Embodied Torah

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.

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.

Psalm 71

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Do not cast me off in old age; when my strength fails, do not forsake me! (71:9)

The context of this Psalm is a prayer from the Psalmist to God. Bear with me for a moment, because I want to suggest that to understand this verse as a heartfelt plea from an aged individual for God to embrace him and give him strength in old age doesn’t really make sense. Such a plea is whiney and ungrateful.

Aging and failing strength happens to virtually everyone, and when it doesn’t happen, when a person dies at a young age, we consider it an exceptional tragedy. On one hand, most people want to live lot an advanced age, even though they know that as they age, their physical vigor will decline. On the other hand, the same people might bemoan their physical decline.

A spiritually healthy person may not welcome the physical decline, but finds a way to adjust his expectations so that he is not continually frustrated by thinking about what he used to be able to do but can do no longer. As our strength fades, we should not be crying to God, we should be thanking God that we’ve loved long enough to experience the sunset of years.

If we imagine that the Psalmist is addressing his child or other caregiver instead of God, the verse has a very different valence. Gone is the whininess and ingratitude, replaced by the reality that we owe our elders extra care as they enter their advanced years. The speaker is pleading with those around him not to abandon him just because he can no longer keep up physically, no longer see well, especially at night, and no longer hear many of the voices around him.

There ought to be no shame in needed extra help. A spiritually healthy person may not welcome physical decline, but accepts with equanimity the assistance offered to him.

James Madison and Disability

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In “James Madison: A Life Reconsidered,” author Lynne Cheney demonstrates that Mr. Madison’s epilepsy fundamentally affected who he was as a politician. What specifically caught my attention was the connection between his condition and the first amendment to the Constitution.

The “people first” language of the disability rights movement asserts that we are not “handicapped, epileptics,or wheelchair-bound,” but rather a person with a handicap, a person with epilepsy, or a person in a wheelchair. The difference is that first they are people just like any other. Their condition doesn’t define them, but rather gets integrated into their personhood just like a person’s height, hair color, or temperament.

James Madison read widely on the subject of epilepsy, seeking a cause for and hoping to prevent his “sudden attacks.” Christian sources suggested that they a person who exhibited symptoms of seizures was a lunatic, possessed by the devil or a dumb spirit, or sinful. He struggled with this explanation, which didn’t ring true. He found in other books suggestions that regular exercise and sufficient sleep could prevent seizures.

It is likely that Madison used the same investigative logic with which he researched his physical condition to also examine his spiritual condition. Just as he cast aside the notion that Satan was the cause of his epilepsy, he also began to move away from other ideas of traditional religion.

He began to understand that religion, like science and medicine, needs to be tested. In order to test religion, society needs free and open discourse on religion. When government and religion are connected, it is not possible to openly question religious precepts. Thus, there is a direct line from Madison’s epilepsy to his questioning of religious texts to his belief in the separation of church and state as expressed in the Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Next up in the presidential biography series: “The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness.”