You are with me -- #23

The Schechter Institute in Jerusalem (one of my many alma maters) has been publishing an online commentary to the greatest of the biblical books for spiritual care -- the Book of Psalms. Today, they released their commentary for the ultimate of the psalms of comfort, Psalm 23, that so-very brief work that opens with lines famously translated as "The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want." Benjamin J. Segal, the author of the commentary, labels this great psalm simply as "With Me," reflecting his claim that the psalm revolves around these words from the middle of its fourth verse. But, while Segal says that the simple concept that "God is with me sits at the core of the psalm, he also claims that the psalm treats the concept in a very complex way, with a progression that could reflect one that many of us go through in our journeys in life and in faith. At the beginning, the psalm expresses a simple faith in the presence of God -- God as a source of physical sustenance and protection. But, as the psalm progresses, this faith changes -- into a faith in God as a source of spiritual sustenance, a sustenance that can support us even in the darkest of times. Even in the dark shadows cast by evil, injustice, or even death.

This kind of spiritual sustenance is what can not only comfort us, but also inspire us to do things that would have seemed not only impossible, but even miraculous. I am reminded of how Nelson Mandela was able to find this kind of sustenance in another very short work, the Victorian poem Invictus -- something that helped him find not only the courage to survive decades of bitter imprisonment, but to be able to emerge from it unbroken: still able to love other human beings and unbelievably still able to move past anger to profound forgiveness and reconciliation. (Minna and I this week watched the brilliant Clint Eastwood movie of the same name, which documents one small part of what Mandela did after his imprisonment.)

Jews everywhere have been reclaiming the Book of Psalms as our own in recent years and finding comfort and wisdom within its ancient words, traditionally credited to King David. I am so grateful for this free contribution Schechter is making to this movement of reclaiming!

Why we are sad and depressed (and how we can become "happy")

This fascinating New York Times magazine article -- Depression's Upside -- reminds me of a scene from Annie Hall The depressed Woody Allen character stops a good-looking couple on the street:

• Allen: Here, you look like a happy couple, um, are you?
• Woman: Yeah.
• Allen: So, so, how do you account for it?
• Woman: Um, I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
• Man: And I'm exactly the same way.

In other words (according to Woody Allen, at least), chronic happiness -- as attractive as it might look from afar -- comes at too great a price, the price of being incapable of having interesting thoughts and doing interesting things.

The main psychologists profiled in the Times article say more or less the same thing, but from the opposite perspective: They claim that depression has a function -- the function of allowing people to do the kind of thinking required to come up with creative and effective responses to really tough (and interesting) challenges and questions, including challenges that lead to grief. Evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews, for example, is quoted as saying about the person who has experienced a divorce or a tough breakup:

“I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”

This idea that depression (maybe it's better to just say, sadness) actually has a function that should not be routinely medicated out of existence with Prozac and alike reminds me of some books I have encountered over the last few years that have influenced me, including Healing the soul in the age of the brain and Thomas Moore's Care of the soul. I was also reminded of the New Yorker's recent article on grieving around death, which asks the question of what the function of grief might be.

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I am also reminded of some thoughts I've recently had about the first Psalm (for which I have the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem to thank for the inspiration; check out their new blog on the Psalms). Psalm One starts out:

אַשְׁרֵי הָאִישׁ-- אֲשֶׁר לֹא הָלַךְ, בַּעֲצַת רְשָׁעִים;

וּבְדֶרֶךְ חַטָּאִים, לֹא עָמָד, וּבְמוֹשַׁב לֵצִים, לֹא יָשָׁב.

Which is typically translated something like this:

Happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the path of the sinners,

nor sits in the seat of the insolent.

But I don't think happy is a very good rendering of what the Psalmist meant here (with the word אשרי/ashrei). The results of following God's ways -- the ways of Torah, as the next verse says -- are not simple happiness; rather, they are a deeper kind of fulfilment and satisfaction -- perhaps, blessed, is a better word, as the King James and some other translations use (even though it is impossible to literally translate ashrei as blessed).

Similarly, the Schechter blog's commentary on this psalm says of translating ashrei as happy:

[C]learly the term is more profound than that, i.e., deeper than our contemporary use of the word “happy.” Ashrei implies peace, satisfaction, fulfillment and tranquility of worldview. (Martin Cohen, noting the term’s centrality, points out that it appears a total of twenty-five times in nineteen different psalms!) Thus the speaker opens with the only “reward” he acknowledges, but that is less reward than description, and the image of the fruitful tree expands upon it. His claim is that the person of faith is“ashrei,” having a deep conviction of the rightness of his ways, of their long-range influence and permanence, and of their benefit to the world.

This kind of deep conviction in the rightness of one's ways -- in the path one is taking through the challenges of life -- is something I value much more than simple happiness. And as tough as the times of depression I've experienced in my life have been, I believe they have played a role in my finding my way towards my true convictions and towards my being able to make my walk through life to be in line with those (challenging!) convictions. In this sense I feel very much to be ashrei at this point in my life. And I have HaShem to thank for that -- especially for the beautiful Torah, including the Psalms, that HaShem has given to us.

Soulless reviews of soulful psalms (translations)

Recently, I recommended Robert Alter's new translation of the Psalms (and especially an NPR interview with Alter, himself). Now, I'd like to recommend the New Yorker's review of Alter's book.

Actually -- in the 'great' tradition of New Yorker writers getting intoxicated by their own words and thoughts -- it's not really a review of Alter's work. It's more of an essay by the author -- novelist and literary critic James Woods -- about what he thinks about the Psalms. Luckily, what he thinks is very much worth reading. His article is a wonderful, short summary of some of the most important points about what gives the Psalms such incredible power and beauty even now, thousands of years after they were written. And Woods wonderfully states why the Psalms can be so relevant for us today as we sometimes struggle to maintain the strength of our faith in a world whose ubiquitous violence and suffering can test us dearly:

This struggle [presented in the Psalms] between faith and doubt, hope and despair, is undoubtedly one of the features that have made the Psalms such a help to so many readers and writers, both believers and nonbelievers.

A word of caution, however (and this is why I used the word "soulless" in the title of this post): Woods, like so many intellectuals, feels a need to say that while the Psalms are interesting to, in effect, gaze upon (like an ancient piece of art in a glass museum case), he does not think they actually have any relevance to our lives. He says, for example:

Psalm 90, like many others, belongs to a theological landscape quite remote from our own.

He says this is so because "with our new, borderless knowledge of the cosmos" we can no longer relate to "what the Biblical scholar James Kugel refers to as the 'starkness' of the Hebrew Bible, a bare, hard world in which a desert landscape of rocks and rare streams is briefly lit up by columns of fire."

Oh, Mr. Woods, come and stand beside me in the hospital some day. Come and stand beside me as I talk to a cancer patient facing death or the possibility of death. That place can indeed be a desert landscape, one full of the despair and desperate pleading that we find in the words of the Psalms. But -- and this is part of what makes chaplaincy work with cancer patients such an amazing experience -- it is exactly this kind of place that has the incredible potential to be suddenly lit up by "columns of fire", columns of fire that represent the presence of God becoming manifest in the suffering person's life. It is an amazing thing to be a part of.

But, if you read Woods' review with a grain of salt, you can really learn a lot by reading his fine article. I recommend it!

Soulless Psalms?

Actually Robert Alter's new translation of the greatest prayerbook ever written has plenty of soul in it (even if he avoids the word, itself). Alter is one of those rare top-notch academic scholars who also has a real commitment to finding the place where spiritual meaning and intellectual rigor meet. He's not my favorite Bible translator (that honor goes to Everett Fox), but he's way up there. This NPR interview is definitely worth a listen.

clipped from www.npr.org Author Explores the Psalms, Sans Soul All Things Considered, September 17, 2007 · For thousands of years, the Psalms have been a powerful part of first Jewish, and then Christian liturgy. In translation, they contain some of the most memorable lines ever written in English. Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California Berkeley, has published a new translation of the Psalms, The Book of Psalms. Among the most noteworthy absences from his version is the soul. Why Psalms with no soul and no salvation? Robert Alter tells Robert Siegel that those are concepts superimposed on the ancient poems in more recent times. Alter's previous works include the biblical translations Genesis and The Five Books of Moses.

Psalm 88 -- going to the bottom in order to get back up

I've written here before about the possiblity of using great literature to help people (whether they be chaplains or doctors) develop a greater sensitivity to just what it is that hospital patients experience and need. This summer I'm actually putting this into effect myself by leading some literary study sessions with our summer chaplain interns.

Most of our readings will be from 20th and 19th century literature -- like Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. But last week we started with a much older work of literature -- the book of Psalms.

I got the idea that Psalm 88 might be a particularly appropriate psalm to focus on from Paul Steinke, a very interesting trainer of chaplains who works at Bellevue in New York. Rev. Steinke encourages his chaplain students to read psalms to their patients. But, as one of his former students explained to me, he does not encourage them to read any psalm. In fact, he even discourages them from using the most favorite psalm of chaplains everywhere -- Psalm 23 -- at all.

Steinke's reasoning, as I understand it, is that Psalm 23 is too comforting. Comforting words -- as important as they might be -- are relatively easy to find. What is hard to find -- and what it is that the chaplain might be the only one willing to offer -- is someone who will be willing to join the ill person in their most lonely place, the place where their suffering and despair is the greatest. And joining them there -- being willing to try and break their lonliness there -- may be the most healing thing we can do.

Psalm 88 goes to such a dark and despairing place in the most dramatic of ways. In its mere 19 lines, it expresses a wealth of emotions the suffering person might feel, including that God has abandoned them (verse 6):

I am like the dead who have been released [from life]	בַּמֵּתִים, חָפְשִׁי
like the slain lying in the grave	כְּמוֹ חֲלָלִים, שֹׁכְבֵי קֶבֶר
whom You [God] remember no more;	אֲשֶׁר לֹא זְכַרְתָּם עוֹד
And from Your hand they are cut off.	וְהֵמָּה, מִיָּדְךָ נִגְזָרוּ

The psalm also wonderfully expresses the terrible loneliness of an illness, and even the shame that the victim of the illness can feel at his or her condition (verse 9):

You [God] have estranged my friends from me	הִרְחַקְתָּ מְיֻדָּעַי, מִמֶּנִּי
You have made me an abomination to them;	שַׁתַּנִי תוֹעֵבוֹת לָמוֹ
I am imprisoned, and cannot get out	כָּלֻא, וְלֹא אֵצֵא

The line that says you have made me an abomination -- a toeavah -- to them is particularly powerful to me.

What I also love about this psalm is the lines that reflect what I think is one of the central themes of the entire book and that represent the book's favorite way of asking God for mercy. The Psalms' author believes that our purpose is to praise God -- in song and prayer. And, further, the author believes ferverently that God appreciates these songs. In asking for mercy -- and for more life -- the author seeks to remind God that only the living can offer such song (verses 11-14):

Will the dead rise to give thanks to You, Selah?	אִם-רְפָאִים, יָקוּמוּ יוֹדוּךָ סֶּלָה
Will Your lovingkindness be recounted from the grave?	הַיְסֻפַּר בַּקֶּבֶר חַסְדֶּךָ
Your faithfulness amid destruction?	אֱמוּנָתְךָ, בָּאֲבַדּוֹן
Will Your wonders become known in the darkness?	הֲיִוָּדַע בַּחֹשֶׁךְ פִּלְאֶךָ
And Your righteousness in the land of oblivion?	וְצִדְקָתְךָ, בְּאֶרֶץ נְשִׁיָּה
But I, to you HaShem cry out,	וַאֲנִי, אֵלֶיךָ יְהוָה שִׁוַּעְתִּי
and in the morning	וּבַבֹּקֶר
my prayer to you will be the first thing.	תְּפִלָּתִי תְקַדְּמֶךָּ

In those final words I have put in bold, one of our students saw a fundamental hopefulness in this psalm, in that the author -- for all his feelings of despair -- has not give up on God and continues to pray to God.

I am not sure I see that in the psalm myself, but I was very encouraged to see how intensely the student was engaging the text of the psalm to find things within it that supported his own theology. It was clear that our discussion of the psalm struck the students deeply, and individual students several times during the week referred to something from our discussion while they were describing their work with patients. This connection by students of the literary study with their reflection on clinical work is, of course, precisely the goal of bringing literary study into a Clinical Pastoral Education program. So, I was extremely pleased to see this.

I hope we have similar results with our next reading!

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By the way, my notes are a couple of years old now, but what they indicate is the following (lamenting) psalms are the ones Rev. Steinke was encouraging his students to use (the ones in parenthesis are ones considered not quite as useful as the others):

(30), 38, (41), 88, 90, 130


And here, by the way, is psalm 88

• in Hebrew
• in English (King James version)
  

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Letting nurses know that by them we are blessed

Sunday May 6 begins National Nurses Week. One thing that many hospitals -- including ours -- do to honor nurses is to send our chaplains out onto the floors to do a "Blessing of the Hands" ceremony. This can -- as it does for us -- just involve words (saying a prayer/blessing for the nurses). But some hospitals take it a step further and do a ceremony that includes anointing nurses' hands with oil.

Judaism, however, has had no tradition of anointing since the time of the Bible. Therefore, Jewish chaplains can find the demand that they participate in an anointing ceremony to be a troubling crossing of interfaith boundaries. This led, last year, to a very interesting discussion on the National Association of Jewish Chaplains mailing list.

Some Jewish chaplains shared that they would refuse to do any such a ritual as well. Others shared that they had come up with a more Jewish version of such a ritual -- a hand washing ceremony (based on the Levites washing the hands of the Cohanim/Priests, something for which there is substantial support in the Jewish tradition).

This led me to do some thinking about what the nature of blessing is in Judaism. Can we bless things? Can we bless people? Can we bless parts of people's bodies? What are we really saying when we do these things?

The Jewish way of answering such a question is to look to our ancient texts and traditions for guidance. The most prominent example of people blessing other people in our tradition comes from the 6th chapter of the book of B-Midbar (Numbers, verses 24-26). It is the priestly blessing (בירכת כוהנים/birkat kohanim) which God tells Moses to instruct Aharon and the other priests to use to bless the people Israel. It is a blessing that has been anything but buried in the Jewish tradition -- it is featured prominently in the regular prayer liturgy and is part of the traditional blessing parents say to their children:

כד יְבָרֶכְךָ ה', וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ.
כה יָאֵר ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ.
כו יִשָּׂא ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם.
כז וְשָׂמוּ אֶת-שְׁמִי, עַל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל; וַאֲנִי, אֲבָרְכֵם.

May HaShem bless you, and may He keep you.
May HaShem shine His face upon you, and extend grace unto you.
May HaShem lift His face upon you, and may He give you peace.
[In this way, they will put My name upon the people Israel, and I will bless them.]

The last line (the one I put in brackets because it is not part of the blessing proper) makes one thing quite clear -- the actual source of the blessing is not the priests who offer it; the blessing itself comes only from God. The priests are merely requesting that God carry out this blessing for the people.

If we are to take birkat kohanim as our model, then, any blessing of a person should actually be a request to God to bless that person (and his or her works) -- something along the lines of, May God (or we could substitute a nice name for God like 'The True Source of all healing') please bless these hands, so that they may bring true comfort and healing to others. Keep their work in Your sight, Lord, and guide them on their proper path.

I think the original author of the prayer that is now most commonly used in the Blessing of the Hands nurses week ceremonies had a similar sentiment about the nature of blessings. Her name is Diann Neu, and she is a Catholic feminist liturgist and psychotherapist. When I wrote her last year, I shared with her a copy of her original prayer (which was not written with nurses specifically in mind) with her. She pointedly let me know that the text had been changed from her original in one important aspect:

THE ORIGINAL BLESSING OF THE HANDS PRAYER
(not specifically written for nurses)

The text I found

The author's actual original

Blessed be the work of my hands. Blessed be these hands that have touched life. Blessed be these hands that have nurtured creativity. Blessed be these hands that have held pain. Blessed be these hands that have embraced passion. Blessed be these hands that have tended gardens. Blessed be these hands that have closed in anger. Blessed be these hands that have planted new seeds. Blessed be these hands that have cleaned, washed, mopped, scrubbed. Blessed be these hands that are wrinkled and scarred from doing justice. Blessed be these hands that have reached out and have been received. Blessed be these hands that hold the promise of the future. Blessed be the work of my hands.

Blessed be the work of your hands, O Holy One. same same same same same same same same same same same Blessed be the work of your hands, O Holy One.

That is, there is a clear recognition by the author of the original of who the real owner (God) of those healing hands is.

My guess is that people changed the original in an attempt to make the prayer palatable to people who don't believe in God (or in one God). I must admit that, as a chaplain, I feel stuck trying to come up with prayers that are both consistent with my core beliefs and that would be palatable to someone who doesn't have a God belief. (This, by the way, is not a barrier to me ministering to such a patient -- I don't need to pray with or for someone to show them caring.)

But, it is neither of the above prayers that we use in nurses week. The blessing most commonly used is an adaptation of Neu's orginal that a CPE Resident made (in Chicago, I believe):

Nurses' Hands

Blessed be these hands that have touched life.
Blessed be these hands that have felt pain.
Blessed be these hands that have embraced with compassion.
Blessed be these hands that have been clinched with anger or withdrawn in fear.
Blessed be these hands that have drawn blood and administered medicine.
Blessed be these hands that have cleaned beds and disposed of wastes.
Blessed be these hands that have anointed the sick and offered blessings.
Blessed be these hands that grow stiff with age.
Blessed be these hands that have comforted the dying and held the dead.
Blessed be these hands, we hold the future in these hands.
Blessed be our hands for they are the work of Your hands, O Holy One.

Note that the last line of this version includes an acknowledgment of the ultimate source of the hands being blessed. I nonetheless am not entirely comfortable with this text as it does not make any reference to the Creator until the last line.

A modification that I think would bring it closer to the Jewish tradition would be something like this:

Blessed are Your, Lord/HaShem our God the creator of hands that touch life . . . ..

Last year, one Jewish chaplain shared with me prayers he created that he was more comfortable with. I like both of them more, as they answer my core concerns. (Both, by the way, were meant to be used with a handwashing ceremony, which is why the language of "lifting hands" (נטילת ידיים/nitilat yidayim) is used). The first is meant to be specifically Jewish:

Praised are You, Eternal G!d, Sovereign of the universe,
who hallows us through mitzvot, and commands us
to lift our hands.

The second is meant to be more suitable for all:

Praised are You the eternal source of all
who enables us to lift our hands
that we may continue
to do our work
day after day.

In the course of the discussion, one Jewish chaplain suggested the use of Psalm 90:17, another suggestion that I like and I think is firmly rooted in our tradition (especially as we recite it traditionally before performing some mitzvot).

יז וִיהִי, נֹעַם אֲדֹנָי אֱלֹהֵינוּ-- עָלֵינוּ:
וּמַעֲשֵׂה יָדֵינוּ, כּוֹנְנָה עָלֵינוּ; וּמַעֲשֵׂה יָדֵינוּ, כּוֹנְנֵהוּ.

May the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
And the labors of our hands, uphold them for us.
The labors of our hands, uphold them!

[A perhaps nicer translation might be, May the pleasantness of my Lord, our God, be upon us -- may He establish our handiwork for us; our handiwork may He establish.]

In conclusion, I would endeavor to avoid any kind of ceremony that looks anything like anointing; it's just not consistent with the Jewish tradition. Handwashing, to me, looks a lot like anointing, especially if it is a matter of one person washing _another_ person's hands. The only place I know of that in the tradition is the Levites washing the priests. Are we saying that nurses are like priests when we do this? I know there are some other places washing has come into the modern tradition (some people wash a female child's feet at a baby naming ceremony), but that strikes me as a place where a lack of a ritual (that is, an equivalent to the drama and power of circumcision for a boy) was especially glaring (which really is not the case with nurses hands!).

As far as prayers, I could imagine a number of options, including some use of Psalm 90 and/or an adaptation of the two prayers the other Jewish chaplain used.

But I also think I can live with the "Nurse's Hands" adaptation of Neu's prayers. I think the key for me would be to add an impromptu introduction I would give just myself (out loud to the group) before asking everyone to say the written text together. The introduction would make clear: a) that the prayer we are about to say together is addressed to God, and b) that we are saying it to ask for God's blessing to be upon us (and the work of our hands). Then we could recite the text of the Nurse's Hands prayer together.

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By the way, when I wrote Neu last year, here is how she responded to my asking her if she was pleased about the adaptation of her original prayer:

I am pleased to see that my blessing is meeting the needs of the nurses. I see myself as a healer and feel strongly that healers need to be blessed for the work that we do.

And I was fascinated by what she shared about how she came up with the original prayer:

I was teaching a liturgy course and gave my students (Christian and Jewish) the assignment: take a symbol and write a blessing. I do the same assignments that I ask my students to do. So, about one hour before the class convened, I started to do the assigment. I searched for a symbol. Looked at my hands. Wrote the blessing.

The path to success -- Psalm 1

יום שישי א' בטבת תשס''ז

אַשְׁרֵי הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר לֹא הָלַךְ בַּעֲצַת רְשָׁעִים וּבְדֶרֶךְ חַטָּאִים לֹא עָמָד וּבְמוֹשַׁב לֵצִים לֹא יָשָׁב:	1) Happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the evil; And in the path of the sinners he does not stand; And in the seat of the mockers he does not sit.
כִּי אִם בְּתוֹרַת יְהֹוָה חֶפְצוֹ וּבְתוֹרָתוֹ יֶהְגֶּה יוֹמָם וָלָיְלָה:	2) Rather, in the Torah of HaShem is his desire; And in His Torah he occupies his thoughts day and night.
וְהָיָה כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַל פַּלְגֵי מָיִם אֲשֶׁר פִּרְיוֹ יִתֵּן בְּעִתּוֹ וְעָלֵהוּ לֹא יִבּוֹל וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה יַצְלִיחַ:	3) And he will be like a tree planted along streams of water, whose fruit he will give in its time, and whose leaf will not whither; And all that he does will succeed.
לֹא כֵן הָרְשָׁעִים כִּי אִם כַּמֹּץ אְַשֶׁר תִּדְּפֶנּוּ רוּחַ	4) Not so with the evil; Rather, they are like chaff that scatters the wind.
עַל כֵּן לֹא יָקֻמוּ רְשָׁעִים בַּמִּשְׁפָּט וְחַטָּאִים בַּעֲדַת צַדִּיקִים	5) Therefore, the evil will not stand in judgment; Nor the sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
כִּי יוֹדֵעַ יְהֹוָה דֶּרֶךְ צַדִּיקִים וְדֶרֶךְ רְשָׁעִים תֹּאבֵד	6) For HaShem knows the way of the righteous; And the way of the evil will be destroyed.

This very first composition in the Book of Psalms acts as kind of an introduction to the philosophy of what is surely the greatest book of prayer ever composed. Happy will be the person who embraces the Torah, it says. That person will thrive like a well-watered tree, while the evil person who does not follow the Torah's path will amount to nothing.

You might object that the world does not look like this at all, that the evil do in fact prosper and that sometimes the righteous suffer. To a Jewish person, there are few more disturbing things in this regard than the Holocaust. The evil people, for a time, did indeed thrive, and the most righteous -- even the greatest Torah scholars and the most innocent babies -- were murdered beyond counting.

And, yet, for all the evil the murderous Nazis did, no "tree" of theirs stands, today. In the end, they amounted to nothing. They left behind no country at all, not to mention the glorious thousand-year "Third Reich" they dreamed of. Except for a few disturbed individuals on the fringes of society, no one carries on their traditions. They have been scattered to the wind.

Not so, for the righteous. Their "tree" still stands wherever you see a synagogue. Or, at this time of year, wherever you see a Hanukah light. And there is now a nation -- the state of Israel -- for all their people. We Jews, for all our struggles, still give fruit in our time. Our leaf has not withered.

That is not at all to say that the suffering and murder of the righteousness and the innocent is in any way made palatable by the fact that their people as a whole have survived. It is not to say that their pain is something we should cease to care about. This some 149 more psalms that follow this first one occupy themselves time and time again and again with crying out against suffering and pain. They pus their faith deeply in God, but never hesitate to recognize and deplore injustice.

This -- our legacy from this beautiful book -- is the way of the Jews: to abhor injustice and to cry out against it.

But the flip side of that abhoring of injustice is our deep belief _in_ justice. Few peoples of the world are so consumed by it. In our hearts we know it is worthy of pursuing. And that, eventually, the way of the evil will be destroyed. Those are the articles of faith expressed in this first of the Psalms.

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