In 1992 the General Synod voted to delete from use and from further printings of the Book of Common Prayer the third collect for Good Friday. The prayer asked for God’s mercy on Jews for willfully rejecting and denying Jesus. It read in part, “Take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word; and so fetch them home…”

The prayer’s removal was a recognition that the collect represented an obstacle in Jewish-Christian dialogue. Its continued presence in our official liturgies also did not reflect the church’s renewed understanding—especially in the shadow of the Holocaust—of Christians being joint heirs, with the Jewish people, of God’s covenantal promises.

A similar prayer, entitled “For the Conversion of the Jews” (found on page 41), remains in the Book of Common Prayer, even though it reflects the same attitudes towards the Jewish people as the collect that our church removed from use in 1992.

Rather than simply expunge this prayer, this resolution proposes that it be replaced with a new prayer entitled “For Reconciliation with the Jews.”

This new prayer attempts to express the same reproach found in the meditation on the cross, in the Good Friday liturgy of the Book of Alternative Services, in which Jesus Christ says from the cross, “I grafted you into the tree of my chosen Israel, and you turned on them with persecution and mass murder. I made you joint heirs with them of my covenants, but you made them scapegoats for your own guilt.” However, it attempts to do so in a literary style consistent with the Prayer Book.

The prayer “For Reconciliation with the Jews” was composed and approved by the Prayer Book Society of Canada, and in consultation with the Canadian Rabbinic Caucus, a representative body of ordained Jewish leaders from across the country. 

General Synod 2019 gave First Reading to this motion, and it has been referred to the diocesan and provincial synods.