Author: Rabbi David Krishef

Psalm 75

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There is a cup in Adonai’s hand with foaming wine fully mixed; from this God pours; all the wicked of the earth drink, draining it to the very dregs. (75:9)

The topic of this Psalm is a condemnation of arrogance. This particular verse caught my eye for its evocative imagery, but I didn’t immediately understand the point. In ancient times, wine was always mixed with water. This particular cup of wine is foaming – not a word one usually associates with a cup of wine. In fact, the root hamar is found only three other times in the Hebrew Bible, meaning anguish, tumult, and foaming (with rage). The cup of wine that God is serving here, therefore, is questionable. Perhaps the scene is an elegant dinner party at which poisonous wine is served. The wealthy, well dressed, arrogant, guests elbow their way to the front and snatch all of the bubbling, foaming, glasses of wine, leaving the more modest and polite guests with none. They drain the cup to the last drop and die horrible deaths, and finally, the meek inherit the earth (wait — that’s not one of our texts …)!

Leaving aside the question of theodicy, that God literally rewards and punishes, there is a clear truth in the idea that arrogance plants the seeds of its own downfall. An arrogant person will tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, unable to understand that bad outcomes are a result of bad decisions. Those who are humble will examine their behavior for things that they could have done differently. Those who are arrogant will blame their misfortune on the behavior of those around them.

In the end, a person’s arrogance and refusal to change patterns of behavior will lead to his or her downfall. We reap what we sow, and in the end, we drink the cup of wine that we ourselves have mixed and poured.

Psalm 74

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It was You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters. (74:13)

In the first Genesis creation story, the universe at the first moment of creation was tohu vavohu, unformed chaos. The enterprise of creation consists of taming or beating back or organizing the chaos. Anything that behaves in unpredictable or dangerous ways, such as a large body of water or a wild sea creature, is a remnant of the unrestrained chaos.

We know from our attempts to clean a house with children or organize our workflow at our job that factors beyond our control (children messing up as we’re cleaning, for example) constantly introduce chaos back into the system. In physics, this is known as entropy, the natural tendency of things to decline into disorder.

No matter how carefully we might plan our day, a customer whose order gets lost by the delivery service, a coworker who doesn’t do his part of the presentation, a supervisor who scheduled a meeting and forgot to send us the notice, reintroduces chaos into a system that we thought had been thoroughly organized.

It is worth remembering that although God drove back the chaos, or perhaps more properly stated organized the chaos, to create the universe, that there is still chaos left in our world. So when we find ourselves in the midst of suffering or disorder, we might remember that it is our opportunity to join with God in driving back the sea of chaos and smashing the monsters of suffering.

Psalm 73

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God is truly good to Israel, to those whose heart is pure. (73:1)

I am completely uncomfortable with the notion that God acts better towards Israel than other peoples or religions. Therefore, I read the second half of this verse as an important qualification of the first half of the verse.

In good Biblical poetic form, the second strophe restates the first, but adds something. We can see this more clearly if we write out the verse fully:

“God is truly good to Israel. God is truly good to those whose heart is pure.”

There are two ways of reading this verse. Either the poet is defining Israel as those whose hearts are pure, or God is good only to those among Israel who have pure hearts.

It is impossible, in my opinion, to define any ethnic, religious, social, or national group as a whole as all sharing a single characteristic. Human free will being what it is, it is not possible for a group of people to be united in an attribute (such as being pure of heart) unless a violation of that standards means automatic disqualification from the group. Since “Israel” is a designation that transcends disobedience to God, it cannot be that all members of the group “Israel” are pure of heart.

Therefore, it must be the case that the quality of pureness of heart is a limiting factor. God is not automatically good to all of Israel. Rather, God is only good to those whose heart – actions, thoughts, intentions – are pure.

I suggest that those whose actions, thoughts, and intentions are directed solely to good and noble deeds and purposes will be likely to accept and overcome with equanimity the obstacles that life places in their path. The ability to find good and blessing within evil was an admirable quality of Job. It need not be a naive Pollyannaish outlook, but rather both a sincere acknowledgment of difficulty and a desire to find some good coming from or associated with the bad.

James Monroe

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When James Monroe became president, the Federalist party, that of Presidents Washington and Adams, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, which believed in a strong Federal government and a strong, almost royal, executive, and close ties to Great Britain, was dead. The Republican party (no relationship to today’s Republican party), which believed in States’ rights, a weak Federal government and executive, and close ties to the revolutionary republic of France, reigned supreme. It is worth noting, however, that Monroe continued Madison’s movement of the Republican party closer to the center of the political spectrum. The White House was significantly more formal than it was during Jefferson’s presidency, and while consolidating the United States’ control over a swatch of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, he expanded the power of the Presidency considerably.

Monroe was elected to a second term virtually unopposed. Were it not for one electoral vote for John Quincy Adams, he would have been the second president (after Washington) to have been elected unanimously by the electoral college. We think that the lack of organized opposition would guarantee his ability to get things done. This was not the case. In Monroe’s second term, his cabinet members and congressional leaders were more interested in pursuing their own political agenda than in working with their president. For example, according to Harlow Giles Unger, author of “The Last Founding Father,” Madison’s Treasury Secretary, William Crawford, deliberately misreported the financial state of the government (he reported a surplus, when in fact there was a $5 million deficit) in order to make John Calhoun, Secretary of War, look bad because of the heavy spending on the military.

It turns out that the lack of party politics meant that there was no cooperation to get things done, because there was no opponent against whom to organize. It was every man for himself. A decision making body comprised of people who all think the same has no one to challenge their thinking. A knife needs a sharpening blade, a whetstone, or some other hard substance upon which to grind it in order to keep it sharp. A Board or a Congress without an opposition will similarly lose its sharpness.

This ought to be a lesson for synagogues and other institutions, when recruiting Board members. They shouldn’t look for ideological uniformity, but rather for people who are willing to talk to and learn from those with very different political or religious outlooks.

Next up:  “John Quincy Adams,” by Harlow Giles Unger.

Psalm 72

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Let him champion the lowly among the people, deliver the needy folk, and crush those who wrong them. (72:4)

This is the final Psalm of the second (of five) book of Psalms. The subject of this composition is the king.

If we read the Psalm more generally as speaking about any leader (not just a king), the Psalm raises the question of what are the most important qualities in a leader? The quality of this verse is that of fighting on behalf of those who cannot fight for themselves. Those without power have virtually no voice. No one listens, because they don’t have the standing to be able to do anything about the injustice they face. The leader is a person people listen to. It’s like the old commercials about E.F. Hutton, in which there is a crowd of people all talking. One person says the words “E.F. Hutton,” and the entire room falls silent. The tag line is, “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.” [Here and here are some examples.]

The willingness of a person of great importance to fight on behalf of those whom society has all but forgotten takes humility, another great quality of a leader. Specifically, the ability to admit that a past action or past statement or past proposal was wrong and change one’s behavior or change one’s mind or position takes humility. Sadly, the political world, rather than recognizing this as positive growth, often condemns it as inconsistency, flip-flopping, or even hypocrisy.

If we don’t allow our politicians to change their minds then we are not allowing them to mature as leaders. We ought to expect that 25 or 35 year old politicians will make mistakes that a 50 year old candidate for president would not make. We ought to have the humility to recognize that the people we choose as leaders might change their minds and make as many mistakes as we have, as long as we look at our lives with honesty.