## Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Shabbat, Prayer for the State of Israel

###### Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Shabbat, Prayer for the State of Israel 1
[Rabbi Sacks on Siddur, Shabbat, Prayer for the State of Israel 1](https://torahapp.org/share/book/Rabbi%20Sacks%20on%20Siddur/s/Shabbat,_Prayer%20for%20the%20State%20of%20Israel/r/1)

**English Edition; Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2017:**
אָבִֽינוּ שֶׁבַּשָּׁמַֽיִם *Prayer for the State of Israel:* Introduced after the birth of the modern State of Israel in 1948. A key element of the prayer is the phrase “the first flowering of our redemption.” It means that the restoration of Israel as a sovereign nation in its own land was not merely an event in secular history. It was the fulfillment of the prophetic vision – first stated by Moses in the quoted verse from Deuteronomy – that Israel would one day be gathered from “the furthermost lands under the heavens,” an astonishingly precise prediction of what actually happened. According to the third-century Babylonian teacher Shmuel, “The only difference between this world and the messianic age is subjection to foreign powers” (*Berakhot* 34b). In this view, Israel’s independence was in itself a redemptive moment, a return to Jewish self-determination, self-government and self-defense under the sovereignty of God alone.