Text Study – The Embodied Torah of Study

Psalm 33

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Note: My psalm reflection leading into April on Psalm 33 is in honor of the celebration of Pesah. For more information about Pesah, you can download a detailed Guide to Passover from AhavasIsraelGR.org or contact the synagogue office to request that we send it to you, either by email or by regular mail.

For God spoke, and it was; God commanded, and it endured. (33:9)

I learned recently that in the Biblical idiom, “God spoke” or “God said” in Genesis 1 means “God thought.” God’s speech does not need to be audibly pronounced, because speech is a physical human action that involves breath and mouth/nose and teeth and lips pushing and shaping sound. God, lacking human anatomy, does not need to manipulate wind and sound to make something real. A though or an idea, which to us is only a potential reality depending on action to make it concrete, to God is a reality. In the higher world of God’s reality, if something can be thought than it is real.

Told through the lens of God, Passover should therefore have been a quick story. God would needed only to speak/think and the Israelites would been free. The story would have been brief and to the point – Now we’re slaves, , now we’re free! But the Hagadah doesn’t opens its telling of the story this way because we don’t tell the story of Passover through God’s lens – we tell it through the lens of human experience. Maggid (the storytelling) begins Now we’re slaves – next year may we be free. We human beings don’t transition quickly. Unlike God’s immediate though to action, we need time to adjust from one state to another. We need to draw out the story to give us time to become free, so we have 10 plagues (which in the Rabbinic imagination are multiplied to 50 and 250) to give Pharaoh and ourselves time to prepare.

I shared a d’var Torah recently in which I suggested that a critical component of leadership is presence. One can be a great visionary leader, but only if one also is able to enlist others to fulfill the mission and get the job done. There will be times of crisis during which writing memos and issuing orders will be insufficient. The leader needs to demonstrate presence, that he or she is involved in the process of getting the work done. Enduring visions are those which are sufficiently compelling so that people stick around to do the work and to see what comes next. The story of Passover wasn’t a story of slave people who scattered to the four winds, each in pursuit of their own vision of freedom but rather the liberation of a people who remained together. 3500-some years later, we are still that same enduring people, telling the same story of how God’s plan came to be. Have a happy and kosher Pesah!

Psalm 32

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Many are the torments of the wicked, but one who trusts in Adonai shall be surrounded with favor. (32:10)

Why do Jews ask me if Jews believe in Hell? Do they not know what they believe in? It seems clear that if they believed in Hell, they would not need to ask me – they would know that they, full fledged dues paying members of the Jewish community, believe in Hell and therefore Jews believe in Hell. They do not believe in Hell, and are asking me if Jews other than themselves, any other Jews, believe in Hell. Are they afraid that their non-belief might jeopardize the quality of their Jewishness? If I tell them that certainly Jews believe in Hell, would they suddenly change their minds and begin believing?

In fact, I don’t think that this Psalmist believes in Hell. It is far more likely that his theology assured him that goodness and evil carry their own rewards and punishments in this world, not in a future world.

The evil that you do will come back at you. It will torment you. It will catch up to you. it will turn you into a frightened, suspicious, bitter, dried up soul. On the other hand, the good things that you do will keep you fresh and vibrant. You will smile and others will return the favor. You will see the good in people, as they will see the kindness in you.

I believe in Heaven and in Hell, although I don’t really know what heaven and hell means or what it looks or feels like. I also believe that you make yourself into the kind of person you want to be, and you see yourself and your attributes reflected around you. When I am happy, I see the blessings and favors around me; when I am unhappy, I see the curses and burdens around me. I am happier when I am happy, so therefore I choose to be happy.

Psalm 31

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Into Your hand I entrust my spirit; You redeem me, Adonai, faithful God. (31:6)

The final stanza of the well known hymn Adon Olam is based on this verse, “Into God’s hand I entrust my spirit; when I sleep, I shall not fear.”

Fortunately, I sleep well most of the time. I don’t sleep enough, but that is because I stay up later than I should. Most of the time when I settle in with my head on the pillow ready to sleep, I am asleep within 5-10 minutes. I am thankful that I don’t have trouble falling asleep, because when I do have trouble, or when I wake up in the middle of the night and am unable to sleep, I am filled with anxiety. I worry that I am going to be too tired to function the next morning if I don’t get enough sleep, and the worry causes me not to be able to sleep. I begin thinking about the various things I have to do the next day, and either I am eager to get started (and thus cannot sleep) or I worry that I’ll forget something on the list before the next morning (and thus cannot sleep).

When this happens to me, I turn to techniques of meditation. I focus on my breath, and try to imagine my thoughts as puffs of vapor that arise and disappear, arise and disappear. I try not to allow myself to be seduced by a thought – to chase it around, to follow it as it leads me down the pathways and through the meadows of my mind towards other thoughts. I think about this verse, imagining that I am handing over all of my thoughts, plans, and items on my to-do list to God. I entrust not only my spirit but also my thoughts and memories to the repository of the Holy Blessed One, trusting that I will get them back safely the next morning.

Psalm 29

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The voice of Adonai breaks cedars; Adonai shatters the cedars of Lebanon … The voice of Adonai kindles flames of fire; the voice of the LORD convulses the wilderness … the voice of Adonai causes hinds to calve, and strips forests bare ….” (Psalm 29:5, 7, 9)

I am fascinated by the description of God’s voice – the power of a tremendous thunderstorm, causing the mightiest of trees to lose branches and even topple over. Not only thunder but lightening as well, so loud that the sound can be felt in one’s core even more than by one’s ears. I’m not sure if the hind (deer) gives birth prematurely out of fright, or whether this is a reference to some other biological phenomenon – but the image is of God’s voice stripping both animal and vegetable bare.

Psalm 29 is sung liturgically twice – during the Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service to welcome to Sabbath, and on Shabbat mornings when processing around the congregation and putting the Torah away.

The pairing of this Psalm with the Torah service makes a kind of sense, but is a bit backwards. God’s thunderous voice is associated with revelation of Torah. It would make more sense if we chanted these words when removing the Torah from the ark rather than after. The verses we chant when carrying the Torah in procession at the beginning of the Torah service focus on God’s majesty and beauty, which could just well be chanted when putting the Torah away as a response to revelation.

The Kabbalat Shabbat service is a serious of seven Psalms, once for each day of the week, followed by Lekha Dodi, a song welcoming the Sabbath queen. I wonder if the series of Psalms leading up to Shabbat is intended to build up to the revelation of the Divine Presence, which would explain why Psalm 29 immediately precedes Lekha Dodi. However, I have never really understood the progression of Kabbalat Shabbat Psalms (except for Psalm 92, the Psalm for Shabbat, right after Lekha Dodi), so my conjecture might be completely off base. If you have other ideas, I’d love to read about them in the comments on my blog at EmbodiedTorah.Wordpress.com.

Psalm 28

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Deliver Your people, bless Your heritage; shepherd them and raise them forever. (28:9)

In Hebrew, this verse has exactly 10 words. Because of an odd Jewish bias against counting people, this verse is often used on traditional settings to count people to determine whether a minyan is present. The bias comes from to main places in the Bible:

Exodus 30, where a half shekel ransom is taken along with a national census, possible to “atone” for taking the census.
Samuel 24, where King David took a census and as a result 70,000 people died of a plague.

Counting people or possessions was seen as dangerous, lest it attract the evil eye and cause death. In addition, there is something distasteful about assigning people numbers. Number are dehumanizing (e.g. Holocaust tattoos), and because they are associated with value, numbers may imply that some people have higher value than others. Therefore, Exodus 30 takes a coin from each person and counts the coins, rather than counting the people directly.

So, back to our verse, rather than counting a minyan by number people in the room, you might assign each person a word from the verse:

Hoshia et amekha, u-varekh et nahalatekha; ur’em v’nas’em ad olam.

Of all the verses that have exactly 10 words (I haven’t counted them, but I imagine there must be a good number), this is the one that has become popular. Perhaps because the verse is a plea for deliverance, and if we are going to do something as dangerous and dehumanizing as count human beings (even indirectly), we ought to do it with a prayer for their safety and deliverance, calling upon the shepherd God who takes care of the flock. You hear a popular melody of this verse here.