Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel

The prayer opens by addressing God as "Our Father in Heaven, Rock of Israel and its Redeemer" and immediately describes the State of Israel as reishit tzmichat ge'ulateinu — "the beginning of the flowering of our redemption."[1] This phrase places the prayer within a redemptive theological framework from its first lines, presenting Israel's establishment as more than a political event and as the opening stage of a redemptive process.

The petitions that follow are both political and eschatological. The prayer asks God to bless and protect the State, guide its leaders and advisers with wisdom, strengthen the land's defenders and grant them salvation and victory, and grant peace and lasting joy to the land's inhabitants.[1][2] It then prays for the ingathering of Jews from the lands of their dispersion to Zion and Jerusalem, invokes biblical language about their return to the land, asks for devotion to the Torah, and expresses hope for the coming of the messianic descendant of David.[1][2] The prayer closes with an expression of God's universal sovereignty.[1]

The National Library of Israel identifies the prayer as drawing on earlier Jewish liturgical sources. Its wording shares elements with the Hashkivenu prayer, includes a passage based on the liturgical poem Yigdal, and incorporates language from the High Holy Day Amidah.[3] It also draws on the older prayer for the welfare of the ruling government used in some Ashkenazi Diaspora communities.[3]

A separate, shorter petition for the State exists in the Birkat Hamazon (Grace After Meals), composed by the Chief Rabbinate; this is distinct from the longer Tefilla Lishelom HaMedina recited on Shabbat morning, which is the subject of this article.[4]

The tradition of Jewish communities praying for the welfare of the governments under which they live is ancient, rooted in the prophet Jeremiah's instruction to the exiles in Babylonia: "Seek the welfare of the city where I have caused you to be exiled, and pray to God on its behalf, for in its prosperity you shall prosper" (Jeremiah 29:7).[2] The exiles depended on Babylonia and its rulers physically, economically, and politically, and needed those rulers to govern justly and mercifully.[2] The practice also connects to sacrifices made in honor of Caesar at the end of the Second Temple period.[2]

The first siddur to include a formal prayer for the government dates to the fourteenth century, and that text already described the practice as an "established custom."[2] In the centuries that followed, hundreds of prayers for the various governments under which Jews lived were composed, and they have been characterized as windows into the communities that produced them.[2] By the Middle Ages, Hanoten Teshuah had become an established prayer for rulers in Jewish communities, providing a liturgical precedent for prayers concerning the governing power.[5] A 1909 Vilna siddur, for instance, included a prayer asking God to protect and elevate Tsar Nikolai Alexandrovitsh, his family, and the crown prince.[6]

Before Israel's founding, prayer books used in Palestine contained either the traditional prayer for the government or no prayer at all for a governing authority.[7] The establishment of a sovereign Jewish state in 1948 presented a fundamentally new situation: for the first time since antiquity, a prayer for governing authorities would be directed toward Jewish leaders of a Jewish state. The composers faced a central question — whether the prayer should express specifically Zionist hopes and the unique significance of Israel to the Jewish people, or treat Israel's leaders as it would those of any other country.[2]

The familiar prayer was not the first text composed in response to the creation of the State. Several earlier attempts emerged in the months surrounding Israel's independence, none of which achieved wide adoption.[8]

On the night of November 29, 1947, as the United Nations voted on the Partition Plan, Rabbi Reuven Katz — chief rabbi of Petah Tikva and a member of the Council of the Chief Rabbinate — drafted an early prayer for Jewish independence in the Land of Israel and sent it to Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog the following morning.[8] His draft was an adaptation of the established Hanoten Teshuah prayer for rulers, revised for the new circumstances.[8] On the day the State was declared, Rabbi Isser Yehuda Unterman, then rabbi of Tel Aviv and later the second Ashkenazi chief rabbi, composed a Mi Sheberakh prayer for Israel; it was recited once, at Tel Aviv's Great Synagogue on Shabbat, 6 Iyar 5708.[8] Professor Dov Sadan wrote a prayer for the state that remained unpublished for twenty years before he published it in 1968, and an anonymous prayer was recited once at Jerusalem's Yeshurun Synagogue on Shavuot in 5708.[8]

The familiar version was composed by Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog in Av 5708 (summer 1948), after these earlier drafts had been written.[5] Herzog sent his text to Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel and to the writer S. Y. Agnon for comments and review.[5] Uziel pressed for the addition of the biblical phrase u-mal Adonai et levavkha v'et levav zarecha ("The Lord will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring"); the suggestion was initially rejected but eventually appeared in most versions.[5] Agnon proposed several changes, most of which were not accepted; notably, his suggestion to remove moshi'o ("its savior") from the opening was accepted.[5]

On September 20, 1948, the familiar text appeared in Haaretz and HaTzofe under the title "Prayer for the Peace of Israel." The notice stated that Chief Rabbis Isaac Herzog and Ben-Zion Meir Uziel had established and corrected it for recitation in synagogues in Israel and the Diaspora.[1][8] A Hebrew Union College thesis dates the Haaretz appearance to September 21, creating a one-day discrepancy between the secondary accounts.[7]

The publication came two weeks before Rosh Hashanah 5709, and the public was instructed to recite the officially published version every Sabbath near the Torah reading.[1][8]

The prayer was intended from the outset for Sabbaths and festivals, recited after the Torah reading.[7] It is chanted or recited in Hebrew while the Torah ark is open, with the congregation standing.[3] In Israel, most congregations use the Chief Rabbinate's version; in the Diaspora, practices are less uniform, with communities using either the Chief Rabbinate text or adapted versions.[2]

In most Israeli synagogues it is also customarily recited on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the eve of Yom Kippur, and on Sabbaths.[1] Some communities add a recitation at Yom Ha'atzmaut services alongside prayers for Jerusalem and for those who have fallen, though this practice is more common in Israel than in the Diaspora.[9] The prayer entered siddurim in the early 1950s; the religious-Zionist siddur Rinat Yisrael, published by Moreshet in 1970, included it, as did Koren siddurim on the insistence of publisher Eliyahu Koren.[5] The prayer was incorporated into Israel Defense Forces prayer books in 1966.[5]

The prayer's presence varies considerably by community. Non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox synagogues are a recognized exception to the general practice of recitation.[3] Many Israeli ultra-Orthodox synagogues omit it, while it is recited in many synagogues serving Jews of Middle Eastern and North African background.[5] Several melodies have been composed for it, and the melody by Jewish-American composer Sol Zim is identified as the best known.[1]

At Israel's first Independence Day in 1949, Tel Aviv's Great Synagogue recited both traditional formulas naming President Chaim Weizmann and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and the newly published prayer for the State.[7]

Researcher Dr. Yoel Rafel has reported locating at least 60 distinct versions of the prayer.[5] About 30 of them, together with dozens of siddurim and related documents, were displayed in a Bar-Ilan University exhibition marking the state's seventieth anniversary, and Rafel donated an archive of versions to the university.[5] Alternative wordings began appearing as early as the 1950s, and the variations reflect a broad range of political, social, and religious orientations within the Jewish world.[10]

The most theologically freighted variation concerns the phrase describing the State as "the beginning of the flowering of our redemption." Rafel found versions that use "the beginning," "as the beginning," or "may it be the beginning," as well as versions that reject any connection between statehood and redemption altogether.[10] A version authorized by British Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie and used in Britain and Commonwealth communities omitted the phrase.[11]

Some adaptations reflected the particular settings and concerns of specific communities. In 1959, Rabbi David de Sola Pool wrote a version that joined prayers for the United States and for Israel; it was still being recited in hundreds of American synagogues.[10] A 1977 version by the Reform rabbinical council in England emphasized peace, mutual understanding, and healing.[10] A 1999 version in Professor Jeremiah Broner's prayer book for Jews from the Soviet Union added a prayer for immigrants settling in the land.[10] The Reconstructionist movement's Kol Haneshamah siddur (1994) produced a version that asks for justice, freedom, and integrity among leaders, and for peace, kinship, and an end to hatred; unlike the traditional version, it does not call for a speedy universal return to Zion or explicitly invoke the Messiah.[12]

During the Oslo Accords period, Rabbi Avigdor Nebenzahl, with the backing of Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapira, added a petition against harmful counsel and a line asking God to strengthen settlers in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, the Golan, and other parts of the land.[10] These additions prompted calls from other rabbis not to alter the prayer.[10]

The publisher Sinai at one point included the prayer in its siddurim and later removed it, illustrating how editorial decisions in prayer-book publishing became proxies for communal religious and political stances.[5]

The prayer represents a landmark in modern Jewish liturgy: a text composed for the new historical reality of Jewish sovereign statehood that became a standard element of Sabbath worship across a wide range of communities.[2] For the first time, a prayer for a governing authority was directed not toward foreign rulers but toward the leaders of a Jewish state, requiring composers to decide how much of the Jewish people's hopes and beliefs about redemption should be embedded in the text.[2]

The prayer's theology is explicit. It frames Israel's establishment as a divine event and an initial stage of redemption, expresses confidence that the state's maintenance and defense call for divine intervention, and affirms that Jews will ultimately be gathered from the Diaspora to live in Israel.[2] This theological density gave the prayer an importance beyond the liturgical: it became, in Dr. Rafel's phrase, a litmus test of religious attitudes toward the State of Israel.[5]

For religious-Zionist communities, the prayer gave expression to a conviction that the return of Jewish sovereignty to the Land of Israel was not merely a political achievement but the beginning of a messianic process. The phrase reishit tzmichat ge'ulateinu represented a cautious formulation between the establishment of the State and claims of complete redemption.[13]

Immanuel Jakobovits argued that the difference between the version used in Israel — which includes the "sprouting forth" of redemption — and the version authorized by Chief Rabbi Brodie for British and Commonwealth communities — which omits the phrase — constituted a substantive religious disagreement about whether the State is an early stage of messianic redemption, not merely a difference in wording.[11] That disagreement, encoded in two versions of the same prayer, reflects a division within modern Orthodox Jewish life.

The prayer's reach has been broad. The Jewish Agency and My Jewish Learning describe it as recited or sung in most religious streams and in many synagogues in Israel and the Diaspora, while noting exceptions and local variations.[1][2] An Encyclopedia.com biography states that hundreds of thousands of synagogue congregants recite it annually on Yom Kippur.[14]

Two categories of controversy have attended the prayer since its publication: the question of who wrote it, and the question of what its language commits its reciters to believe.

Authorship

The original 1948 newspaper notice named Chief Rabbis Herzog and Uziel as the prayer's founders and revisers and noted that S. Y. Agnon had participated in its formulation.[8] In the early 1980s, a handwritten copy of the prayer was found in Agnon's archive at the National Library, and for a period many people believed Agnon had been the author.[1] The literary scholar David Tamar concluded, based on language, style, and the manuscript, that Agnon was the true author.[7]

Subsequent archival research by Dr. Yoel Rafel — whose surname is also transliterated as Rappel — concluded that Rabbi Herzog composed the initial text and Agnon reviewed it, making limited changes.[1][15] A surviving envelope in Herzog's handwriting described Agnon's manuscript as the state prayer "as copied and corrected by Mr. Agnon in his own hand," supporting the conclusion that Agnon amended rather than originated the draft.[8] The World Jewish Congress likewise attributes the prayer to Herzog and describes Agnon as the friend who edited it.[16]

Other reference accounts retain a more collective attribution. My Jewish Learning records versions crediting Herzog and Uziel with Agnon's assistance, Agnon working with the rabbis, or Agnon composing the text before its adoption.[2] Several more recent archival accounts favor Herzog as the primary author, with contributions from Uziel and Agnon.

The Messianic Phrase

The prayer's characterization of Israel as reishit tzmichat ge'ulateinu — "the beginning of the flowering of our redemption" — has generated persistent religious and political disagreement.[13] Many Haredi Jews do not understand redemption as being brought about by a secular state, holding instead that it comes through Torah observance; some worshippers removed the prayer from their siddurim or tore it out.[2][5] Some communities have questioned more broadly whether messianic beliefs belong in the affairs of a sovereign state, citing the dangers of messianic movements in Jewish history.[2]

Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook reportedly declared that the State itself was redemption, treating even the prayer's cautious formulation as understating the case.[13] The phrase "the beginning of" thus stood between a categorical identification of the State with redemption and the rejection of such a connection.

Other Textual Disputes

The prayer's petitions for the ingathering of Diaspora Jews and for military victory have also prompted reservations. Jews who are comfortable and rooted in Diaspora communities may not relate to a request for their own speedy return to Israel.[2] The simultaneous request for both victory and peace has sparked debate, with some religious leaders producing revisions intended to retain devotion to Israel while reducing triumphalist or martial overtones.[2] The question of whether some versions should include an explicit petition for the Messiah — the "son of David" — has also varied across traditions; some versions include it while others, including Agnon's manuscript, do not.[7]