OT: Between רפואה שלמה and רחמי שמים

My trouble psalm is 46. Unsurprising choice for a girl raised Lutheran. It’s been really useful, except when I’m so scared that I forget the words. As I did on the morning of my doctoral exams. Luckily, all the people who were taking the exams were standing together in the corridor, and the wife of a fellow student of mine was there. So when I muttered, “G-d is our refuge and strength,” and my mind went blank and my eyes went wide, Rosella said, “a very present help in trouble.”

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea.

Do the feelings we have cause us to resort to particular prayers, or do the prayers we say give rise to the sort of feelings we have?

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Pray without ceasing, because we never know what could happen. G-d comes like a thief in the night. Be ready, don’t wait for a crisis to start. Develop a habit of prayer.

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Jews say psalms (tehillim) for the sick.

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Some people I know drink when they’re frightened. Maybe that’s what I’d like to do. Maybe that’s why I have a trouble psalm. Or is it a mantra?

G-d is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble therefore we will not fear though the earth be moved and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea G-d is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble therefore we will not fear though the earth be moved and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea G-d is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble therefore we will not fear though the earth be moved and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea G-d is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble therefore we will not fear though the earth be moved and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea G-d is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble therefore we will not fear though the earth be moved and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea G-d is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble therefore we will not fear though the earth be moved and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea …

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Pray without ceasing. Then, in order to set up a barrier of bitterness between yourself and your tears, play a mental game in which you calculate odds on whether your dad will be sober when you get home today. Afterwards, castigate yourself for the paucity of mercy in your soul and your inability to forgive people for simply following their natures or the universe for following its rules. Blessed are the merciful, a club to which you do not belong.

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The first link in the chain of events that led to the worst moment of my life was forged by a failure of prayer, though it wasn’t the fault of prayer but rather the expectations. Pray and G-d will hear you. Honestly, the thing I am second angriest about, thirty years later, re: the church of my youth was its use of prayer. If I hadn’t been told to pray for things that no reasonable person would have thought were going to happen as if my prayers would change things if only they were good enough, maybe my picture of G-d wouldn’t have been shaken so decisively. If you wonder why I can be such a brutal rationalist at times, this episode is the reason. I’m determined that I’m never going to be disappointed that badly, that universally, again.

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The Jewish trouble psalm choice is often 121. I know this one by heart, too. My problem with it is that “from whence cometh my help?” has always read to me like a desperate rather than a rhetorical question and so my thoughts get distracted because I try to answer it before I get to read the psalmist’s answer in the third line.

(Note to rhetoric students: this text offers the classic example to demonstrate why you should never ask a rhetorical question in an argumentative essay — you don’t want to risk the reader making an attempt to answer the question and coming up with a different answer than the one you’re about to offer.)

121 is supposed to reassure by never discussing fear; I appreciate the reference to fear in 46. The rhetorical appeal to emotion in 121 answers the question only if we already believe the answer, which lies in something we can’t see except by looking to the hills, which are the pathway of help, not the help itself, which I can’t help but point out is never visualized in the text. At least in 46, we can see evidence of divine action. But even upon a more sober reading, the acknowledgement of fear in 46 touches upon something we can already see all around us: destruction.

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Rhetoric and poetics are so interesting because they touch upon the problem of how we convince others. When my perception so consistently fails to tell me anything reliable, how do I ever believe anything?

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Fear or hope. No one can see hope — a tautology. If you can see it, you don’t need to hope. In contrast, everyone can see destruction. Change and decay in all around I see.

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I’m no Talmudist. The Mishnah for Tractate Berakhot says that we are prohibited to pray in vain, so that one may not (for example) pray to have a son upon hearing that one is pregnant, since the sex of the fetus is already determined. This principle is extended by most traditional Talmudists to say that we may not pray for a revealed miracle. To give a practical example, one might pray for divine assistance before a test, but not, “please G-d help me have passed the test” once the test is complete and we can do nothing but await the results.

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Still we say tehillim for the sick. When we say them we pray for רפואה שלמה (complete healing) for those who may be healed, and רחמי שמים (divine mercy) for those who may not.

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Unfortunately, humans are in a poor position, cognitively, to make this judgment.

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Every tear prays for you.

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~ by Servetus on June 28, 2012.