Obama’s Prayer: Lord, protect my family and me

Obama’s Prayer

For over two thousand years, since the destruction of the Holy Temple, the Kotel HaMaaravi, Western Wall, had been the Jewish focal point for prayer. It is a centuries-old tradition to place a note with a prayer or request in the Western Wall. When Jews pray, no matter where, in any synagogue or home, they face the direction of this last standing remnant of the Temple.

Barack Obama, like most visitor to Israel felt compelled to experience the Kotel by writing his prayers and stuffing it into a crevass between the giant white stones, hewn over 2,000 years ago. On a hotel stationary, he penned the following prayer, according to Maariv, which ran a photo of the note: "Lord, protect my family and me," Obama wrote. "Forgive me my sins and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will."

At the Kotel, people pour out their hearts to God, in a variety of languages, at all hours of the day and night. Minyanim, or prayer quorums, are organized spontaneously throughout the day.

But after Obama and his entourage left the sacred site, an orthodox seminary student went to the Wall and pulled out Obama’s prayer note from the wall and delivered give it to the Maariv newspaper, which printed the content of his prayer.

The newspaper’s decision to publish Obama’s private words was "an outrage", said Rabbbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, supervisor of the Western Wall. "It damages the personal, deep part of every one of us that we keep to ourselves," the rabbi told Army Radio. "The note placed between the stones of the Western Wall are between a person and his maker. It is forbidden to read them or make use of them."