Kavanot: One Day at a Time

The other two תהילים attributed to Moshe that do not fit into the model of תהילים of the משכן are תהילים פרק צב and תהילים פרק צד. To understand those, I would use an interesting hypothesis of Rav Yaakov Kaminetsky. He is trying to understand what תהילים פרק צב,‎ מזמור שיר ליום השבת has to do with שבת. There is no mention of שבת in the whole perek.

He goes back to the time when Moshe initially tells Pharaoh to “let my people go”. Pharaoh refuses and makes things worse:

What does אל ישעו בדברי שקר mean?

ישעו is from the same root as שעה, meaning to “spend time”. The midrash connects it to שַׁעֲשׁוּעַ, ”pastime“, and specifically to the well-known pasuk:

Rav Kamenetsky speculates on these מגילות. There is a midrash that Moshe, when he was still a young man growing up as an Egyptian prince, invented the weekend:

So Moshe composed this perek for בני ישראל during שעבוד מצרים.

In this reading, מזמור שיר ליום השבת is literally true; it was a song for שבת, their only day of rest. And it doesn’t talk about the halachic שבת since that wasn’t relevant then; it’s all about hope. “Things get better”. The Jews needed that in the depths of their slavery. “To tell of your mercy in the morning”, in bright sunny times, but also “of your faithfulness at night”; even when things are dark and חסד is not visible, ה׳ keeps the faith and will save them.

The question is, what is there to celebrate, שמחתני ה׳ בפעלך? Even if they had one day off a week, the rest of their lives was עבודת פרך, back-breaking work. Moshe tells them they aren’t looking at the big picture:

בני ישראל as slaves were in a state of איש בער, ”brutish man“. They needed to learn to go beyond mere survival to appreciate מה גדלו מעשיך ה׳.‎ שבת helped them do that.

It’s the big question of Jewish philosophy: theodicy, צדיק ורע לו.

He gives the standard answer of ספר תהילים: you need to take a longer view. גם זו לטובה. It will get better. This isn’t really an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people, but it is an approach, a way to deal with the reality of suffering and of continuing to live with not knowing why. That is the essence of Rav Kaminetzky’s argument that this perek is one of the מגילות that בני ישראל had during the dark years of slavery. When those מגילות were taken away (אל ישעו בדברי שקר), the people lost all hope.

The perek says, don’t lose hope. ה׳ is ישר, and לא עולתה בו. The wicked are פרח כמו עשב, bloom and wither, but the righteous are like trees that take a long time to flourish but will live for years.

We have taken that מגילה of צדיק ורע לו, and say it every שבת, because we are in a similar position to those slaves. We see injustice in the world and ask, “Where is G-d?” And the answer is, גם זו לטובה. It will get better, לעתיד לבוא.

There is one other “Moshe Psalm” that deals with צדיק ורע לו, but it is a much more brutal perek. It looks at ה׳ wreaking vengeance on evildoers:

This is a call for vengeance against גאים and רשעים. Later, their sins will be described as עמך ה׳ ידכאו; ונחלתך יענו, implying that these רשעים are not עמך, they are non-Jews. This certainly goes with the model that this perek was one of those that gave hope to בני ישראל during the Egyptian slavery. Only ה׳ can legitimately have גאווה; those who pretend to it, the גאים, will be destroyed:

These גאים talk a good game:

The form התאמר (literally, “to speak of oneself”) appears elsewhere in תנ״ך.

Ramban says it also appears as התעמר:

Presumably, that’s the same word as “emir” as in the “United Arab Emirates”. The פעלי און are acting as emirs over us.

After describing the גאים, Moshe changes his subject:

Even though the רשעים are not Jews, he addresses בערים בעם, you brutes among the people. You are the ones who are calling on the G-d of Vengeance to manifest, א־ל נקמות הופיע, but that’s not how things work. The words are very similar to the previous perek we looked at:

And in fact this perek and מזמור שיר ליום השבת share many expressions. They clearly are meant to be a pair.

There is a subtle shift from the rhetorical questions (the ones the fool does not understand) to a simple statement. Koren translates:

That last phrase, המלמד אדם דעת, is translated as another rhetorical question with the end of the question elided, and that is implied by the ניקוד; a פתח־ה before a letter with a שוא where that letter does not have a דגש is a ה״א השאלה, indicating a question: הַמְלַמֵּד. But it could be read (if there were a דגש in the מ:‎ הַמְּלַמֵּד) as a ה״א הידיעה, a statement of identity. ה׳ is He Who teaches man knowledge. It’s no longer a question but a statement of fact: there is something to learn here.

The line about אשרי הגבר אשר תיסרנו י־ה is very similar to one from איוב:

But here it makes clear why someone who experiences יסורים is אשרי, happy. It is because מתורתך תלמדנו: happy is the one who experiences pain and learns from it, who sees in that pain an aspect of Torah.

The force of אשרי הגבר אשר תיסרנו י־ה; ומתורתך תלמדנו is that יסורים come to teach a lesson, and happy is the one who can see that: “Happy is the one whom ה׳ chastises and learns from Your Torah”. It’s a slightly different approach from the גם זו לטובה above. The lesson of יסורין של אהבה is not that it will be OK in the end, but that these difficult times are actually inherently good. It is the suffering that is beneficial (a trivial example is getting enough exercise).

Moshe is also making another point. The perek starts with a call for vengeance, but that shouldn’t be the goal. We should call on ה׳ to bring משפט that leads to צדק , not נקמה.

Moshe then calls on the people to join him as he faces these מרעים:

So this perek is one of the מגילות that Pharaoh said, אל ישעו בדברי שקר. But these are not דברי שקר; in the end, ה׳ will not let those who pervert justice prevail.

The perek ends with a call that ה׳ make the רשעים pay for their sins, and וברעתם יצמיתם, ”annihilate them through their own wickedness“. It’s a negative way to end a perek (compare the positive להגיד כי ישר ה׳ above). It’s so negative, that when we use this as the psalm for Wednesday:

We add the first psukim of the next perek:

Why say this perek on Wednesday?

But I think there is another reason. If שבת is מעין עולם הבא, then Wednesday is as far from that, and as stuck in עולם הזה, as it is possible to get. Just like בני ישראל needed a reminder of ה׳'s ultimate justice on שבת, they needed some hope and redirection in the middle of the week, when things were at their worst. They were thinking of revenge: א־ל נקמות ה׳; א־ל נקמות הופיע. Moshe taught them to look instead for justice: כי עד צדק ישוב משפט.

It’s a lesson we need in the Wednesdays of our lives as well.