Prayer and Ritual

By Rabbis Felicia Sol and Roly Matalon of B’nai Jeshurun in New York City.

From Rabbi Seth Goldstein: We know that this is a nation founded by massacre, built by slavery, maintained by exclusion, defined by inequality. And we also know that this nation promises equality, exercises resilience, evolves continuously, practices teshuvah.

In the wake of the events of October 7, 2023, many of us in the global Jewish community have found ourselves longing for liturgical language to speak to the sense of loss, hopelessness, and heartbreak we have felt over the past year. The following words are an adaptation of El Malei Rachamim (“God full of compassion”), a prayer traditionally recited over the dead at funerals and during Yizkor on Yom Kippur, created by Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, President of Hebrew College.

We offer these texts, sermon ideas, articles, talking points, and insights about the Israel-Hamas war and its reverberating effects to make it a little easier to meet the needs of your community at a tremendously difficult time. 

A collection of T'ruah's resources for Pesach/Passover 2024.

The supplement includes reflections and conversation starters about the Israel-Hamas war that can be used as additions to the traditional haggadah texts or in place of them.

Since the attacks on October 7, T'ruah has offered public webinars for prayer and mourning, to engage with the moral challenges of the war, and to hear from staff who traveled to the region.

We offer these texts as starting points for rabbis and cantors to speak to their communities after this first full week of war. When we have no real answers to provide people in this painful time of uncertainty, the best we can do is offer teaching that orients and grounds us.

God, according to the Torah, created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh. This doesn’t mean that the world was perfect at the end of the sixth day of creation. Rather, God models the necessity of taking just one day to experience the world as it is, while acknowledging our own limitations in perfecting it.

A prayer by Rabbi Ayelet Cohen for the State of Israel.