Beha'alotkha (Psalms)

Theophany and Revelation: Psalm 68

My Psalms calendar recommends reciting Psalm 68 this week. My first reaction was: an appropriate enough choice for the week following Shavuot. Indeed, I had originally planned to discuss this psalm on Shabbat Yitro, seeing it, alongside Psalm 19 and 119, as an apt one for the revelation of Torah at Sinai. Indeed, where those two speak of Torah per se, this psalm gives a powerful picture of the theophany.

A short digression about this term. There are two distinct, different aspects to the Sinai event: the first, more familiar aspect, usually referred to as “revelation,” refers to the specific message or contents given then: the Torah. But a second, prior aspect, is that of theophany, or epiphany, meaning: God’s self-revelation, His making Himself known to the people gathered at Sinai. They felt an awesome, overwhelming sense of Presence, of the numinous, of the reality of God—unaccompanied per se by any specific sense of commandment: in a certain way similar to the experience of mystics and prophets, but far more powerful, immediate, and direct. In Hebrew, one might perhaps refer to these as Matan Torah and Giluy Shekhinah. Indeed, an interesting phrase used in the Passover Haggadah, in one of the stanzas of the hymn Dayyenu, alludes to these two aspects: “If He had brought us before Sinai and not given us the Torah—it would have been enough!” That is: the experience of being at Sinai in itself, a certain direct, experiential knowledge of the Divine that served as a source for the steadfast faith, the emunah in the living God, that must ipso facto serve as the necessary prelude to accepting the Torah. Ramban’s view that the words ”I am the Lord your God” is not counted as one of the commandments is based upon this same idea: it is prior to any mitzvah—“Accept my kingship and thereafter accept my commandments.”

All this was my original plan. Psalm 68 seemed the psalm par excellence to portray the drama and power and awesome nature of the Divine revelation at Sinai. “The mountain God desired as His dwelling” (v. 17); “When you went forth before Your people… the earth trembled, the heavens rained…” (vv. 8-9); “Extol Him who rides upon the clouds” (v. 5); etc.—all these seem familiar poetic representations of the overwhelming event at Sinai, when the gap between the finite and the Infinite was suddenly breached.

Bu when I sat down to study the psalm in earnest, I realized that matters are somewhat more complicated. To begin with, simply in terms of language, it is perhaps the most difficult chapter in the entire Psalter: filled with difficult words, complex linguistic constructions, dense images and syntactical constructions that require a commentary on almost every line. Reading Amos Hakham’s sagacious comment that all the commentators break their teeth, so to speak, trying to figure out this psalm, I felt some comfort, knowing that I am in good company. So I will explain what I can, and extend an invitation to my readers to understand it as best they can.

Some examples of the difficulties. Why does the word yerakrak, in the phrase yerakrak harutz in v. 14, which to the modern Hebrew ear sounds like “green” or “greenish,” suddenly mean “fine gold”? The word is clearly a diminutive or softening of yarok, green, as in Lev 14:37, where it refers to a sunken, “greenish” depression in a contaminated house (analogous to adamdam in Lev 13:19, 24). On the other hand, it is used in a complementary sense, as a mark of beauty, in the midrash that comments that Esther coloration was ”greenish”—we can imagine her as an Oriental beauty with olive or light-brown skin. My wife notes that the eyes of a cat seem green or golden, depending on how the light strikes them. And why does rigmatam in verse 28 mean “the commander [of their multitude]”? Amos Hakham reminds us that the verb rg”m means “to stone,” as in capital punishment; after casting the stones, there is a pile or heap of many small stones, called ragmah, which in turn means “a lot,” “a multitude” in much the same way as the word “heap” is used in English. And so on.

Moreover, in reading this psalm I felt very much like the proverbial yeshiva bakhur, who knows the Tanakh through the lenses of the Talmud. At least three verses in this psalm are familiar because they serve as proof-texts in well–know aggadot: the combination “Extol Him who rides upon the clouds…. father of orphans” (vv. 5-6) is the basis for the statement that God’s greatness and His humility (that is, His empathy for the downtrodden) go hand in hand (Megillah 31a); the verse, “You went up on high, taking captives” (v. 19) is cited in connection with Moses’ ascent to the heavens to receive the Torah and his conflict with the angels (Shabbat 89a); while v. 27, “In the assemblies bless God… from the source of Israel” is one of the verses used to prove that the nuptial blessings are recited in the company of ten (Ketubot 7b; see HY V: Pinhas).

But the more basic questions remain unresolved. What is this psalm all about? Reading it more closely, one sees that it is primarily a victory march, or a prayer before going into battle, invoking God’s help as the deliverer of Israel and He who “gives might and power to His people” (v. 36). Read in this way, the references to Sinai and are a kind of parenthetical clause, proofs of God’s might and majesty as shown by great events of the past, invoked in the hope that they will be similarly manifest in the present.

Interestingly, a British Bible scholar, Michael D. Goulder, in his book The Prayers of David, proposes an interesting interpretation of the entire series of Davidic prayers in the latter half of the second book of the Psalter (Pss 51-72). He sees these as written in response to the various turns of events during the attempted palace revolution of David’s son Absalom (see 2 Sam 15-18), involving David’s flight and his ultimate triumphant return. This psalm marks the turning point in that entire situation.

I mention Goulder’s theory, because it represents a rejection of the dominant tendency in modern, so-called critical Biblical scholarship, to date everything a late as possible. In a paradoxical way, his suggestions that (a) the individual psalms not be read in a vacuum, but that their arrangement and grouping under various headings be taken seriously; and, (b) that Bible scholars at least consider the possibility that some of the psalms might actually have been written by King David or in his circle, and not centuries later, well into the Second Temple period, as was assumed by Günkel and Mowinckel, et al, was little short of revolutionary.

In the introduction to this book, he tells an interesting story. As a boy during the Second World War he studied at Eton, where King George VI and his queen used to come to chapel when staying at Windsor Castle. Psalm 68, which was a royal favorite, was sung on such occasions to a stirring melody. Young Goulder was moved by the powerful imagery of the psalm and the pomp and circumstance of the occasion. Even though, he continues, he didn’t really understand what it was all about, he was confident that the minister understood it. Besides, he said, “I knew our praying it was bad for the Germans.” Some years later, when he was a grown man, and himself a pastor in a diocese in Manchester, he still didn’t understand, but took comfort that “the professors in Cambridge” did. More years passed, and he himself became one of the professors—and then he realized that nobody understood it, and he decided that there was no option but for him to try it figure it out for himself. And so, indeed, he did, going on to write books about various collections within the Psalms—not only the prayers of David, but also about the songs of Korah, the Psalms of the Return, the Songs of Asaph, as well as developing unconventional theories about the New Testament, which are of course not our concern here.

One more interesting facet of this figure. In 1981, in his middle years, when he was already a prominent figure in the Church of England and was even considered for a bishopric, Goulder suddenly lost his faith and became what he described as a “nonagressive atheist.” I found something strangely familiar in the description of his experience, reminiscent of various “apikorsim” and heterodox thinkers within the Jewish fold whom I have known: the sense of sadness at leaving a religious communion in which he had spent so many years; the continued feeling of personal respect and even reverence for his saintly and devoted mentors, whom he had deeply disappointed; combined with the sense of inevitability of this move, that his own intellectual integrity and perception of things made it impossible to continue to teach and practice, given that he could no longer honestly believe in certain axioms that were central to Christian faith.

Due to the lateness of the hour and the approaching Shabbat, I cannot address certain ideological issues raised by this psalm, viz. the attitude to warfare and violence. I will try to turn to these issues soon.

Postscript

In last week’s piece on Psalm 68, I inadvertently omitted one of the most important points: the connection of the psalm to the particular Torah portion chosen. In the case of Beha’alotkha, there is at least one striking and obvious connection: the opening verse of this psalm, “Let the God rise up and scatter his enemies, and may his foes flee before him” is an almost verbatim repetition of the verse recited when the ark of the covenant was raised up at the head of the procession of Israelites marching through the desert (a verse also familiar from the Torah service in the synagogue), found in Numbers 10:35, except that in the psalm it is phrased in the third person whereas in the Torah verse it is in the second person.

More generally, this psalm, in which God is depicted marching at the head of His people in times of war, raises major issues about war and aggression, which for many people today strikes a rather discordant note, difficult to square with what we perceive as the ideals that we intuitively feel to go with Godliness, and the pursuit of the good and righteous place. The issue is both broad and profound, so that even an elementary articulation of the issues must be postponed for another occasion.

Another point deserving of comment: in my discussion there of Michael Goulder, the Anglican cleric and Bible scholar turned-atheist, some readers thought that I was somehow advocating apikorsut, or at least implying that any person who is intellectually honest has to go the route of rejecting religion. Far from it! Ironically, I cut that discussion short for reasons of piety: the practical need to cut my writing short so as to avoid violating Shabbat. I can understand Goulder and his Jewish counterparts on a human level, but I believe that there are answers to the problems he and others raise, be they intellectual, emotional, or intuitive. A lengthy discussion of precisely this issue—“Know What to answer the (Outer and Inner) apikorus”—has been in preparation, but that too must wait for another time. Meanwhile, I will give a brief answer in the Hasidic spirit: the serious Jew is a) too busy working on his own ethical and spiritual self-improvement, and, b) feels experientially that “there is no place empty of Him,” to worry about theoretical issues of this or another flaw in the canonical texts.