Shavuot (Psalms)

Psalm 119: The Grand Eight-fold Psalm

No psalm expresses the centrality of the Torah in the Jew’s life, which is ultimately the central theme of Shavuot, as much as Psalm 119, which begins with the words ”Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the Torah of the Lord.” The longest chapter in the Psalms, and in the Bible as a whole, it consists of a whopping 176 verses—almost twice as many as the next longest chapter, Numbers 7, with its 89 verses. It has a unique structure: an eight-fold alphabetical acrostic, it consists of twenty-two groups of eight verses, in which every verse in each group begins with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet; hence its name, tamnei apei, “the eight-fold psalm.” (Interestingly, this psalm is well-known for its use in a popular memorial custom: when visiting a grave, it is customary to read a certain sequence of seven psalms, followed by those verses from Psalm 119 that spell out the name of the deceased, sometimes followed by the letters of the word neshama, “soul.”)

Due to its great length, it is difficult to identify any clear-cut structure or pattern to the psalm, beyond the alphabetical rubric. But notwithstanding the constraints imposed upon the author by its alphabetical arrangement, it is very poetic and suffused with the message of love and devotion to the Torah and its laws. Reading through, one gains the impression that each group of eight verses is in some sense an autonomous unit or section; many seem to focus upon one or another theme. Some speak of the strictness of the law and the awe of God entailed in the observance of its laws; others emphasize the love or joy connected with Torah; still others, of the intense longing and desire to draw close to the law. The nature of the Hebrew language imposes its own constraints as well: almost all of the verses in the section beginning with bet begin with the preposition bet, as do those with kaf, correspondingly; those starting with vav use that letter as the conjunctive; many of those in heh tend to be phrased in the hiph’il (causative) construction, those in nun in the nif’al (passive voice), and so on.

But beyond these formal features, one is struck in this psalm, more than anything else, by the constant use of images of love, joy, even of pleasure and playfulness, related to the study of Torah. This point is in sharp contrast to the harsh stereotype of “The Law” often encountered in Western civilization, under the influence of Christianity, as something stern and frightening, dwarfing man and forcing him to mindless obedience, to a kind of coerced, anxiety-producing behaviorism. This idea was promulgated by Paul of Tarsus, who was obsessed with the notion that the Torah demanded a kind of unreachable perfectionism, so that to live under the Law is to feel that one is never doing enough, that one is constantly inadequate, not “justified.” His solution was to throw out the baby with the bath water: to act as if humankind does not require law or norms at all, or that they are in any event irrelevant to the religious enterprise, and to posit a religion of divine grace and kindness and love which, nice as it may sound on paper, ignored major areas of human nature and ended in the cruelty and fanaticism of crusades, inquisitions, witch-hunts, pogroms, or garden-variety violence, coupled with apathy to this-worldly violence and human suffering.

But to return to our psalm: the themes that come across clearly and repeatedly are those of joy and happiness and love. “How I love Your Torah; it is my discourse the whole day long” (v. 97). Several particularly powerful verses deal with the idea that the Torah serves as a psychological stave for the person who is otherwise hounded and persecuted from all sides. Thus, in verses that became the text for one of the most moving songs to emerge from the Holocaust: "This has been my comfort in my affliction, that Your word gives me life. Wicked ones greatly taunted me, but I did not turn from Your Torah”—vv. 50-51); or “Were it not for Your Torah that was my plaything [or: delight], I would have perished in my affliction”; v. 92. This last verse serves as the text for one of Shlomo Carlebach’s most beautifully haunting melodies.

I would like to focus upon the concept of the Torah as “a plaything,” a source of pleasure and happiness in a world otherwise filled with darkness and evil, threatening figures. What is meant by this usage of the root sh'ash'a, repeated eight times in the course of this psalm in various forms, and also used, e.g., in Proverbs 8:30 (the verse used in the very first section of Midrash Rabbah), where the Torah is referred to as God’s “plaything”? Clearly this word, whose root meaning is “to sport, take delight in, to be an object of delight” is used, not in a trivial, childish sense, but as that which brings deep joy, a sense of meaning and order in a chaotic and confused world. Far from being something dark, heavy or somber, the Torah lightens a person’s burden in this world, filling it with “sweetness and light” (qualities that Matthew Arnold mistakenly attributed only to Hellenism, not to “Hebraism”).

Interestingly, the noted Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga, in his book Homo Ludens, writes of play as an essential feature of human culture. He defines play as that which is performed, nor for any utilitarian end, to fulfill a concrete biological or other need, but for the pure enjoyment and pleasure of the mind. Thus, we speak of “playing” a musical instrument, of that performed in the theater as a “play,” of puns and such as “word-play,” of the “play” of the mind—but also to “play” games, “sex-play”—etc. Homo Ludens illustrates the role of play in law, war, science, poetry, philosophy, and art. Huizinga saw the instinct for play as the central element in human culture; all human activities are in a sense play: “Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play.” (Compare Ernst Cassirer’s concept of culture as the unique project of human society in An Essay on Man, in which he elaborates a somewhat similar idea, albeit with a different terminology.)

So, too, the Torah contains an element of play. We see this in such things as gematria (homilies based on the numerological values of various words or phrases), notarikon (the reading of the letters of certain words in the Torah as initials spelling other phrases), or in the recombining of the letters of a given word into others (thus, Tikkunei Zohar derives no less than 70 words from the opening word of the Tanakh, Bereshit). Similarly, there are numerous derashot of Hasidim which turn biblical verses and rabbinic dicta backwards and inside-out. And, most recently, with the emergence of powerful and rapid computers, we have a new form of “Torah play” in the Torah codes, the unveiling of hidden messages imbedded within the text at regular letter intervals. (A friend of ours recently told us of a game she sometimes plays on Shabbat which might be described as a form of Torah play, but also as a light-hearted meditative tool. The aim is to find a term descriptive of God for each letter of the alphabet (English or Hebrew, as the case may be), but with one crucial rule: no clichés or hackneyed, standard phrases allowed!)

But there is in fact a great deal of intellectual play even in the “straighter” modes of Torah study. There is a certain joy and intellectual satisfaction derived from the sheer inventiveness involved in discovering a hiddush—a new way of looking at things, a new explanation or conceptual framework for a seemingly well-known Talmudic passage. Certain yeshivot place particular emphasis on studying Torah lishmah—“for its own sake”—that is, in specifically studying the more abstruse, non-applicable subject areas of Torah, simply because they are part of Torah, for the sake of the act of engaging in Torah per se. Thus, R. Hayyim of Brisk especially liked Kodashim, the collection of tractates dealing with sacrificial offerings, currently a halakhic “dead letter,” precisely because it is such an obstruse way subject, providing plentiful latitude for creating hiddushim and constructing new conceptual models. Was this work or play? At times it is difficult to say.

Of course, the Torah is seen as something Divine, not merely an artifice of human culture, but something beyond that. Perhaps, in the spirit of the Rabbinic rule that “the Torah speaks in the language of man,” we might say that the Torah assumes the guise of a plaything, of something that sits well within the rubric of homo ludens. In any event, much of this “play” element is found specifically in the Oral Torah, which may be defined as kind of meeting place between the human and the Divine. The point is that Jews are not dour, unsmiling Puritans, but people who love play. Indeed, the Talmud notes that the Holy One blessed be He Himself has in his daily schedule, so to speak, a period during which he plays with the Leviathan—the great sea-monster which He doubtless treats like a puppy.

Gershom Scholem, founder of modern Kabbalah studies and a self-declared religious anarchist, writes of the tremendous exegetical freedom made possible, paradoxically, by the belief in the literal divinity of the Torah. In one of his more personal essays, he writes:

the basic assumption upon which all traditional Jewish mysticism is based… [is] the acceptance of the Torah, in the strictest and most precise understanding of the concept of the word of God…. Each and every word and letter, and not merely something general and amorphous lacking in specific meaning, is an aspect of the revelation of the Divine Presence… It is only for this reason that they were able to find infinite illuminating lights in every word and letter, in the sense of seventy faces to the Torah—of the infinite interpretation and endless understandings of each sentence…. Once a person has accepted the strictures of this faith and this quality of faith… he enjoys an extraordinary measure of freedom… He is able to uncover level upon level, layer upon layer, in the understanding that the gates of exegesis are never closed… This decision allows wide latitude for religious individualism, without leaving the fixed framework of the Torah…

Such an approach can justify even such outrageous multi-lingual puns as my late grandfather’s reading, half tongue-in-cheek, of “you shall not boil the kid in its mother’s milk” as an enjoinder to parents and educators that one cannot bring a “kid”—a child—to mature understanding of Torah if you only feed him watered-down, “milky” intellectual fare (Abraham Gallant, Mashal u-Melitzah, II; Bo, 47-48). In the words of Ben Bag–Bag in Pirkei Avot 5.26: “Turn it about and turn it about, for everything is in it.”