One of our liturgy's more beautiful prayers

What if you were told that a loving parent was going to wrap his arms around you to protect you from distress for a while? That you could forget about your worries and take a deep breath and just feel unhurried and peaceful and even nurtured? What a rare treat this would be for an adult!

I have two garments from my late father that cause me to feel that he is near me. I have a sweater that was his, and I can feel his warmth and love when I put it on. But I feel far more strongly his presence when I wear his tallit – it’s draped over my shoulders and feels so comforting and loving to me. It gives me courage and strength when I’m doing something new or challenging, and makes me feel that he is with me as long as I have it on.

There is a beautiful prayer in the evening liturgy, the Hashkivenu, which translates something like this:

“Lay us down, Adonai our God, in peace, and raise us up again, our Sovereign, to life. Spread over us Your shelter of peace, And guide us with Your good counsel. Save us for Your name's sake. Shield us from every enemy, plague, sword, famine, and sorrow. Remove the adversary from before and behind us. Shelter us in the shadow of Your wings, for You are the one who guards us and saves us,

You are the Sovereign of mercy and compassion. Guard our going out and our coming in, and grant us life and peace, now and always.

Blessed are you, Adonai, who guards Your people Israel forever.”

On Shabbat, the version with which you might be more familiar, it ends:

“Blessed are you, Adonai, who spreads your shelter of peace over us, over all of Your people, and over Jerusalem.”

This is an even more compelling ending, when you start to visualize what it is like to have God’s protective shelter of peace covering us, like a loving parent who won’t let any harm come to us.

For Shabbat, this prayer has a number of different musical settings, and there are many translations that are rendered poetically to serve as readings in English. When I ask people what their favorite prayer is from the Friday night service, they almost invariably point to one of the versions of the Hashkivenu prayer. If you are familiar with it only from Friday night services, it would be understandable if you thought that the reference was to the peace of the Shabbat, the ceasing to worry about our everyday concerns and turning our focus instead to rest and peace, guarded by God. But the prayer actually is a reference to going to sleep each night; if you will listen to the Craig Taubman setting, you will realize that it sounds like nothing so much as a lullaby. The words are intended to convey the sentiment: “ May I lie down safely to sleep, guarded by God so that no harm will come to me as I lay slumbering, and may my soul be restored to me in the morning when I arise.” An equally beautiful interpretation, and it makes more sense now that we find it in our nightly service, not just on Shabbat.

May God guard the comings and goings of you and your loved ones, and may you always lie down in peace and security when you go to sleep, safe in the knowledge that you are being watched over by a loving parent.