Laying to Rest the Question of Who Wrote the Prayer for Israel’s Government

Jewish congregations the world over recite a standardized prayer for the wellbeing of the state of Israel, the text of which was promulgated by the country’s chief rabbinate and first published in the newspaper Haaretz in 1948. For years, it was generally assumed that the Ashkenazi chief rabbi at the time, Yitzḥak Halevi Herzog, was the prayer’s author, until, in 1983, an Israeli scholar produced evidence suggesting that the prayer was written by the great Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon, with Herzog’s imprimatur. A recent discovery by the historian Yoel Rappel has now set the record straight, as Tracy Frydberg writes: