The word “advisers” has been axed, but the ministers and leaders made it — joined, importantly, by “every citizen in Israel.” The new version softens “May God devastate their enemies” to “May they go out to do their duty proudly, and may they return home safely.”

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There’s a quotation from Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence about fulfilling the vision of the biblical prophets. And a new ending: “May Zion be redeemed in justice, and those who return to her in righteousness.”

Call it the Prayer for the State of Israel 2.0.

Six months after Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky made headlines by refusing to recite the original version in light of Israel’s new racist and far-right ministers, he is bringing it back to the bimah of his Upper West Side synagogue — with significant adjustments. 

“At a basic level, my job is to help people daven meaningfully,” Kalmanofsky explained when we caught up this week.

Given the mass anti-government protests in Israel, the power Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has handed to extremists, and the riots Jewish settlers have wrought on Palestinian towns, he added: “Honestly, I feel more resolute to say that this government does not deserve my community’s blessing unambiguously.”

After my Jan. 6 column about why Rabbi Kalmanofsky, a staunch liberal Zionist, had stopped saying the Prayer for Israel at his Conservative Manhattan synagogue, Ansche Chesed, the story got picked up by the The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and National Public Radio. He did two Zoominars for fellow rabbis, was featured on a University of Chicago panel for Israel’s 75th anniversary, and recently met with a group of Haifa University students. 

He’s been denounced by some colleagues who say Israel and its leaders need our prayers now more than ever, and mocked publicly at an AIPAC meeting for giving Israel’s enemies cover. He was called racist (and worse) by the pro-Palestinian left. 

One prominent member of his shul, the conservative commentator John Podhoretz, quit in disgust, and others grumbled that Kalmanofsky had made the change without enough congregational input. 

“This was my 15 minutes of infamy, definitely,” he quipped.

But he took the grumblings about input seriously, which is part of why it’s taken awhile to roll out the new version. He worked it through the congregation’s ritual committee, held broader community meetings in person and on Zoom, workshopped the text with Hebrew grammarians, and explained it all in a video and a Google doc that borrows from the style of the great Talmudic commentator Rashi. 

“When you want to make a change, you have to ripen the atmosphere for change,” he said. “I feel like I learned a lot — I have a greater sensitivity to the sensitivities. One of the people who was upset with me wrote me a note. He said, ‘Well, you can disagree with what you did, but you did it in a very thoughtful way.’ I’m plenty happy with that.”

The new prayer contains 79 Hebrew words compared to the original’s 50 (English translations vary, but it’s basically 139 to the old 85.) Each one was chosen carefully. “Writing something that you hope people will recite together every Shabbat, over and over again, is really different,” Kalmanofsky said. “A liturgy has to have a little bit of an incantatory beat to it.”

Hence the loss of “advisers,” the rabbi explains in his Rashi-style explainer.

The original prayer, which was written in 1948 by Israel’s founding Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Isaac Halevi Herzog, had “ministers, leaders and advisers.” Kalmanofsky wanted to remove all three — after all, his decision to stop reciting it centered on his conviction that the hateful ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir were simply beyond the pale. But he understood, too, people’s desire to pray for the government officials that are responsible for protecting Israelis against rockets from Gaza and providing them with health care and electricity. 

So, instead, he decided to “expand the realm of those I pray for,” as he put it, to add, “every citizen in Israel.” The new version, then, “lets us pray that Hashem illuminate politicians in their duties and citizens in theirs,” he continues. As for cutting ”advisers,” he says, “three terms in a list is better than four.”

“One of the people who was upset with me wrote me a note. He said, ‘Well, you can disagree with what you did, but you did it in a very thoughtful way.’ I’m plenty happy with that.”

– Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky

There are rabbis these days who write a lot of new prayers — prayers for Ukrainian refugees, prayers about climate change, prayers for coping with the pandemic. Rabbi Kalmanofsky is not one of those rabbis. He said that other than, say, creating a special, tailored misheberach blessing for a wedding couple on their aufruf, this is pretty much his first liturgical go. 

He started back in December, when he first realized he could no longer lead the congregation in the traditional prayer. “The first thing I wrote was bad,” he said. There was the cadence issue, he said, and it was also “too topical. It was tightly aimed at the specific — like I was making a little speech about Jewish supremacy. And that’s not a prayer.” 

He set it aside for awhile. A major inspiration came in April with Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s 75th birthday. He revisited the Talmudic deep dive that the social change movement Bina did on Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That led to the new version’s most significant addition, a quote from the declaration’s 13th paragraph about the country being “founded on the principles of freedom, justice and peace, as envisioned by the biblical prophets.”

“Secular and political Zionism often aspired to be ‘a state like every other.’ Not good enough. Certainly not good enough to warrant a prayer in the synagogue and a religious commitment,” Kalmanofsky explains. “I pray that the modern State of Israel also be worthy of the history and faith of the people of Israel.” 

This Shabbat will be Ansche Chesed’s third week using the new prayer, though Kalmanofsky still calls it a draft, and just this week made a slight grammatical tweak to the Hebrew. He said that by summer’s end, he expects to have it pasted into the cover of all the synagogue’s prayer books.

I suppose we could pray that, by then, Netanyahu will come to his senses and withdraw the dangerous judicial overhaul plan that threatens to undermine Israeli democracy. We could pray for him to get rid of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, or at least reduce their influence. We could pray for peace with the Palestinians.

For an end to antisemitism. For a world free of hate. An internet free of disinformation. A planet not on a path to self-destruction.  

I’m starting to get how hard prayer-writing can be, and not just because of cadence. 

Thanks to Matthew Litman for contributing to this newsletter, and Adam Langer for editing it.  

Shabbat Shalom! Questions/feedback: [email protected]

YOUR TURN: JURY DUTY

THANKS FOR SHARING YOUR STORIES

I got so many thoughtful emails about last week’s ode to jury duty that I had to share a few:

“I’ll never forget doing jury duty in Brooklyn some 20 years ago. Made it into the large, theater-like jury pool selection room. The manager behind a desk of sorts on a stage of sorts at the front of the room leaned into his mic and rattled off a host of exemption questions.

“A steady trickle of jurors walked out. Then he declared: ‘If there is anybody present in this chamber who does not comprehend the language of English, please rise and exit to the rear.’ And about half the room got up and left.” — Mendy Hecht

“I used to run a Jewish nonprofit, and with the support of my board set a policy that if anybody wanted to get out of jury duty, they could come up with whatever excuses they want, but never pin it on work. Our workplace is supportive, even encouraging, of people to fulfill their civic responsibility. And personally, I would tell people that if I ever found myself the defendant in a case I would want people like them on my jury.” — Robert Lichtman

“I think that doing jury duty is a mitzvah … in the Amidah, we have a whole blessing about justice, and it ends with the fact that God loves justice!” — Deborah Miller

And this important counterpoint from a woman who recently served six weeks on a Grand Jury and asked to remain anonymous: 

“It was day after day after day of listening to heart-breaking testimony in nine different child rape cases. Watching multiple videos from different angles over and over of three different bloody murders. I was absolutely glad to hear a drug dealing charge. I was sadly and weirdly relieved to hear an adult rape case because hey, at least it wasn’t a 14-year-old struggling to remember details of what happened she was 7 or maybe 9, and then the horror of having several grand jurors question her credibility, to her face.

“There’s a prevailing attitude that jury duty will be bland if it can’t be avoided, but sometimes for your own heart’s sake, you should avoid it. The very small consolation I have from it is that I’m helping get some justice for these souls.”

YOUR WEEKEND READS

A FREE, PRINTABLE MAGAZINE OF STORIES TO SAVOR OVER SHABBAT AND SUNDAY

It’s the last day of Pride month and the first Shabbat of summer camp season. So we lead this week’s collection of top stories with Louis Keene’s fascinating look at how some camps are catering to the growing number of trans and non-binary kids — and the backlash against it.

Also: Roseanne Barr, Edie Windsor, Alexander Lukashenko, Mick Jones, and what to do if your alleged friend doesn’t like your (very Jewish) style of talking. 

Download the printable (PDF) ➤

WATCH: TREE OF LIFE TRIAL

On this week’s edition of That Jewish News Show, Benyamin and Laura talked with Toby Tabachnick, editor of the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, about what it was like to cover the worst antisemitic attack in the nation’s history — and, now, the death-penalty trial of its perpetrator. 

WATCH: ALL ABOUT OUR ARCHIVE

I recently got to chat with Chana Pollack, our longtime archivist, about some of the things she most treasures — a single key left from a Yiddish typesetter, a silhouette of our founding editor Ab Cahan. Chana shared secrets of how she does her work, and answered audience questions. 

BINTEL BRIEF: TALKING WHILE JEWISH

A reader calling herself “Chatterbox Checkmate” wrote to our Jewish advice column after a close synagogue friend confronted her about what the friend sees as a rude pattern of interrupting. Our Mira Fox introduced her to a linguistic phenomenon known as “conversational overlapping,” which lay people might call Talking While Jewish.

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