Our Family Prayer

At the book launch for The Reclaiming Anthology: healing our wounds in December 2005, my mother recited a prayer that we say often in our family, as part of Shabbat services and on other occasions. The prayer attracted a lot of interest, and I've had several requests for the wording, which I'll add below.

I don't know the origins of the prayer, but here's its history as it pertains to my family. My grandmother, Ruth Reiner, fled Vienna with her parents in 1938 just before the Anschluss. They were sponsored by relatives to enter the United States of America, and entered the country through Texas, where they settled. She later married Chris Lucchesi, who was a German immigrant to the USA, and like many Jews whose backgrounds were spiritual but not necessarily orthodox, she brought up her children (including my mother, Sylvia) in the Unitarian Church.

When my mother and father decided to bring our family to Australia, they chose Adelaide as a destination because it has a Unitarian Church. As a child, I spent several years as a congregant at Adelaide's Unitarian Meeting House.

We moved to around a lot to other states of Australia before eventually returning to Adelaide. During our time away from being part of a regular Unitarian congregation, we were able to receive printed materials from the Unitarian Universalist Association. As a teenager, I received a special newsletter several times each year, called "Uniteen". What became our Family Prayer was printed on the back cover of one of these newsletters. I copied it onto cardboard, with fancy lettering. It hung for many years in my parent's home, near the dining room table.

Over twenty-two years ago, there were strange stirrings in my family. As we gathered courage to begin to speak about it, my mother, my sister and I all reached the same conclusion - we all felt secretly Jewish, but had never had a way to express this or act upon it. If we had tried to act upon it, we felt unwelcomed, stigmatised and thwarted in our attempts to reconnect with the public face of Judaism as it existed in Adelaide.

Fortunately, we had had plenty of practice conducting our own spiritual life, and so we began to research Jewish practices and to incorporate them into our lifestyles. When Rabbi Lenore Boehm came to Beit Shalom, (Adelaide's Progressive Synagogue), she assisted our family to finally make the final steps towards reconnection. It was from that time that we have identified as Jews, rather than Unitarians.

Our Family Prayer

Lead us
from death to life
from falsehood to truth

Lead us
from despair to hope
from fear to trust

Lead us
from hate to love
from war to peace

Let peace
fill our hearts
our world
our universe

And so let it be