What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful’.
-Kierkegaard
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.
-The Beatles
All the greatest artists reclaimed and embraced their darkness. The most famous poets, musicians, painters, and authors were all broken people. For true art is an authentic, yet blissful, expression of the human condition. And inner conflict is an essential element of the human condition. There can be no poet without pain because there can be no thinking, deep person without pain, confusion, and inner conflict. A poet/artist is simply a person who knows the secret of sweetening instead of repressing the bitterness of life. When singing from the place of darkness, especially songs sharing the darkness itself, deepest art and expression flows. That is truly respecting, cherishing, and transforming darkness into beauty.
Torah tells us of all the stories of the conflicts and (apparent) “failings” of even our most righteous heroes —not because it wants to show that even holy people could fail or fall, but because God embraces humanity. He wants to dwell in the “seething cauldron” of our humanity. Only dealing properly with our darkness and griminess can allow us to sing the most beautiful music to God.
We, too, need to sing to God from and with our darkness. “Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” We need to learn to fly with the broken wings themselves. Indeed, the broken tablets were also in the Holy of Holies, not just the whole, second tablets.
Judaism is not a panacea that will solve all problems and take away all pain. Some people think, and there are those that, generally unintentionally, give off the impression that being religious means to be made out of plastic. Espousing “the plasticity of being frum” they think that being holy means being robotic and perfect, clean-cut, tie always in place, never failing. This is a shame because people start to venerate that type of shallowness, thinking that the path to God is without cracks, bumps, ditches, and annoying potholes. Upon realizing that an attempt to live life traveling upon a completely smooth road is illusory and unsustainable, people sadly give up hope of ever being able to be profoundly connected to God. They think they must not be traveling the right direction because life is just so full of twists and turns, many of them within our own hearts and bodies. Missing the opportunity to bring God into the deepest and most real parts of what it means to be human, our most raw and vulnerable parts are sent into exile.
Many assume that holiness means negating our humanity, when indeed allowing God to touch and be with us in our humanity is the ultimate holiness. Of course we need to sanctify ourselves to the best of our ability, but the process of sanctification, along with the setbacks and inevitable downfalls that are part of that process, is a tumultuous ride which God wants to join and carry. He knows that the arduous road has sudden sharp turns and even descending hills. He created that road. He intended that we should sing to him all along the way.
Being a “Ben/Bas Torah” does not mean that one does not have impurity and griminess inside. Those that attempt to market it as such are not only cheating the people that they are attempting to help, but are also corrupting the truth of what Torah is all about. Coming to God with our pain is the ultimate worship. Talking to God about our temptations, our frustrations, our desires, our sins, our anger, and all our inner negativity is the most intimate type of prayer. Sharing the things about ourselves about which we are most ashamed is the very definition of a true lover of God.
For us, it is the only way to have a really deep relationship with God. Just as we know that our best friends are the ones we could trust with our darkest secrets, God can only in that same way become our ultimate friend.
But also for God, it is even more important. Firstly, as a א-ל מלא רחמים, God full with mercy, He is like an overflowing cup of mercy that spills over when even gently touched. Our sad songs of pain and failure, sweet songs of success and joy, haunting songs of yearning and fortitude, and hopeful songs of regret and requesting forgiveness become the receiving vessels upon which the life-giving and resurrecting dew of God‘s Infinite Mercy can drip and flow.
Yet deeper: the entire purpose of creation is that God wants to dwell in the lowest world. The lowest world does not just mean physical objects. It does not even just mean physical acts. It means in our humanity. He wants to dwell within what it means to be human. And being human means having conflict and pain and failure.
But what is the secret? How can we indeed sing from that place of brokenness and longing, of conflict, frustration and pain? In this chapter, King David, who was the “sweet singer of Israel” because he knew about difficulties and grime, teaches us.
2 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants longingly for You, O God. 3 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; when will I come and appear before God?
Seemingly, how could one thirst for God if God is everywhere? “When will I come and appear before God?” Don’t we do that three times a day when we stand before him in prayer, and indeed live all of life in God‘s presence?
Obviously the thirst is for the experience of God, to be aware and conscious of being part of Him. We are thirsty for Him because we do not feel Him. Although we are always within Him, our whole being is His Light, we are generally oblivious of this cosmic truth of reality. This blindness manifests in the frustration we often have when unable to connect while praying, but even more intensely does this lack of our conscious feeling of God manifest by the fact that we could sin. Sinning and falling into darkness, into impurity, can only happen because we are so thirsty for God.
All Jews’ souls when not completely and consciously absorbed within Ohr Ein Sof, the Infinite Light of God, thirst for His Face, פְּנֵ֣י אֱלֹקים, meaning His Essence. Sensitive and courageous souls feel that thirst always, becoming sick with love, fulfilling what the Rambam writes:
“What is the proper [degree] of love? That a person should love God with a very great and exceeding love until his soul is bound up in the love of God. Thus, he will always be obsessed with this love as if he is a lovesick person, whose thoughts are never diverted from the love of that woman. He is always obsessed with her; when he sits down, when he gets up, when he eats and drinks. With an even greater [love], the love for God should be [implanted] in the hearts of those who love Him and are obsessed with Him at all times as we are commanded [Deuteronomy 6:5: “Love God…] with all your heart and with all soul.”
This concept was implied by Solomon [Song of Songs 2:5] when he stated, as a metaphor: “I am lovesick.” [Indeed,] the totality of the Song of Songs is a parable describing [this love].”
Most of us, however, would not be able to live with that intense obsession. Like all psychological defense mechanisms, the thirst is so profound that we become numb to it, and sometimes we are not even aware that we are thirsty. (See Tanya Chapter 19) Or rather, as is more often the case, we fail to recognize how that thirst is manifesting.
4 My tears were my bread day and night when they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
We have romanticized visions of what God-thirst looks like and what passion for God feels like. We picture holy people rolling around on the floor, crying and simultaneously delighting in some kind of metaphysical, mystical rapture. Yet thirsting for the Divine can take myriads of forms. (See Likkutei Moharan 1:31) Desperately seeking inspiration wherever we could find it and repeatedly regretting sins instead of apathetically not caring about doing them both equally are signs -and even more, are garments – of an incredibly deep desire for God. We don’t realize that the frustration and yuckiness that we feel so often is the thirst.
Hence, instead of thinking something is wrong with us, we need to eat, not despise, our tears. As bread sustains the body and gives it the strength to live, if we would but only understand that the constant stream of tests we go through -and often fail- are really gifts from our Beloved to make our hearts grow fonder and our desire for Him stronger, we would become strengthened and enlivened by our tears instead of dejected and depressed. The path to the heavens is paved with all our attempts, successful and otherwise, to be good Jews. It must be traveled with the joy and the strength and the vitality that comes from internalizing -eating- that God is manifesting through us from the very first step upon it. My tears were my bread day and night. “Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.”
The nations wonder (and sometimes voices inside of us do as well…) why we would bother continuing to seek God after centuries of His hiding in all the bitter persecutions we suffered and after months- or even years -of our hiding in sin, in an inability to be consistent in our devotion to God. They say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
Always seeking a community of like-minded people to help us grow (but usually hitting only the stark truth of innate human individuality and even loneliness), we forever try to rely on specific circumstances and environments to connect us with God. The fusion of many wicks into a torch facilitates a soaring flame much higher than the sum total of what each flame would be individually. (This is the secret of why communal prayer is encouraged.) Peak experiences of spiritual highs, usually with large groups, can leave us unsatisfied with a simple mincha that we pray privately in our own homes. The same psychological illusion that makes grass greener on the other side of the fence causes God to be regarded as more accessible in a holier place and time, surrounded by righteous people. The Kotel and Elul and Shabbatons and tisches can all be hindrances to an authentic personal, individual connection with God, replete with darkness as much as light, if kept in comparative memory unwisely.
5 These things I will remember, and I will pour out my soul upon me, how I passed on with the throng; I walked slowly with them until the house of God with a joyful shouting and thanksgiving, a celebrating multitude.
Bliss and euphoria achieved through the energy of a crowd is wonderful, but should never be the comparative measuring apparatus used when evaluating the cataclysmic energy of a lone individual trying so hard to be in a relationship with God.
6 Why are you downcast, my soul, and why do you stir within me? Hope to God, for I will yet thank Him for the salvations of His presence.
For indeed, each mincha and each mitzvah and each line of Torah learned is saturated with Godliness, with His presence. It hurts that we don’t feel it, but the purpose of serving God is not to feel. It is to objectively become unified with Him -and we are, each time we take another holy step on our path. (See Tanya Chapters 23 and 46) I can optimistically tell my soul not to be downcast because I am sure that I will thank Him for the salvation of His presence, not in the distant future, but at any moment I make the slightest step towards Truth.
7 My God, my soul is downcast upon me; therefore, I will remember You from the land of Jordan and the peaks of Hermon, from the young mountain.
Fulfilling our destiny and our mission to sing under and because of all circumstances necessitates entering many existential and geographical distances and having a vast array of experiences. It is not an accident that we are exposed to all the temptations that the world has to offer, especially in our generation. There cannot be a Holy of Holies without broken tablets; there cannot be a Messianic revelation (which is when the whole world will be like the Holy of Holies) without God being actively brought into brokenness. Distances are part of the ultimate plan. Knowing that God’s Infinite Light shines through them all, always, regardless of which “level” we are on, land, peaks or mountains, becomes a remembering that heals a downcast soul.
8 Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; all your surging tides and waves passed over me.
The history of the grime that lurks inside of us is very long. (“All your life/You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”) It dates back to the second day of creation. On the first day of creation, God created the revelation of His light. Already on the second day, as soon as His Light “hardened” into water/created reality, there was a split. There was a separating of upper waters from lower waters, of spirituality from physicality, of blissful experiences from challenges to being religious, of ecstatic spiritual dancing from keeping dry Halacha, of excitement over Judaism from the sometimes burden of devotion to it over seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The split happened on the second day, meaning after His Light manifested as created reality\water. All of the water is still Godliness, still essentially His Light, but the lower waters is God’s Light (enclothed in vessels, garments, and shells) manifesting as darkness. This apparent duality results as the seemingly binary world we live in and, eventually, as those times in life when we get stuck in the realm of the lower waters. This causes the thirst for God.
One might sense the irony of a person dwelling in (Divine) waters, albeit the lower type, thirsting. The Ba’al Shem Tov and all his students pointed this irony out throughout their teachings. (See Likkutei Moharan 2:12) At the same time, however, they taught that only by reaching for and drinking from the upper waters can we then realize that the lower waters we have been living in all the time are just as Divine. (This is the deeper meaning of the prohibition to eat or work each morning before praying.)
The hardest part of dwelling in the realm of the lower waters is this need to constantly be jumping to reach the upper waters. Jumping while in water, the incessant striving towards spirituality and God-consciousness, causes waves. Dealing with these metaphorical waves is another way of thirsting for God. Constant, roaring and often high, they take the form of all the obstacles we deal with when trying to keep Torah fully.
Tension is always the result of being pulled into opposite directions or wanting things to be different than they are. Self-loathing builds each time we fail to live up to what we expect of ourselves. Anxiety overtakes us when we feel that we may not jump high enough to the upper waters and quickly enough away from the drowning parts of the lower waters. Sadness tries to creep over our heart each time we fall again into sin. These waves and many more like them crash over us, throwing us off balance, threatening to wash away our hopes of being servants of God. All Your surging tides and waves passed over me.
How can we maintain our positivity, not give up hope, and indeed flourish when so tempest-tossed by the vicissitudes of the waves of life? How can we sing “lovely music” from the lower waters, the darkness? How can we make our “lips…so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music”?
King David responds: Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls. Plunge deeper to see into the form the waves have taken to feel what they are essentially. Or as the Gemara puts it –
“I was once traveling on a ship,” recounted Rabban Gamliel, “when I saw another ship that had been wrecked. My heart grieved especially for one of its passengers, the great sage Rabbi Akiva. When I reached land and resumed my studies I suddenly saw him sitting before me and discussing spiritual matters with me.
“I said to him, “My son, who pulled you up?”
Rabbi Akiva replied: “A plank [daf דף] from the ship came my way and I clung to it. When each wave came surging towards me I bowed my head and let it pass over me.”
–Talmud, Yevamos 121
And we feel pulsating through these words shining advice for all of us.
All too often we get thrown out of the ship of Torah (“She is like the merchants’ ships”; הָיְתָה כָּאֳנִיּוֹת סוֹחֵר Proverbs 31:24) by various circumstances. Sometimes the religious persona we created crashes into a shipwreck. We hang on for dear life to a plank, a page of Torah to keep us from drowning.
The waves keep crashing over our heads, though. Fighting them is useless. Sing from them. When each wave came surging towards me I bowed my head and let it pass over me. Bow your head into it; feel that it, too, is God’s Light, manifesting as lower waters. Go deep into yourself and don’t just deal with all these troubles at a conscious, empirical level. Meditate in the depths of who you are about Who the depths of these waves is. Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; all your surging tides and waves passed over me.
9 By day, may the Lord command His kindness, and at night, may His resting place/song (שירה – sheero) be with me, a prayer to the God of my life.
God wants to manifest as lower waters and not just reveal His Light as wonderfully holy ethereal realms, because He wants to dwell fully in our humanity. And human life is never a straight, plastic road.
It consists of days when we can openly revel in God‘s kindness. These are the inspired, upper waters parts of life. There are also many, many nights. Those who can learn King David’s secret and sing to God from them, bow our heads as the waves pass over us into their essential being, become the resting place of God. וּ֖בַלַּיְלָה שִׁירֹ֣ה עִמִּ֑י. Rashi says that שִׁירֹ֣ה means both His song and His resting place. Those that can sing from their darkness become God’s resting place. And if you know that secret, you can be liberated from the pain of any circumstance. “You were only waiting for this moment to be free.” At night, His song is with me. Only in that way is He truly with me. Only then can I truly feel that He is the God of my life, in all its versatile roads.
10 I will say to God, my Rock, “Why have You forgotten me? Why should I walk in gloom under the oppression of the enemy?”
11 With murder in my bones, my oppressors have reproached me by saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
Rashi-“It seemed to me as though they were killing me, so confined within my bones was that with which my oppressors provoke and reproach me.”
It is overwhelming at times, however. It might be easy to understand theoretically that the purpose of creation is to allow God into our darkness, to feel His presence shining within the surging waves. Living with this belief when caught up in the storm of myriads of challenges coming at us from every direction, threatening to wash away any feeling of Godliness that we achieved, feels utterly impossible at times. God might be my Rock upon which I should be able to feel secure and safe, even in the middle of the ocean, but often in life the extreme thirst doesn’t allow us to feel what we believe to be true. Our inability to truly experience God consciousness within the lower waters causes them to transfer into the oppression of the enemy. All the voices- inside my head and outside it- scream at me to abandon the thirst and the storm altogether, and live a peaceful life, undisturbed by seeking God. The supreme challenge of finding God in darkness causes us to give up finding him even in goodness and kindness, during the day. Saying to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
The temptations of this world are so much more accessible and visceral, even often more pleasurable, than things holy. We feel the pull to just give up in the deepest parts of our bodies, in the very bones and kishkes of who we are. “It seemed to me as though they were killing me, so confined within my bones was that with which my oppressors provoke and reproach me.”
Knowing God‘s Omnipresence cannot, therefore, totally save us. Belief in our heads and even joy in our hearts is still not yet enough of a solid grounding to get us through the difficult feelings and failings.
We need to be hanging onto that plank. The response to this thirsting must be to learn Torah. (See Tanya, end of chapter 40) For thousands of years Jews have held tightly on to God in the worst storms known to man because we objectively had God solidly in us through the study of Torah. Like Rabbi Akiva, we know that even those times we don’t yet feel back in a boat, if we strengthen our resolve to make sure to study Torah often enough, it will just be a matter of time that we will make it to land, to upper waters, to sing songs of salvation.
12 Why are you downcast, my soul, and why do you stir within me? Hope to God, for I will yet thank Him for the salvations of my countenance and my God.
And now, after understanding all of this, we could now return to the very first passuk in this chapter and see who introduced this reassuring and beautiful chikkuk, encouragement. It’s of course not incidental that this chapter was written by
לִבְנֵי־קֹֽרַח: the sons of Korach.
The words of Rashi here are astounding. These were three sons that, when the rebellion began, took their father’s side and were swallowed up by the ground like the rest of Korach’s mutinous band. Thoughts of repentance were already welling up inside their hearts during the actual disputation with Moshe; therefore, some kind of ledge or elevated area was set apart for them in Gehenom and they did not descend completely into the pit of hell. Rashi had already brought this midrashic anecdote in Parshas Pinchas 26:11, explaining the passuk “And the sons of Korach did not die.” But here, in his commentary on Tehillim explaining the opening of our chapter, after repeating how they survived in the depths of the mud and earth, hovering somehow near the roof of the place of torment and suffering, he continues:
“ושם אמרו שירה, ושם יסדו המזמורים הללו, ועלו משם ושרתה עליהם רוח הקודש ונתנבאו על הגלויות ועל חרבן הבית ועל מלכות בית דוד”
“There they sang, there they founded these chapters, they ascended from there and the spirit of holiness came upon them and they had prophesies of the exiles, the destruction of the temple, and the Davidic dynasty.“
“There they sang”! They were the first ones to sing from the mud in the depths of the earth.
Lest we think that this episode, their human failure and mistaken judgment brought them only impurity, Rashi assures us that “they ascended from there and the spirit of holiness came upon them.” “You were only waiting for this moment to arise.”
Upon ascending, “they had prophesies of the exiles”, they saw us. And taught us how to sing at night.