Shabbat Shalom

I spent this Friday night at Temple Sinai in Worcester, a wonderful Shabbat celebration to say goodbye to their rabbi for the past twenty-five years, Seth Bernstein. (Next Friday night I'll welcome the Sabbath at another Worcester synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, with our confirmation class.)

One of the prayers we prayed tonight really hit me, and I share it here; a prayer I think that people of all faiths could learn to pray together. Shalom Shabbat.

DISTURB US, Adonai, ruffle us from our complacency;

Make us dissatisfied. Dissatisfied with the peace of ignorance, the quietude which arises from a shunning of the horror, the defeat, the bitterness and the poverty, physical and spiritual, of humans.

Shock us, Adonai, deny to us the false Shabbat which gives us the delusions of satisfaction amid a world of war and hatred;

Wake us, O God, and shake us

from the sweet and sad poignancies rendered by half forgotten melodies and rubric prayers of yesteryears;

Make us know that the border of the sanctuary is not the border of living and the walls of Your temples are not shelters from the winds of truth, justice and reality.

Disturb us, O God, and vex us;

let not Your Shabbat be a day of torpor and slumber;

let it be a time to be stirred and spurred to action.

Baruch atah, Adonai, m'kadeish Ha Shabbat