American Jews once liked to pray. They may not have regularly attended Sabbath services or kept the dietary laws, but offering up a few good words to the Almighty was a common practice of theirs during the closing years of the 19th century and the opening years of the 20th.No Jewish organizational gathering or communal celebration took place without evoking His sheltering presence.
When, in February 1876, District Grand Lodge No. 2 of the International Order of B’nai B’rith held its annual meeting, its president, Brother Nathan Drucker, set things in motion by thanking the “Great Author of our existence” for enabling the members of the order to gather together to promote the values of “Benevolence, Brotherly Love and Harmony.”
Summoning the presence of the divine was not just a form of insurance, one of those “it couldn’t hurt” kind of practices. A grace note that elevated the proceedings, it also heralded American Jewry’s sense of belonging to the body politic, of being an active participant in a national culture in which the civic and the religious spheres were closely aligned, the recitation of prayers an expected feature of events that ranged from the opening of Congress, the launching of world’s fairs, and the start of political conventions to the celebration of the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. As J.R., a Jewish resident of Philadelphia, evocatively put it in an 1875 letter to the editor of The American Israelite, “prayers, fervent prayers, are constantly sent up with lightning express.”
In figuring out what to say, American Jews like J.R. could draw on Jewish history, not just on contemporary rhetoric, by reading about and patterning themselves after Abraham, the prayerful patriarch. “Abraham Prays,” declared The American Israelite three years later in an unabashed salute to the biblical figure and his humanity, noting how “humane emotions overpowered him, commiseration moved his heart and tongue and lips, and he prayed.”
It’s not clear what prompted the weekly to hold forth on Abraham’s belief in prayer; no archaeological discovery, no brouhaha within the ranks of biblical scholars, no impending theological schism seemed to have occasioned it. All the same, the American Jewish newspaper made much of Abraham, intimating that his devotions led the way to Moses and Mount Sinai and, by extension, that praying on behalf of the common good was a very good thing, indeed.
The patriarch’s sterling example notwithstanding, over time his kind of intercession—and public prayer, more generally, especially for the welfare of those in power—fell from grace, a casualty of growing modernization and secularization. Increasingly, its primary redoubt became the house of worship. Here, within the sacred precincts of the synagogue, American Jews petitioned the divine to look favorably upon the nation and its “constituted officers of government.”
On Thanksgiving in 1879, Dr. Gustav Gottheil of New York’s Temple Emanu-El told his congregants to count their blessings and to bear in mind how thankful they ought to be for the “excellence of the form of government under which they live.”
He was hardly alone. One of the few features of the Sabbath prayer service that Reform, Conservative, modern Orthodox, and Reconstructionist denominations had, and continue to have, in common, a “prayer for the government” was sacrosanct. The phrasing of its sentences as well as the language in which they were delivered might differ from one branch of American Judaism to the next, but the essential theme—the providential nature of the American experiment—remained constant.
Much the same could be said of its set place within the modern worship service: Unquestioned, assured, a “prayer for the government” had long been one of the fixtures of the American Jewish siddur, or prayerbook. (And well before that, of its Old World counterparts: An artifact of the diaspora, prayers for the welfare of those who ruled over them have been around ever since the Jews found themselves in exile—and in need of protection.)
Within the printed pages of compilations such as the Union Prayer Book for Jewish Worship (1895), a staple of Reform congregations; the Festival Prayer Book (1927), used in Conservative synagogues; and Philip Birnbaum’s Sabbath Prayer Book: A Complete Ritual (1925), which serviced what came to be known as the modern Orthodox worshipper, psalms might come and go; hymns truncated, transliterated, or cast aside; kings tumbled from their perch and presidents inaugurated in their stead. But beseeching the heavenly power to protect America, this “happy country, the land of Freedom,” its leaders, and citizens from harm remained firm, constant.
What’s more, as Jonathan Sarna’s comprehensive and vividly detailed account of American Jewry’s liturgical history makes clear, the manner in which members of the tribe sought God’s blessings on the powers that be reflected the realities of life on the ground, not just the heavenly state of affairs.
Supplicants no more but citizens, members in full, of the republic, American Jews were now at liberty to cultivate a different relationship to the state and to power than their European cousins; consequently, they brought a different tone to their devotions. No longer compelled by either law or custom to make themselves small, they excised what Sarna describes as the “uniquely plaintive quality” of the Old World entreaties in favor of the more confident, assertive pose of well-wishers.
If not quite an article of faith, the prayer for the government came pretty close. An expression of American Jewry’s unwavering faith in America, it was not to be messed with. Even Mordecai M. Kaplan—that self-proclaimed theological maverick, whose Sabbath Prayer Book with a Supplement Containing Prayers, Readings and Hymns, and with a New Translation (1945), a determinedly modernized approach to congregational worship, brought down the wrath of American Jewry’s most traditional religious element on his graying head, resulting in his excommunication from the Jewish commonweal—left the “prayer for the government” alone.
Kaplan’s version, or what he called the “prayer for our country,” not only remained one of the very few things he would not touch, a testament to its hallowed status. His siddur went even further than most by including a special section of civic-minded benedictions of his own devising, among them one for Independence Day, another for Memorial Day, a third for Brotherhood Sabbath, and a fourth for the Sabbath before Labor Day.
No doubt about it: America was the promised land. Even so, it could always use a little help from on high.