In our monthly survey of the traditional morning prayers we have reached the section called “P’suqei d’zimra—verses of song.” I discussed this set of prayers in a general way last month, highlighting the essential importance of singing itself. Now I would like to look at a few places in the prayer texts themselves and discuss some of their messages and some of their hoped for effects upon us, particularly as they may speak to us in light of recent events.
This section is composed of verses of praise taken from the Bible, almost exclusively from the book of Psalms. But the section is begun and concluded with blessings. These blessings serve as bookends or brackets for the entire section. The initial blessing is called by its first words, “Barukh she’amar—Blessed is the One Who spoke.” This refers to God. In Rabbinic literature one of God’s names is: “The One Who Spoke and the World Came into Being.” God is praised over and over as the One Who is loving,strong, faithful and redemptive. In our accepted version of the blessing the word “barukh—blessed” occurs thirteen times. The word is repeated so much in order to produce a mind set within us, like a mantra or like a melody that we can’t get out of our heads. And all this is even before we have started to praise God in earnest with the various psalms that comprise the service!
The thirteen-fold repetition of the word is, itself, an expression of its true meaning. We often translate the word as “blessed” or “praised.” The first translation seems a bit tautological. Does it simply mean to say that God is the object of the many blessings we recite? And the word “praised” is no better. Is the point really that we should say that God is the object of many praises? But the deeper meaning of the word “barukh” speaks to something essential about God and not to something that we happen to say about God. The word means “overflowing” or “abounding in goodness.” Thus, every blessing that calls God “barukh” is extolling God for the abundance of goodness that flows out of God’s Being in the form of whatever the blessing mentions: a fruit, a beautiful sight, a rainbow, a proper bodily function, a mitzvah.
The thirteen-fold repetition of this word is, therefore, a performative expression of the divine overflowing abundance. We overflow in saying that word again and again. Why thirteen times? Many explain that this is an allusion to God’s Thirteen Attributes of love and compassion. These Attributes were God’s revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai, when Moses wished to understand (“to see”) God as deeply and clearly as possible. (See Exodus Chapters 33-34.)
This allusion is repeated in the concluding blessing of this section. Here we declare that, though we have praised God with the psalms of King David, we know that God is deserving of even more homage and adoration. We say: “For to You, O Eternal, Almighty God of ours and of our ancestors, is befitting song and praise, extolling and melody, power and sovereignty, eternity, greatness and strength, psalm and glorification, holiness and overwhelming presence.” There are thirteen phrases of praise applied to God. While they may seem redundant and verbose, the thirteen words are meant to reinforce this sense of overflowing blessing whose source is the Thirteen Attributes of God’s goodness and love.
A long-standing objection to such fulsome prayer is that it seems to express a childish concept of God. Does God really need to be buttered up so much? And the long-standing response to that objection is that we do this not for God, but for ourselves. We need to remind ourselves of God’s abounding compassion and mercy so that we might strive to emulate that divine quality of compassion—if only to the thirteenth part!—in our own lives.
This is no small challenge. We live at a time when we witness so many brutal attempts to act in God’s Name through horrific acts of violence. God’s Name is used to motivate and justify cruelty, selfishness, oppression and bloody atrocities. I write these words as I mourn for those murdered in a Jerusalem synagogue while they were offering the same prayers these columns discuss and as I mourn the non-Jewish Israeli police officer who sacrificed his own life while trying to stop the terrorist carnage. The death of that Druze hero should remind us that the conflict is not between us Jews and “the Arabs.” The conflict is between those, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, who praise God as the Source of overflowing compassion and those,whether Jewish or non-Jewish, who praise God as the scourge of evil.
It is in light of this stark dichotomy in religious orientation that I have struggled for many years with one of the psalms in this section of our prayers. Our prayer book chooses to reach a climax of praise by selecting the last six psalms of the Book of Psalms. These psalms build to a crescendo of praise. They conclude with the rousing declaration: “kol haneshamah – all with the breath of life, every soul, shall praise God, Halleluyah!” But the next-to-last psalm (Ps. 149) sounds a different note.
This psalm calls on everyone to join God’s devoted followers in singing a new song. The humble will rejoice and sing, even as they recline in bed. But then the psalm seems to take a dark turn. “They have two-sided swords in their hands; In order to take vengeance in the nations, punishments among the peoples. To bind their rulers in chains and their nobles in cords of iron; to execute written judgment upon them; this is the glory of all God’s devoted ones. Halleluyah!”
For years I could not recite this psalm. It seemed to me to express the sickening ugliness of religious vigilante violence. Was the psalmist really calling on me to sing in jubilation for exacting revenge against my foes? I couldn’t do it. I found the psalm a jarring note in an otherwise inspiriting and moving set of prayers. And, moreover, I found it a betrayal of the overall message of those psalms. The abuse of piety in the service of cruelty is too real a danger. I could not understand how we could be called to regularly court it.
But then one day, not long ago, out of depression and desperation perhaps, I heard the psalm in a totally different way. I perceived that the psalm must be read, and sung, in the spirit of all the psalms that surround it. The universal celebration of God’s compassionate glory is resoundingly expressed before and after this psalm. So what place does this psalm mean to take within this overall symphony?
I began to understand that this psalm is a response to the very challenge posed by the temptation to desecrate God’s Name in the guise of religious piety. The psalmist knows full well that the religious conviction that God is good and compassionate is outrageously contradicted all the time by the horrors and tragedies we see around us every day. If we are not tempted to reject this article of faith, which would be a spiritual tragedy, we are tempted to mount a crusade in its defense. But such a bloody crusade can only become a spiritual tragedy as well as a social, human catastrophe.
So how can we respond to the gruesome tearing down of our vision of a world imbued with love and justice? Shall we abandon that vision? Shall we join in bloodying it? This psalm tells us that we can take revenge by refusing to stop singing God’s praises, day and night! Our song is our “two-edged sword.” In Hebrew, the word for “two-edged” is “two-mouthed.” Those who wish to pollute our world through evil, cruelty, and bloodshed must be countered by the one weapon they cannot fathom, defeat or defend against, the steadfast determination to continue to sing to God in joy, with every mouth filled with melody. What sweet revenge! “This is the glory of all God’s devoted ones. Halleluyah!”
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