I want to end today’s newsletter where it began: looking back to this time on the calendar last year. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik recalls an article he submitted for publication on October 6, 2023, about the enduring power of the book of Psalms, and reflects on the essential role these timeless prayers have played in Jewish religious life over the past year:
I found myself, on the morning of October 7, with only fragments of information, instructing my congregation to engage in a liturgical activity I could not really recall doing before on a festival day: reciting psalms of distress. Saying such psalms on Shabbat and the holidays as a form of beseeching [God] is permitted in Jewish law only in times of great crisis; and I could certainly not have predicted that such psalms, rather than joyous ones, would become our weekly fare. . . .
[On] April 14, 2024, when Iran launched its first missile attack on Israel at 2 a.m. local time, there was one term that bleary-eyed Israelis seem to have googled again and again. The most popular search during the Iranian missile attack on Israel, the Jerusalem Post informed us, was “T’hillim, the book of Psalms.” In a striking joining of ancient and modern, citizens sought Scripture on their iPhones, in order to commune with God in the words that David wrote when he faced his enemies in the very same land.
We must ponder how astonishing this is. One would wager that few, waking up after midnight in Rome or Athens in a moment of crisis in modern times, would turn to the original words of Virgil or Pericles. And no one in Iraq is seeking solace in the words of the Code of Hammurabi. But here Jews were reading words written in their land thousands of years ago, in the very same language.
More about: Gaza War 2023, Hebrew Bible, Israeli society, Psalms