Maof

A prayer from Jews before an almost inevitable war.

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            We are a generation of Jews who have reached the bottom point in a spiritual downfall of our people. The Creator brought us back to our Holy Land and, by a chain of continuous miracles, returned it to us including Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. He has raised the revived Country and maintained our victory in all the wars. From a historical perspective, Israel has become a regional nuclear superpower in the blink of an eye.

People of Israel on the their Land should have restored their spiritual leadership among all the nations and started a spiritual alteration of the world. However, we did not match either holiness of the Land or our Tasks. Like goyem, we took credit for all these achievements, and like Jews in golut, we still tried to imitate goyem and were afraid of them. We did not think about any spiritual tasks, and instead of spiritual elevation we have begun our downfall, first slowly and then faster and faster.

By loosing all our values, we have committed a transgression, which has no comparison in the history of our people. It was a voluntary handover of the Land of Israel to non-Jews. Its name is Oslo. What we have committed is not even mentioned in our Holy Books, because there was no need to instruct anyone not to give away his land or not to allow murdering his children. No normal nation or any human being would do that, but we have done that.

From that moment, having gotten off the Creator's path, we started following the path of suffering. The climax of our downfall was the Israeli offer to give away almost all the territories returned in 1967, half of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. In return for our unbelievable generosity, we have gotten an atrocious terrorist war, which is in reality genocide of Jews on the Jewish Land.

With our masochistic desire to give away our Land we have started an Error Correction Program, which manifested so far as two years of terror. We could have stopped this program and avoided horrific suffering of our people. We could have prevented an avalanche of terror, saved almost thousand Jewish lives, avoided enormous economic losses. All we needed was a simple and natural act of repentance and return to the path of the Creator. In practical terms, Israel should have done something that would have been done by any other country in the world, even if we ignore the spiritual aspect of events. Israeli actions should have included the denunciation of the Oslo agreement that was violated numerous times by the other party, taking back our territories that were given away to our enemies, destruction of all the terrorist organizations, abolishing the enemy administration, and disarming of their military units including police.

We could have done it before the terrorist war, in 1996 for instance, when enemy police murdered 14 of our soldiers. We must have done it in the very beginning of this war, especially during those two horrible years. But we have not done it. Any nation would have ended such a situation a long time ago. We could not. Being in a condition of spiritual lethargy, we got used to the lies and impotency of our administration, to the order of horrific TV news reports, and to the fact that Jewish blood, blood of the elderly, women, and children, flows like a river on the Jewish Land.

            We are revisiting the worst time of our history. However, we did not understand the root of our despair and have changed nothing. Right now, we are the witnesses of a new, more drastic Error Correction Program being launched. A new threat is coming from Iraq, ruled by a maniac who is ready for any crazy action. Everybody knows that destruction of Israel is his desperate desire. There is no doubt that the 9/11 attack against United States and its actions against Iraq originated from the Heavens.

Can Israel avoid new, more severe suffering? Theoretically, yes it can. That would be the denunciation of Oslo agreement combined with other necessary acts. If we did it, we would press a "Stop Button" and the Program would stop immediately. Either the United States would change its mind, the dictator would croak, or civil war would start between Palestinian Arabs with the consequent elimination of their rulers and activists - Isn't Divine Power resourceful?

However, there is a very slim practical chance to stop this new Program. The time is already gone. Politically, the United States hinders any Israeli moves towards toughening their policy with the Arabs, especially drastic ones like the denunciation of the Oslo agreement. Also, the choice that the Israeli people made is really astounding. They have already chosen a politician who implanted in their mind an idea of the inevitability of everyday murdering of Jews on their Land. He has completely transformed his country into a banana republic fully dependent on a foreign patron. His policy has brought our economy into a state of deep and unprecedented crisis. People, who lost all their values, have elected a leader who despite his own will is practically responsible for the destruction of his own country.

What is left? It is prayer and repentance for those who understand the suicidal nature of the existing path. The more Jews read this prayer and agree with it with all their hearts, the higher will be its power and its protection.

And like in the last Yom Kippur prayer, Neilah, when it is already impossible to change anything in the material world, just before the gates of compassion are closing, with hope and faith we hear over all of Israel a rumble of AVINU MALKEINU.

      Our Father, Our King. Our Father, Our King!  Forgive our sins. Forgive us, You have returned us to our Land to turn us to Your holiness, to be the leaders in the pursuit of changing the world, but we turned our face from you and remained in a spiritual golut of impurity and fear. All we wanted was to be like the others.

The Lord, Gracious and Compassionate! Forgive the sins of your people. Forgive us, You have returned our Land to us with Love, but we started committing the same sins for which we were exiled - unreasonable hatred between Jews, left and right, civil and religious, from East and West. Our Father, Our King. Forgive us, You have returned the Temple Mount to us, but we immediately gave away our holiest place to our enemies, who are continuously destroying everything related to our Holy Temple and our history.

The Lord, Gracious and Compassionate! Forgive us, You have created for us all the conditions needed for spiritual elevation, but we have started a spiritual downfall. We were entrapped by our enemies, yielding to their plot against Israel, and gave away Sinai. Our leaders, accelerating our downfall, started finding a way to hand over our Land to people who hate us and signed an agreement with the enemies in order to create their state on our Land.

Our Father, Our King. Forgive us. Forgive us, our elected leader has come up with an idea to offer half of the Holy City and the Temple Mount to our enemies. But they found that that was not enough and started a terrorist war against us.  And we neither realize nor understand that it was a punishment for our transgressions.             The Lord, Gracious and Compassionate! Forgive us for the third year in a row we are being murdered. Almost every day we bury our loved ones- children, women, and the elderly. We got used to the genocide of Jews on Jewish Land and didn't even try to make our administration act accordingly, an administration of national misery, paralysis and shame.

            Our Father, Our King. Forgive us for having fallen down to the lowest level in the history of the Jewish people, we have obstructed your Light not only for ourselves but also for the other nations. We have degraded the righteous and elevated the evildoers among the nations. Therefore we are responsible for all the chaos, wars, and horrible terrorist acts in the world.

            The Lord, Gracious and Compassionate! Forgive us, we have put ourselves in front of new horrible disasters, new catastrophes. Do not allow us to be mutilated and exterminated. Forgive us, forgive us! Change Your Decision and Your Omen. Save Your People and the whole World.             Our Father, Our King. Forgive us, forgive us. Take under

consideration the enormous amount of suffering of Your People, - destruction of the Temple, 2000 years of horrible golut, persecution, extermination, and Holocaust! Show your compassion, open eyes of Your People. Cleanse, raise, shield, and save them. Redeem us! Avinu Malkeinu!

 Israel,  Kislev 5763 (November 2002)

Russian versia