Voting on a Hope and a Prayer
By Dan Friedman November 4, 2008
For those of you who thought that voting was the time for you to inflict your political choice on 300million other folk, think again. Rabbi David Seidenberg has honed a prayer to help us move “beyond partisan acrimony” and to vote in a true spirit for the good of the common weal.
His prayer, written in 1996 but re-written in 2006 and significantly updated again for these elections helps make Jewish sense of our civic obligation to vote, remind us that voting should take place for the good of the whole society and elevate our mental state for the act of voting.
For those who feel as though they have discharged their duty for 4 more years once they’ve filled in the ballot, the prayer also includes a section that explicitly links our thoughts and votes to our actions: fixing the world may start at the ballot box, but it doesn’t end there.
For the online prayer checkout his Web site.
If you just want to download the prayer in English and Hebrew to print out to use outside the booth, you can get a PDF version here.
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