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6
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O God, whose singularity we declare:
Before You now, let us rehearse the reason we are here.
Not solitary have we come to celebrate Your name.
Generations of the past sit silently beside us,
Remembering how they once arrived in places such as this,
And were moved, no less than we are now, by visions of what just might come to pass,
If they could galvanize their hopes for all the world’s peoples,
To realize, with You, the promise of the prophets, the wisdom of the sages,
And the fondest aspirations of all the men and women
Who lived and died, and somehow prayed that their generation would not be the last,
And that their children and their children’s children, and the children after them as well
Would see a world with violence erased, and poverty obliterated:
All illnesses of body, mind, and spirit merely memories that historians recount,
With disbelief
About the terror of a time when, unaccountably, no one cared enough to make things better.
We are here because we pledge to care enough.
Because we hear the voice of our ancestral past
Urging us to use our gifts for good,
And toward that end — to celebrate this moment,
Not for itself alone, but for what it may yet yield,
If we but dearly, deeply, will it.
With that promise on our lips and in our hearts,
Let us walk through gates of gratitude,
And pray for many other openings as well:
Gates to light and to blessing and to joy and celebration;
Gates to glory and to honor; to merit and to kindness;
Gates to justice and prosperity, a good life for all;
Gates to healing and to peace; to learning and to loving.
God, open up these gates!
For us, for those we love, for those we do not know and never will,
For all your creatures whose well-being we now pledge to further.
Pitchu li shaarei tzedek
avo vam odeh Yah.
ק
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ד
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י־צ
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ר
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ע
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י שׁ
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חוּ־ל
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ת
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 פּ
:
הּ
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ה י
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ם אוֹד
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א־ב
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א
(
Open the gates of righteousness for me that I may enter them and praise Adonai.)