern France. In gratitude, the “Pope’s Jews” included a special

prayer for the welfare of the Pope in their Simchat Torah services.

“LaAdonaynu HaApfiyar; to our Lord the Pope. The protections for Jews in

these cities lasted for 400 years until the French Revolution when Jews

acquired French citizenship,

Starting in the 15th century, the custom of honoring the monarch on

Shabbat took a more or less fixed form in a prayer that starts with the

words “HaNoten Teshuah” (He who gives salvation to kings and dominion

to princes’ may God strengthen , bless and uplift him and incline his heart

to do good to Israel and to speak good of Jews”). It is a prayer that

acknowledges the political reality of Jews, who had few rights in any

country. The prayer also speaks to an underlying fear. Jews were

vulnerable and could at best only hope for mercy and protection from the

ruler. The Hanoten Teshuah prayer captured the market, so to speak, and

began appearing in not only European Shabbat services but also spread

along Sephardic and Askenazic trade routes. By the 1600s, and the

emergence of the printing press, the prayer was standardized in siddurim

and either the name of the monarch was left blank, to be inserted with the

name of the sitting monarch, or more often the name of the monarch

appeared in the printed edition. I have copies of several examples that I

can pass out. Some names may be familiar:

A siddur from 15th century Spain recognizing Don Fernando (that prayer

didn’t out well; Don Fernando turned out to be King Ferdinand who married

Isabella, and we know the rest in 1492),

The 1854 Machzor from Prague that recognizes Kaiser Ferdinand and

Maria Karolina; Emperor Franz Joseph and Elizabeth; (Jews who lived in

both the Austro-Hungarian and German states at that time were emerging

from ghettos and were allowed to own land and engage in professions)

A 1909 Vilna Machzor for Yom Kippur that recognizes Tsar Nicholas,

Aleksandra and others in the ill-fated royal family. (I would guess that many

of the ancestors from whom we are descended emigrated from Russia

under the reign of Nicholas)

And in that vein, we all remember the lines from the musical Fiddler on the

Roof when the rabbi is asked:

“Rabbi, is there a proper blessing for the Tsar?” The answer: “Of course!

May God bless and keep the Tsar____far far away from us!”

So we see that, even into the early 20th century, Jews in monarchies still

felt the need to ask for the monarch’s protection every Shabbat. And as

history would tragically show us, that hope for protection was often not

enough.

Does anyone know when first English-language siddur and prayer for the

monarch was published? Stepping back to the mid-1600’s, we find that the

siddur was finally translated into English, in part to attract Jews to return to

Great Britain after 400 years of exile. The siddur was published in the

Netherlands, where Jewish communities could be found. But this was the

age of navigation and exploration. The standard siddur, which now included

the prayer for the king in Hebrew and English, accompanied navigators and

their passengers to the new world. The small Jewish communities in NY

dutifully included the royal family in their Shabbat prayers.

That practice took an understandably sharp detour in 1776, when

synagogues were advised that prayers for the Royal family were no longer

necessary or appropriate. The vexing problem was that the rabbis were

reluctant to change the words of any prayers in the siddur, especially one

that had been fixed for centuries. Gradually though, the small Jewish

community in the US (only about 2500 in total at the time of Independence)

gradually replaced the name of the monarch with a depersonalized

blessing for elected office-holders, a kind of liturgical compromise. I would

note that it is likely that few if any Jews voted in those early elections. Few

Jews owned land, a requirement for voting, and the right to determine who

could vote was delegated to the states (for example Jews in New

Hampshire could not vote until 1874). Over time, the text of the prayer was

revised to reflect an increased sense of Jewish security in the country, one

not based on fear. The revised prayer spoke to a wish for enlightened and

benevolent elected leaders who would rule with divine guidance. After all,

Jews were increasingly and visibly engaged as presidential advisors,

judges and legislators. And for a while, the form of the prayer was a

notable example of a prayer that all three denominations of Judaism

agreed on. One example is our own Prayer for the Country on page 177 of

the siddur. Those updated prayers mirrored prayers found in the evolving

Protestant church liturgy as well. They also shed light on the gradual

Americanization of Judaism and the evolving relationship between Jews

and the state. The prayer is based on confidence and not fear.

But what happens when Jewish communities disagree with the direction of

elected office-holders, as many of its do now? One classic example comes

from an Orthodox service in Cambridge in 1979, when a student service

leader, unhappy with the policies of the Jimmy Carter administration,

intoned the following prayer: “May the president , vice president and all

constituted officers of the government be blessed, guarded , protected

exalted, magnified and (pointing to the heavens) raised upward “

And this leads to an inevitable question for us now: Why don’t we read the

prayer for our country at Shabbat services at Nehar Shalom? To be fair,

this is more properly an issue for our estimable Ritual Committee and

Rabbi to consider. But I will end with at least a parting question for us to

ponder: Earlier, we talked about the prayer as a kind of barometer for how

safe we feel. How does that barometer read today? Are we really free yet

from the fears that our ancestors experienced under European monarchs?

Can we safely wear our kippot and Jewish stars publicly in every part of our

country, or even in our own city and feel protected by government

authority? Have we really advanced very far? As we hold in our memory

recent attacks on synagogues in our country, the bombing of a Jewish

governor’s residence on Pesach, and increased police presence at

synagogues, do we feel secure? Among our hundreds of prayers we recite

each Shabbat, isn’t there room for a prayer for a wise and biblically inspired

government in our Shabbat prayers?

Shabbat Shalom