Kavanot: This Time It’s Personal

We have been looking at Hallel, and we are up to פרק קטז,‎ אהבתי כי ישמע. It is different from the previous perakim, because it is in first person. This is a personal prayer. In terms of the way we have been analyzing Hallel, the previous perakim were “הלל מצרים”, the ancient Hallel that came out of the Israelite experience in Egypt. Hallel naturally would go straight from (תהילים קטו:יח)‎ ואנחנו נברך י־ה מעתה ועד עולם; הללויה to (תהילים קיז:א )‎ הללו את ה׳ כל גוים; שבחוהו כל האמים׃. That’s what Hallel is all about: praising G-d to the entire world.

But here David (as the psalmist) is inserting his own words. And it’s not about praising ה׳, literal הלל, per se, but about bringing sacrifices:

He mentions זבח תודה and נדר, which are two kinds of voluntary offerings, the sacrifice that is entirely to הקב״ה, and the communal feast that brings people together:

What is this perek doing in Hallel, if it’s not about הלל, but about קרבנות? I think the key is the phrase right between the זבח תודה and the נדר:‎ ובשם ה׳ אקרא. That phrase occurs three times in the perek, making a sort of refrain:

The image of this perek is that David is offering his קרבנות at the מזבח, and retelling his story, of being in trouble and praying for salvation: צרה ויגון אמצא ובשם ה׳ אקרא; of being saved and thanking ה׳:‎ כוס ישועות אשא ובשם ה׳ אקרא; and of bringing קרבנות to ה׳:‎ לך אזבח זבח תודה ובשם ה׳ אקרא.

There is a very specific meaning to the expression קרא בשם ה׳.

In fact, the אבות built seven מזבחות. But we only have a record of offerings on two: הר המוריה (after the עקדה) and באר שבע (when Yaakov is going down to Egypt). The point of a מזבח is not the burning animal; it is the public declaration of service to הקב״ה. So I think that David inserts this personal prayer into הלל to remind his audience (who are in the משכן/מקדש) that the important part of the עבודה is not the קרבן, it is the שירה, the expression of the intent of the קרבנות.

With that, let’s look at this perek.

I would read קולי תחנוני as a hendiadys, “the sound of my supplication”. But אהבתי is hard to translate. If we translate it as “I love it because ה׳ listens to me” then, as Rabbi Etshalom says, “the religious message is troubling. Does the petitioner only love G-d when He responds?” That;s the interpretation of Rashi and Radak:

Malbim says the opposite, that קולי תחנוני is when I am not in trouble; I still pray to ה׳ (as Rambam holds, there is an obligation to pray everyday, even if things are great).

That’s a good thought, and one of the themes of Rav Soloveitchik’s Worship of the Heart, but it doesn’t fit the perek, which is all about צרה ויגון אמצא.

The gemara switches the subject, reading אהבתי as “I am loved”:

But Rabbi Etshalom says we are mis-translating אהבתי: it doesn’t mean “I loved” but “I brought”:

David’s description of the threat to his life is very poetic:

Rashi translates חבלי as “gangs” and מצרי as “boundaries”, which loses some of the parallism:

So Radak translates those words as “ropes” and “bindings”:

which goes with the אפפוני, ”surrounded, enveloped me“.

Radak then notes that the troubles go from מצאוני, ”they found me“ to אמצא, ”I found them“.

David is saying, “I can’t avoid trouble”; the more I try to stay safe, the more danger I get into. It’s the nature of the world we live in. There is no such thing as being in perfect peace as long as we are alive. And our response is always:

Starting the pasuk with a conjunction, ו־בשם, is odd, but as we said before, the בשם ה׳ אקרא represents the “chorus” of the perek. A ו can represent an ongoing action:

And that goes back to what we’ve said is the idea of הלל.‎ שירה is telling G-d how great He is; הלל is telling everyone else how great He is. ובשם ה׳ אקרא means “I will declare G-d’s greatness, over and over again”.

The next part of the perek is about ה׳'s response:

This idea, of שמר פתאים ה׳, is one of the most important psukim in the perek. The word פתאים is usually translated as “fools” but פתי specifically refers being enticed or seduced:

פתאים are those who follow the crowd, who don’t think for themselves. It has important halachic implications. The Torah tells us we need to be careful about our health and safety:

While the פשט of שמר נפשך מאד is religious, the gemara understands that it refers to physical life, נפש, as well.

However, there are limits to how careful you have to be.

The bottom line is that we don’t have to, indeed we can’t worry about every possible risk. At some level, we can rely on ה׳'s protection: שומר פתאים ה׳.

We have to be careful and not put ourselves in danger, but with our finite knowledge we can’t know the actual risks involved in the things we do. We judge risk not by precise calculation, but by seeing what others do. The measure of whether some action is safe (i.e. carries an acceptable risk) is כיוון דדשו בה רבים: what does everyone do. We are all פתאים, following the crowd. That’s the nature of being human.

And David reassures his audience, שומר פתאים ה׳ and חנון ה׳ וצדיק. But we still need to try; שמר נפשך is still the rule, and ignorance is no excuse:

I am expected to learn and obey the רצון ה׳, but I still can’t avoid trouble. I am human and my intuitions are formed by the things I observe; I remain one of the פתאים. I do “normal” things because “normal things” are the things that I and my society do. I am poor, דלתי, spiritually and intellectually. I keep making decisions that land me in hot water, but still לי יהושיע. This alludes back to the introduction to Hallel; ה׳ is המגביהי לשבת yet המשפילי לראות.

David now addresses his own נפש, the “life force”: “you, O נפש, don’t have to worry; ה׳ will save you”. And having been saved, he needs to publicly acknowlege הקב״ה:

The contrast here is to the last perek, לא המתים יהללו י־ה, which we interpreted as a reference to פה להם ולא ידברו…כמוהם יהיו עשיהם. Placing ones trust in anyone or anything but ה׳ is to be forced into silence. But I, says David, was one of ישראל, בטח בה׳.

When I was suffering from being a פתי, following the crowd, I said that כל האדם כזב. It means both “all people are false” and “all of [my] human existence is false”. That may be technically true; only ה׳ knows the absolute Truth: as we say in the next perek, אמת ה׳ לעולם. But that’s not a reason to lose faith: האמנתי כי אדבר.

We skip to this part when we say “half-Hallel”, presumably because it’s more negative, אפפוני חבלי מות ומצרי שאול מצאוני. We now return to the theme of Hallel, proclaiming ה׳'s greatness in public.

There are three parts to the psalmist’s מה אשיב לה׳:‎ כוס אשא,‎ בשם ה׳ אקרא and נדרי אשלם. All of them are public (נא means “now”; he is declaring that he is now, as he is leading Hallel, paying his debt to ה׳).

בשם ה׳ אקרא is what we have been talking about. נדרי לה׳ אשלם is the קרבנות, the sacrifice that demonstrates dedication to ה׳, that brings us closer (קרב) to Him.

כוס ישועות אשא is the idea of a כוס של ברכה that we offer on כל תגמולוהי עלי—‎ ה׳'s גמילות חסדים to us.

אין לנו עשק בנסתרים, but the message is that כוס ישועות אשא is a reflection of כנסת ישראל: celebrating על הכוס requires community. Drinking alone is a bad thing for psychological and medical reasons, but in its connection to כוס ישועות, as part of Hallel, it is meaningless as well. It has to be נגדה נא לכל עמו. It is true that there are some examples of כוס של ברכה that we do even alone (קדוש and הבדלה), but they are missing something.

It’s interesting that the כוס של ברכה, praising ה׳ with a cup of wine, is not a מצווה דאורייתא:

And the gemara says אין אומרים שירה אלא על היין:

But that really only means that the שירה of the לווים was sung when they did the wine libation part of the sacrifices:

But we as a community have taken that idea of הַמְשַׂמֵּחַ אֱלֹקִים וַאֲנָשִׁים, to mean that whenever we celebrate, we need to bring in ה׳ and other people with our כוס של ברכה. The פוסקים point out that we have the מנהג of having wine at every Jewish celebration:

כוס ישועות אשא represents not the will of ה׳, not the will of חז״ל, but the “folk religion” of the Jewish people, the collective כנסת ישראל. That is just as much a part of true הלל as נדרי לה׳ אשלם.

David continues:

This is the hardest pasuk in הלל to translate. The use of יקר for the death of צדיקים occurs elsewhere in תהילים:

It’s been variously translated as “precious”, which doesn’t make sense, or “grievous”, which isn’t consistent with the usual meaning of יקר. I like the JPS translation from תהילים מט:

There is the underlying meaning of the קרבנות. We owe everything to ה׳, including our very lives. But ה׳ doesn’t want us to sacrifice our lives for Him. Sometimes קידוש השם makes it necessary, but really ה׳ wants us to live in his service, not die in it.

Then David adds another prayer:

Before, we had אנה ה׳, מלטה נפשי, which makes sense as a plea. But what does אנה mean here? The psalmist is thanking ה׳ for past salvation, not asking for the future. The parallel in the chiastic structure of this pasuk is פתחת למוסרי, but that’s not a prayer; it is also about the past. Radak says that אנה could be an expression of thanks:

But we don’t see that anywhere else. The Alshich says that this is an aposiopesis; there is an implied request in the middle:

In other words, You have saved me for a purpose, פתחת למוסרי so that I can be one of חסידיו, and then I can fulfill by נדרים,‎ לך אזבח זבח תודה. And there is a hint that the request is for the building of the בית המקדש. Once once in ספר שמואל does ה׳ calls David עבדי:

The אנה ה׳ is a cri du coeur from David. He is offering his נדרים and שלמי תודה, but it’s incomplete. Without the בית המקדש, all his Hallel is inadequate. We will see a similar אנה ה׳ in תהילים קיח:כה‎: אנא ה׳, הושיעה נא.

The Midrash takes אני עבדך בן אמתך as a specific reference to David:

The gemara takes this connection as something that David had to overcome:

But I think there is a positive side to what David is saying. Rav Noach Orloweck spoke at the St. Louis Kollel on November 4, 2021 about “Balancing my spiritual growth with that of my child” (I am looking at my notes, so I have probably missed much of what he was trying to say). He connected מוֹסֵרָי to מסורה, the chain of tradition. I am עבדך because I am בן אמתך;‎ פתחת למוסרי means “You allowed my מסורה to develop”. I would add that David’s love of עבודת ה׳ comes from Ruth’s love of עבודת ה׳.

And the end of the perek recapitulates David’s goal:

נדרי לה׳ אשלם; נגדה נא לכל עמו is a duplicate of פסוק יד, setting up a chiasm where the parallel to כוס ישועות אשא; ובשם ה׳ אקרא is בחצרות בית ה׳ בתוככי ירושלם. That is David’s prayer, אנה ה׳, that his Hallel be offered not just publicly, but in the בית ה׳ in ירושלם.

The structure of the second half of the perek, David’s prayer, is thus:

And so the perek centers on David’s אנה ה׳, his cry even as he is celebrating his salvation, with David’s unspoken prayer. He may be bringing קרבנות on the מזבח, but it still isn’t enough if it is not in the בית המקדש,‎ בתוככי ירושלם.