Middot – The embodied Torah of Character Values

Psalm 103

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Adonai is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. God will not contend forever, or nurse anger for all time. God has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor has God requited us according to our iniquities. (103:8–10)

In Exodus, God told Moses:

Adonai! Adonai! a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet God does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations. (Exodus 34:6–7)

The essential difference between these two passages is that the Exodus passage asserts that God might forgive most of the sin but nonetheless still requires punishment, even if the punishment is stretched out over generational time. The Psalm passage asserts the opposite, that God will not require punishment.

Our system of justice is based on the notion that most of the time, repentance and restitution is not enough. Crime demands punishment. Our prisons are full of people who committed relatively minor offenses which hurt no one, but violated the law. Mandatory sentencing guidelines take discretion out of the hands of judges. Even law enforcement officer body cameras, which we typically think of in terms of protection against officers abusing their authority, also result in officers being unable to use their discretion to ignore small offenses.

In communities of poverty, engaging in criminal activity and serving time in prison is generational. Children who grow up with a father – or sometimes both parents – in prison are likely to end up in prison themselves. This is an Exodus vision, in which children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are stuck in a cycle of punishment that began with the sins of their ancestors.

The vision of Psalm 103 is that of a society in which we find a way to guide those who violate the law towards repentance and restitution without recourse to excessively harsh punishment. If we change the culture of communities in which children grow up without any hope that they can escape the pattern of their parents and grandparents, then we can make the psalmist’s vision a reality.

Psalm 100

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A psalm for thanksgiving …. Serve Adonai with happiness. (100:1-2)

Job said, “Adonai gives and Adonai takes away. May the name of Adonai be a source of blessing.” The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart elaborated, “It is permissible to take life’s blessings with both hands, provided thou dost know thyself prepared in the opposite event to take them just as gladly. This applies to food and friends and kindred, to anything God gives and takes away.”

Joy should not be dependent on receiving a particular thing. Anything we receive can be taken away. If we are happy just because we have a new device, are sitting down to a gourmet meal, or are in the company of a good friend, then when our device becomes old, our meal has been consumed, or our friend goes home, our happy feelings will evaporate.

We have an obligation to God and to all who spend time with us, especially our family, to do whatever we need to do to express our lives with a spirit of gratitude and happiness. Pirke Avot (1:15) expresses the simple act of greeting loved ones with a smile as a moral imperative: “Greet every person with a cheerful face!”

When we greet the day with positive energy, we are giving God an offering of happiness. The converse is expressed in the Star Wars Jedi philosophy by ‘Master Yoda:’ “Anger, fear, aggression; the Dark Side of the Force are they.” In organizational life or interpersonal relationships, negativity and despair sap energy. When we live an unhappy or fearful life, we take something away from God.

We can best serve God by striving to live a positive, cheerful life. As Reb Nahman said, “It is a great Mitzvah to be in a constant state of happiness.”

Psalm 97

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Mountains melt like wax at Adonai’s presence, at the presence of the One who controls all the earth. The heavens proclaim God’s righteousness and all peoples see God’s glory. (97:5-6)

This is the third Psalm of Kabbalat Shabbat, corresponding to Tuesday. On the third day of the week, God separated the water from the dry land and created plant life. Over the eons of geological time, the Creator melted and shaped the geographical features of the earth – mountains and valleys, hill-country and the great plains, the rain forests and the deserts and the rivers. Each particular climate supports its own set of grasses, trees, flowers, grains, fruits, and vegetables. Together, it makes up the agricultural eco-system of planet earth.

The heavens look down on the bounteous produce and proclaim it “good” and a testament to God’s glory. In the mystical system of the Zohar, heaven is a symbolic reference to the third sefirah of Tiferet, beauty. Tiferet is the mediating characteristic between love and judgment. A parent should not shower either unrestrained, unlimited love or harsh judgmental punishment on a child. Proper parenting is a mixture of both love and judgment, and thus the mystical tradition understands God’s traits as well.

Perhaps we might read Psalm 97 as a meditation on an incomplete but beautiful stage of creation. On the third day, “God saw that [creation] was good” twice, perhaps reflecting the fact that even without animal life, the earth had a kind of beautiful perfection in its incompleteness. As much as we try each week to achieve something meaningful and lasting, we remember the rabbinic dictum from Rabbi Tarfon (Pirkei Avot 2:16), “It’s not your job to finish the work, but you’re not free to walk away from it.”

Psalm 94

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Rise up, judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts! (94:2)

Psalm 94 is recited as the Psalm for Wednesday, the fourth day of the week. As with the other Psalms of the day (except for the Psalm for Shabbat), the Talmud posits a connection between this day’s act of creation and something in the Psalm. In this Psalm, the assumption is that those who are in need of punishment for arrogance are those who worship the sun and the moon, created on the fourth day of creation. Arrogant people act as if they are the center of the world, as if the sun and the moon rotate around them.

I find arrogance to be perhaps the ugliest of the negative character traits. It sometimes masquerades as self-confidence, a positive character trait. The difference is that self-confidence is rooted in the essential core of a person’s identity. Confident people have a strong center because they know who they are and understand their abilities and limitations. Humility and self-confidence are symbiotic traits. When they don’t know or understand something or they fail at some task, they are able to admit their deficiency which enables them to learn and grow.

Arrogant people, on the other hand, are not humble. Arrogance is a shell protecting a weak core identity. To admit failure is to admit that their essential nature is weak. To an arrogant person, projecting an image of strength is critical. When they don’t know or understand something, they are more likely to deny or blame to preserve their strong image, rather than show weakness by admitting ignorance.

It’s easy to see why the Psalmist delights in seeing the arrogant receive their comeuppance. Perhaps if they are punished as they deserve, it will be like receiving a dose of humility that will teach them a more pleasant way of relating to others.

Psalm 92

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A righteous person flowers like a date-palm, grows like a cedar in Lebanon. (92:13)

Good behavior is contagious. Unfortunately, so is bad behavior, but the Psalmist and I would rather focus on the power of goodness to multiply. The metaphor in our verse has at multiple layers of meaning.

First, just as a date-palm produces many dates and a cedar tree produces many branches and leaves, a righteous person will have many children. This layer of meaning may not always prove itself to be true. Either because of infertility or by choice, some wonderful and giving people might not have children, or might only have one or two.

Second, just as both a date-palm and a cedar tree grow straight and tall, so too a righteous person stands tall and walks a straight path. By definition a righteous person follows a straight path as long as we define this to mean that such a person lives according to their principles. Great practitioners of civil disobedience like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks lived precisely according to their sense of justice, even when it meant disobeying the law. Humility is also a significant value, so one can proudly stand up for one’s convictions while also avoiding the sin of arrogance.

Third, the fruit, branches, and leaves on the trees can also be understood as the good deeds of the righteous person. Just as the trees sweeten the world with the smell and taste of their products, so too do the actions of a good person make the world a sweeter place.

Psalm 92, with its focus on the victory of joy, faithfulness, and righteousness, is also known as the Psalm for Shabbat. The actions of righteous people bring the world closer to “a day which is all Shabbat,” one of the Jewish expressions for the messianic era.