Kavanot: שיר המעלות

We had been looking at שמואל ב פרק כד and תהילים סט, about David’s learning of the future location of the מזבח and the aggadah about his digging the foundations:

Rav Medan connected this aggadah to the original flood, when the world was inundated because (בראשית ו:ב)‎ ויראו בני האלהים את בנות האדם כי טבת הנה; ויקחו להם נשים מכל אשר בחרו. David’s sin with Bat Sheva was an example of that very sin and David midrashically is threatened with the same fate. תהילים סט starts with the image of the psalmist drowning: הושיעני אלקים כי באו מים עד נפש but then switches to the more literal threat: the humiliation that dogs him, even after ה׳ has punished him for his sins and accepted his תשובה. The perek continues: כי עליך נשאתי חרפה; כסתה כלמה פני and כי אתה אשר הכית רדפו; they keep chasing me even after You have punished me.

I said last time that the image of drowning in a flood appears twice in תנ״ך: the מבול in the time of Noah, and קריעת ים סוף. Janet Weinberg pointed out that I was wrong: I had missed the obvious example of Yonah being thrown into the sea. And Yonah’s prayer is very similar to תהילים סט that we studied last time:

This is a very תהילים-sounding prayer, starting with the expression of despair and ending with the certainty that his prayer will be answered. The difference is, first, that the drowning here is literal, not metaphoric. David was drowning in the gossip and slander that was going to bring down his kingdom and his hope for starting the בית המקדש. The other difference is that Yonah lived in a time when there was a בית המקדש. His fear is that אך אוסיף להביט אל היכל קדשך, I will not see it again. And when his prayer is heard, he will bring his קרבן תודה:‎ ואני בקול תודה אזבחה לך אשר נדרתי אשלמה as opposed to David’s ואני תפלתי לך ה׳…אהללה שם אלקים בשיר; ואגדלנו בתודה, ותיטב לה׳ משור פר.

I want to use the aggadah above as the introduction to the next section of ספר תהילים:‎ שיר המעלות.

The fifteen “שירי המעלות” are short (according to Dr. Beni Gesundheit, an average of 6.7 psukim) psalms that start with the same introduction: שיר המעלות, “A Song of Ascents” (one, קכא, starts with שיר למעלות). The question is, what is a “מעלה”, an “Ascent”? The themes of the perakim go back and forth between praying for help in times of trouble (אשא עיני אל ההרים מאין יבא עזרי or ממעמקים קראתיך ה׳) and celebrating the trip to Israel and Jerusalem (שמחתי באמרים לי בית ה׳ נלך or בשוב ה׳ את שיבת ציון היינו כחלמים). You could fit both of those themes in the idea of “going up”.

The JPS translation gives up:

Radak summarizes the possibilities:

The other possibility, related to the מעלות הגלות idea, is that they are the songs of the עולי רגל three times a year. And of course, all of these interpretations are valid. They may have been sung in the בית המקדש, on the steps; they may have been sung as the people went up to Jerusalem; מעלות may be related to the way it was sung; and they may be the songs of the future redemption (תהילים קכו: בשוב ה׳ את שיבת ציון was actually considered for the Zionist anthem before they settled on Hatikvah).

But I want to look at these perakim through the lens we have used before: they were written by David, reflecting his life but in a generalized and poetic way that would apply to all times and places.

We’ve discussed six of these perakim in the past; the ones that are left are קכ,‎ קכג through קכו,‎ קכט through קלא and קלג. Dr. Gesundheit reads them as a literary sequence, going from the גלות to the side of the אהרון הכהן himself, and chronological from the time without a בית המקדש to the construction to the hope for its reconstruction. It’s worth listening to. I, however, won’t go through them in order, but will start with the one that uses the flood metaphor explicitly.

As we’ve said, David was not Yonah. He never fell off a boat into the sea. The המים שטפונו was the בקום עלינו אדם, and in the parallel in תהילים סט was ישיחו בי ישבי שער; ונגינות שותי שכר. I have talked about the connection between the מבול and לשון הרע in my chumash shiur on פרשת בהעלתך תשפ״ב. The antediluvian world was anarchic, lawless, what political philosophers call “the state of nature”, before the hierarchical organization we call “civilization”. Erik Hoel said that what prevented progress was not that life in the state of nature was “nasty, brutish, and short” as Hobbes put it, but that human beings are social primates and we all care about our relative status among our peers. Just like we have a need for food and shelter, we have a need to talk about others, to establish our social rank. We have an inbred need to gossip.

I would argue that the society of דור המבול was the anarchy of “the state of nature”, and it could not improve either. Any dissention was punished by society as a whole. The Gossip Trap meant that even a איש צדיק תמים…בדרתיו would have no influence on his generation.

Note that אנשי השם doesn’t mean the strong; it means the famous. Read it as “the cool kids”.

The response to the מבול was מגדל בבל, where there was no לשון הרע because no one could say anything not approved by the state.

The response to anarchy was fascism. In the language of the aggadah, the floodwaters retreated so far that the world could not survive, and the שירי המעלות drew them back to establish the proper balance of freedom and structure.

So the world of דור המבול was drowning metaphorically in gossip, and ה׳ turned the metaphor real. And that is what David is seeing in the society around him. לולי ה׳ שהיה לנו…אזי עבר על נפשנו המים הזידונים. But our loyalty to ה׳ broke us out of the Gossip Trap.

The שם ה׳ that David writes on the shard in the aggadah is the שם ה׳ that saves Israel here, just as Avraham, who calls out בשם ה׳, introduces to the world the concept of ברית, a system of rules in which the individual is an active participant. ברית is neither anarchy or fascism, but a hierarchy with הקב״ה at the top and all human beings “ are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. That is the expression of משפט וצדקה.

The next perek expresses this idea, and that the only stable society is one with that balance.

In the simile of this perek, ה׳ is like the mountains of Jerusalem. The metaphor is both one of stability: לא ימוט and of establishing boundaries: סביב לעמו. Even the צדיק needs those boundaries; they cannot rely on their own צִדקוּת:

We can have הר ציון לא ימוט or המטים עקלקלותם. Only one leads to שלום על ישראל.

The next perek is the שיר המעלות that we are most familiar with:

Certainly we can associate this perek with שיבת ציון in the time of Ezra, and the second בית המקדש; it has assumed even more importance since the founding of the state of Israel. But we have been reading תהילים through the life of David, and there was a point that he was exiled and was miraculously allowed to return. If we see the previous perakim as alluding to the consequences of his sin with Bat Sheva and Uriah, then the climax of those consequences was the rebellion of Avshalom. David is in fact exiled, on the run on the east side of the Jordan.

You could read this perek in two different ways: is it a prayer for the future שיבת ציון, or thanks for the past? We always read it as about the past; היינו כחלמים, ”we were like dreamers“, but Malbim looks at the future tense in the next psukim, ימלא שחוק פינו and יאמרו בגוים and says the perek is like a prophetic vision.

For Malbim, the hope of שיבת ציון is reason for rejoicing. But for us, it is a reality, so היינו כחלמים. But what is the dream? מצודת דוד says it is the years of exile; only the גאולה is real:

But I would read it like Ibn Ezra, that it is the גאולה that is like a dream. We don’t believe it is possible; it has to be a dream.

If this perek is about a גאולה that happened, why is ימלא and יאמרו in the future tense? The Biblical Hebrew idiom אז with the עתיד has a specific meaning.

אז ימלא שחוק פינו means we thought about laughing, and the nations were going to say how great ה׳ is. But no one really believes it. It’s not until we can convince ourselves that הגדיל ה׳ לעשות עמנו that we will allow ourselves to be happy. There is a difference between שחוק, laughter, and שמחה, happiness.

As we’ve said before, שחוק is the response to things that are incongruous, that don’t fit together. We find humor in puns, pratfalls and the unexpected blessing, and to these we laugh. Sometimes the distance between what we want and what reality presents us with is so great, we say “if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.” שמחה, joy, is different. שמחה is the feeling that things are as they should be, that everything has worked out, the feeling of נחת רוח: ”all’s right with the world“, איזהו עשיר השמח בחלקו.

When things don’t make sense, we laugh. When they do make sense, we are happy.

The second half of the perek starts very similarly to the first:

But the halves are not the same:

And the last two psukim change the subject entirely:

I would read this perek the way Rav Samet does. It describes the process of גאולה, from disbelief to joy to the realization that the hard work has just begun. אפיקים בנגב is an ambiguous metaphor. Wadis can be dry and dead, they can fill with life-giving water, and they can overflow with destructive flash floods. We started this series of שירי המעלות with ה׳ rescuing us from the flood: לולי ה׳…אזי המים שטפונו נחלה עבר על נפשנו and we end with a תפילה of אפיקים בנגב.

This was true of the generation of שיבת ציון in the time of Ezra, and it was true of David as well. Even before he can return to Jerusalem from exile, שבע בן בכרי, the איש בליעל, starts another rebellion that will eventually split the country in two.

The זרעים בדמעה,‎ הלוך ילך ובכה are the same ones who said היינו שמחים. The process of עליה doesn’t end in a moment. But, David reassures us, it will end with בא יבא ברנה נשא אלמתיו.