Published in Ynet on the eve of Yom Kippur, 02/10/2014, https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4577370,00.html
Uri Orbach (1960-2015, Israel) was an Israeli Religious Zionist writer, journalist, and politician. He served as a member of the Knesset for the Jewish Home party, and as Minister for Senior Citizens.
Prayer for our Foreign Workers
Bless the workers who are not the least bit foreign to our families.
Our G-d and G-d of our aging mothers and fathers, bless Yubraz from Nepal, bless Mally from India, Nutzi from Romania and Nelly from the Philippines, our foreign workers.
Bless the workers that aren’t the least bit foreign to our families, and who have become closer to our parents than anyone else. With them on good days and bad, at the brightest of moments as well as during darker hours. With them while we are endlessly rushing around, completing our urgent tasks, impatiently occupied with our own children. Working-pressing forward-wearing thin-succeeding-driving-returning-driving again.
Bestow upon them favors and kindness for their patience, sacrifice and love, for their physical and mental toil, for the grace and mercy that they bestow unto us and to our infirm grandparents. For they are not foreign to even the slightest of our parents’ movements, or the tiniest drop of sweat on their brows. To these subtleties, they are less foreign than we are. Forgive us, but they have become family, even though on the streets and at the central bus station, they are unjustifiably suspected of being “illegal workers” and “infiltrators.”
Please grant a good year to Yubraz from Nepal, Mally from India, Nutzi from Romania and Nelly from the Philippines and others like them, who care for our parents and grandparents, often in place of us. They wash their aching bodies, caress their slumping heads, carry them from their bed to their wheelchair and back. They wait for them for hours at the club, at the synagogue entrance, in line at the doctor’s office. We appreciate them but we still see them as foreign workers, whose “foreign work” is to honor our fathers and mothers. (The author offers a play on words – the term avoda zara, literally “foreign work”, means idolatry). They don’t see their families for years at a time. Far from their relatives, they go it alone.
Grant them, our G-d and G-d of our beloved fathers and mothers, a good year; a year of provisions and health, salvation and comfort. Bless these “foreigners”, our parents’ relief, whose names appear at the bottom of the obituaries of those we treasure, upon their passing.