"A BLESSING FOR THE CZAR!"

Everybody loves this scene from "Fiddler on the Roof": The townspeople acknowledge that in Judaism, there exists a blessing for everything, and then they wonder, 'Rabbi, is there a proper blessing for the Czar?' He thinks for a moment, then, comes up with the answer: 'May God bless and keep the Czar... far away from us!' The line is an oldie, but what a goodie.

But then, just a few weeks ago, I found the actual blessing for the Czar. Abbe Cohen and Mort Brenner, with the help of Hannah Weinstein, were cleaning out our Larkin Library to make space for brand new Jewish books, and came upon a pile of old dusty Hebrew texts. Most were damaged and unusable. But one worth salvaging was an old machzor, a High Holy Day prayer book, published in 1895 in Petrokov (today Poland, but until 1919, part of the Russian Empire). I thumbed through it, and saw that it contains the full Hebrew text of the High Holy Day prayers, and includes a Yiddish commentary and translation on every page. What a find! And then, turning to the Torah service, on page 97 of the Rosh Hashanah volume, I saw it, the prayer for the Czar, beautifully composed:

"May the One who gives power to kings, and sovereignty to princes; may the One who is the Ruler of rulers... bless and keep, guard and aid, exalt and raise the Czar Nicholas Alexanderovich, and his widowed mother, Czarina Marie Feodorovna [here, my knowledge of the Russian monarchy is a little weak], and his wife the royal Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, and their heir, Grigory... May God save them from all harm and pain, and may all their enemies fall before them. And may the Merciful One put in the heart of the Czar compassion and good deeds for the People of Israel..."

This prayer is a remarkable composition, and what we learn from it is that even traditional prayer books (we might call them "Orthodox") contain improvised prayers created by Jews in every time and age. We have permission, if we were ever seeking it, to draft our own personal prayers that reflect our own needs. This, too, is authentic Jewish prayer. If in our own lives we pray for a loved one to recover from illness, or give thanks for good fortune, or cry out with hope in a time of need, these can be authentic Jewish prayers. I know of a recently translated Italian 16th century women's prayer book that includes prayers for pregnancy, childbirth, and a safe household. Now they can be our prayers, too. Also, just as my Petrokov machzor includes a Yiddish translation, we learn that our own authentic Jewish prayers can be offered in any language, even if we don't know Hebrew.

We also see in the Petrokov book that prayers are not always efficacious, that God does not always answer our prayers, as we remember how the lives of Nicholas II and his family ended, somewhat without God's protection, to put it gently. But that is not the point or the goal of prayer. To quote a line from the Gates of Prayer (and re-printed in the experimental version of Mishkan Tefilah, the Reform movement's new prayer book to be issued in 2005): "Prayer might not bring water to parched fields, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city. But prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, rebuild a ruined will. Those who rise from prayer better persons, their prayer is answered."

Rabbi Andy Vogel