Two Psalms for Hard Times You Won’t Find in Your Prayerbook

The biblical book of Psalms is a source for much of Jewish liturgy. Classical prayers are studded with quotations and metaphors from the Psalms, and entire psalms are embedded in our services. In Hebrew, the book of Psalms is Sefer Tehillim, the book of Praises, but, as you might expect, our book of Praises is also filled with pleas, complaints, and laments. In this essay, we will examine two compelling examples of sad, angry psalms.

What is a psalm? For centuries, psalms were a common genre of worship-poetry throughout the ancient near east.[1] Our book of Psalms contains approximately 500 years of writings by many authors. Many were liturgy for the ancient Jerusalem Temple, either chanted responsively like Psalm 36 or by various groups of participants in chorus like Psalm 118. But some psalms are clearly individual rather than collective and contemplative rather than celebratory.

The Christian spiritual essayist, Anne Lamott categorizes the themes of prayer as “Help, Thanks, Wow.”[2] Our book of Psalms adds the ruder yet urgent theme, “Where the hell are You?” “Where the hell are You?” is not merely a request for help. It laments the disappearance of divine presence and complains of utter abandonment. Psalms 42 and 88, which we will examine here, exemplify this anguished outcry.

“The book of Psalms is the record of a truthful relationship between embodied, fragile humans who inhabit an unpredictable world and a God who is intermittently present and sometimes terrifyingly absent to its inhabitants.”

Except for Tisha B’Av, the day on which we bewail a devastated universe, our liturgies are mainly communal praises of God articulating the joy, gratitude, and wonder we often forget to express. But the book of Psalms also preserves darker communications with the divine. In his classic article on lament, the Christian Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann maintains that to have an authentic relationship with God, we must present our real selves, not compliant false selves that conceal pain and anger behind a pleasant mask.[3] The book of Psalms is the record of a truthful relationship between embodied, fragile humans who inhabit an unpredictable world and a God who is intermittently present and sometimes terrifyingly absent to its inhabitants.

Both for ancient Israelites and for us, the dominant image for divine presence is the face. The priestly blessing requests, “May Adonai make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you. May Adonai lift up his face to you and give you peace.” (Num.6:24-27). Abandonment is hester panim, “the hiding of the face.” Our human terror of abandonment begins in infancy. Infants recognize familiar faces as early as two months. Because infants do not have a concept of object permanence, when something is gone from sight, it seems to have dropped right out of the universe never to return. That is why peekaboo is the most reassuring of baby games; over and over, the vanished face reappears to the delighted child. The pain of divine absence in the book of Psalms is not our modern notion of theological unbelief as an abstract philosophical concept. It is an experience of a world gone dark, anguished, and empty of meaning because God who is the source of meaning and order is inaccessible. When that divine presence or “Face” has disappeared, all that remains is pain and loneliness.

Psalm 42: Yearning and Despair

Psalm 42 bears the notation “For the Menatzeach,” leader or lead player and is categorized as a maskil, a term no one knows how to define.[4] It is attributed to the Korachites, a Temple musical guild. Like all ancient poetry, psalms were sung accompanied by instruments, just as Homer’s epics were sung to a lyre. Music heightens the expressiveness of poetry by making it an embodied performance rather than a text to be read silently. Music also aids memorization. For all these reasons, modern Jews still retain the custom of chanting Torah, Haftarah, and the Five Megillot read on festivals. In yeshivot, Talmud too is studied with a melody. The Masoretic text of the book of Psalms has cantillation symbols, but we no longer have traditions for their music. Nevertheless, innumerable melodies for psalm verses persist and new melodies created. You have probably sung them in services yourself.

Unlike many psalms, Psalm 42 is not a collective liturgical expression. Instead it is an internal dialogue between two parts of an individual self. The first information we learn about this self is that it yearns for God. The speaker compares this yearning to the urgent thirst of a deer seeking water in a drought-plagued land. Desire for the beloved is like a compelling physical need. The speaker’s nefesh, which the JPS inaccurately translates “soul,” and Robert Alter more correctly as “my whole being” craves God, “the living God.”[5] This image of the lover as thirsty deer seeking an elusive Deity as a deer seeks water recurs in many psalms, but here, astonishingly, the yearning lover knows exactly where to find the divine presence. The problem is that the speaker is unable to get there. This is not a psalm of exile. The Temple exists, but for some reason the speaker cannot travel there and is detained among jeering unbelievers.

The hectoring taunt “Where is your God?” often accompanies oppression and degradation in biblical texts. “If I can abuse you at will,” the bully’s reasoning goes, “then your God is powerless, does not care about you or does not exist.” “Where is your God?” is the question that undermines us from within, feeding on our own internal sense of abandonment. The question recurs in Psalm 115:2: “Let not the nations say, “Where is their God now?” The speaker of Psalm 3 says, “Many say of me, ‘There is no help for him from God.’” Hoping for God’s presence or God’s attention is not just a matter of theology. One’s God represents an entire nomos, a universe of meanings constituted by stories and the values implicit in the stories. As the National Socialists well knew, once we relinquish our universe of meaning and accept the oppressors’ universe of meaning as the only reality, we are truly doomed.

It is hard for the knowledgeable modern reader to hear verse 5 without a shudder, because it forms the first line and title of a famous poem recited during the traditional Yom Kippur Musaf Service that narrates the martyrdom of 10 great scholars at the hands of the Romans.[6] In context however, the speaker is vividly recalling the communal processions and songs through which ordinary people participated in the festivals. The speaker expresses no nostalgia for the rituals officiated by the Temple’s experts or their ceremonies. Instead, the speaker mourns an access to divine presence that depends on the power of a community praising and celebrating God together, a worship experience that cannot be replicated by an individual alone.

As I write, most houses of worship have turned to virtual services. If we choose, we can attend in pajamas, mute the service officiants, even leave without being noticed or missed. If we stay and watch, we can be sung at, prayed at, or preached at, but that experience of forming part of a congregation, whose roared songs, refrains and responses, risings and sittings, form a duet with the service leader cannot be reproduced virtually. Making part of the community’s presence before God is how some of us experienced the divine presence. Some of us ache for this participatory worship and are heartsick without it. We remember the power and the certainty that imbued that experience but we cannot reproduce it ourselves. We are in exile.

It is at this point in the psalm that a different internal voice questions the speaker in words that are difficult to translate: JPS has “why so downcast, my soul, why disquieted within me?”[7] Both Robert Alter and Edward Feld, however, offer translations that evoke the embodied image the Hebrew presents: someone responding to a pain in the gut, doubled over and moaning.[8]. Alter renders verse six “How bent, my being, how you moan for me!” and Edward Feld, “Why are you bent over, O my soul? Why are you moaning within me?”[9] “Hope in God,” the comforting inner voice counsels, ”for yet I will acclaim Him for His rescuing presence.” Internal dialogues like this do occur in some psalms. The bereft child voice that asks, as it does in Psalm 13, “How long will you abandon me forever?” is reminded here that if we hang on to hope, we can anticipate the return of the reassuring presence and with it, all that is happy and safe.

The anguished voice responds to this reassurance with its immediate reality: right now, as I recall the geography of my land, my reality is that I am far from home and drowning in loneliness and longing. Repeatedly, this alienated voice compares its anguish to drowning. “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your cataracts”(42:8). But the word “deep” does not convey the terror in the Hebrew word tehom. Tehom is the primeval chaos. The depths of the sea are its living remnant. If the Temple and its service represent the ordered universe, the primeval chaos is its antithesis, the complete absence of order. Drowning in deep water is the prototypical biblical image for being utterly overwhelmed: unable to breathe, thrashing desperately, vainly fighting the plummet into death. This particular iteration of the image exactly echoes Jonah 2:4 where Jonah sings to God inside the big fish describing his rescue: “All Your breakers and billows surged over me.” Whether one text is quoting the other is impossible to establish, but for those of us who read the Psalms both backward and forward, hearing simultaneously both the text and all of the literary allusions that echo or play with it, we hear an additional source of hope: Yes, all the breakers and billows went over Jonah, but we know he made it back to land.

In verse 9, the hopeful voice again urges a stubborn optimism. Alter translates this, “By day the Lord ordains His kindness/ and by night His song is with me—prayer to the God of my life.” Neither the speaker nor we, the socially- distancing readers, have access to the full drama of divine presence that is palpable in communal celebration, but we can still remember that God cares for us. We can still re-experience divine presence through psalm and prayer. In response, (verses 10-11), the despairing voice savagely repudiates this nechemta, this consolation, with the most violent images yet. Feld translates these verses: “Why have You forgotten me? / Why must I walk in darkness, / oppressed by my enemies? Slaughtering me to the bone, / my besiegers ridicule me, / as each day, they ask, ‘Where is your God?’” In the conclusion (42:12), however, the tenacious, hopeful voice seizes this image of agony in the gut, the bent-over posture of hopeless disquiet reiterated from verse 6, and quotes it to challenge the despairing voice. JPS translates this final verse, “Have hope in God. / I will yet praise Him, / my ever-present help, my God,” an anticlimactic rendering of the last words, yeshuot panai v’elohi. In contrast, Feld gives the verse a triumphant cast: “Why are you bent over, O my soul, / Why are you moaning within me? / Await God / for I still acknowledge Him. / Victory will go before me / and my God.”[10]

Psalm 88: There is No Consolation

Nearly all lament psalms have a nechtemta, a verse whose resolution is hopeful, or comforting. Psalm 88 is uniquely shocking because, through its 19 verses, the speaker becomes increasingly aggrieved and estranged from God. In verse 2, the speaker entreats God with the unvocalized four letter name we no longer pronounce: Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey, the name that contains all the consonants of the verb “to be.” The other term the speaker uses is “elohei yeshuati,” God of my deliverance or rescue. The speaker describes having cried out, tza’akti. In biblical contexts, this verb is almost always connected with crying out under oppression or injustice. The verb abounds in Exodus’ narrative of the tribulations of the slaves in Egypt. But neither divine presence nor rescue answer this supplicant, although the speaker implores God to notice the prayer, to listen, to recognize the speaker’s desperation, “sated with misfortunes” (JPS) or “with evils” (Alter) and “at the brink of Sheol.”[11] Sheol, the netherworld of the dead, often appears in grisly constellations of parallelisms with the terms kever, the grave, bor, the pit, (a bleaker way of describing the grave), choshekh, darkness, and avadon, the place of utter abandonment where one is forgotten forever. The speaker describes being met with the repugnance and shrinking with which one might encounter the walking dead.

JPS translates verses 5-6, “I am numbered with those who go down to the Pit:/ I am a helpless man/ abandoned among the dead/ like bodies lying in the grave,/ of whom You are mindful no more,/ and who are cut off from Your care.”[12] The word JPS translates “abandoned” is chofshi, which usually means “free.” Alter has an illuminating comment on this odd usage.[13] He points out, “In 2 Kings15:5, beyt hahofshit means the place of quarantine in which those afflicted with the skin disease tsara’at are segregated. The Ugaritic cognate, moreover, appears to be a designation for the underworld. In fact, in verse 9 the speaker talks of imprisonment.” In other words, the speaker’s hellish experience feels like quarantine or isolation, with the added component of stigma that frightens friends and intimates into distancing themselves. Sound familiar? Let’s be clear: we cannot know the specific cause of the speaker’s distress, but we can relate to it out of our own hellish experiences millennia later. JPS translates the speaker’s complaint in verse 9 as “You make my companions shun me; you make me abhorrent to them; I am shut in and do not go out.”

By the time we arrive at verse 11, the speaker is hurling taunting questions at this God who does not respond to entreaties, or rescue, or alleviate pain. “Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise to praise you?” Since God can only obtain praise from the living, the speaker argues, that should give God a strong motivation to keep the pious alive. Why then, the speaker asks, does God reject a faithful worshipper? As in Psalm 42, the speaker here (88:17-18) describes the terror of divine absence and the sense of being overwhelmed, as a drowning. “Your terrors destroy. They swirl about me like water all day long; they encircle me on every side.” In the concluding verse, 88:19, there is no hope, not even an entreaty, just the reiterated accusation flung at the abandoning Deity. Alter translates, “You distanced lover and neighbor from me. My friends—utter darkness.”

“I would argue that Psalm 88 is included as a demonstration that even this fury and desolation may be addressed to God as prayer. Filled with rage and despair, the speaker is still speaking to the God who has sent neither healing nor liberation.”

We might ask why such a furious, disrespectful psalm would be included in Sefer Tehillim, the book of Praises. I would argue that Psalm 88 is included as a demonstration that even this fury and desolation may be addressed to God as prayer. Filled with rage and despair, the speaker is still speaking to the God who has sent neither healing nor liberation. There is no one else before whom to pour out all this brokenness. It may not be a polite prayer, this “where the hell are you?” but it is an honest prayer. The terror of drowning and of loneliness, the desperate battle against our mortality when, intellectually, we all know that we are temporary, time-limited creatures, these may not be admirable qualities, but they represent the commonest of human feelings. As anyone who has ever dealt with a toddler knows, rage often masks an even more terrifying realization: the realization that we hate what is happening and are utterly helpless to do anything to change it. We are allowed to pray this prayer. God will understand.

[1] This paragraph is based on Robert Alter, “Introduction to Psalms” in The Hebrew Bible The Writings v. 3 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019) 3-10. Hereafter referenced as Alter.

[2] Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow (New York: The Penguin Group, 2012.

[3] Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” JSOT 36 (1986) 49-56.

[4] JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh Second edition (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,1999)1462-1463. Hereafter referenced as JPS Tanakh.

[5] Alter, “Psalms,” 113.

[6] “Eleh Ezkerah,”Machzor Lev Shalem edited by Edward Feld (New York: The Rabbinical Assembly, 2010).

[7] This is the verse the Kabbalist, Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, quotes in the sixth stanza of the Kabbalat Shabbat hymn, L’kha Dodi.

[8] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: The Writings v. 3 Psalms, 113. Edward Feld, Joy, Despair, and Hope: Reading Psalms (Eugene Oregon: Cascade Books, 2013), 86-87.

[9] Feld, Joy, Despair, and Hope, 86-87.

[10] Feld, Joy, Despair, and Hope, 86-87.

[11] Psalm 88, JPS Tanakh, 1521.

[12] Psalm 88, JPS Tanakh, 1522.

[13] Alter, Ps. 88 n.6, 210.