Kavanot: Give Thanks Unto the L-rd Redux

The next perek in הלל is תהילים פרק קיז:

I discussed this as the closing section of תהילים פרק קיג.‎ הלל has two sections: the הללויה part and the הודו לה׳ part. We started הלל with הללו עבדי ה׳; הללו את שם ה׳ and end it here with a declaration to the whole world: הללו את ה׳ כל גוים, because כי גבר עלינו חסדו, G-d’s grace is too much for us to praise alone. We need to declare it to the world.

The second part is one of הודאה, thanking ה׳ rather than declaring His praise. There’s a different “vibe” to this section: הלל is about ה׳‎; הודאה is about us.

I previously discussed תהילים פרק קיח in Give Thanks Unto the L-rd, and this will mostly repeat that shiur.

As a practical matter, הודאה, thanksgiving, is personal. It can’t be delegated. That’s why we have a מודים דרבנן:

This idea, that הודאה must be said by everyone, is expressed in ספר תהילים, the “siddur” of the בית המקדש. Therefore a תהילה of הודאה has a refrain that everyone can sing. This was first seen in the epitome of שירה,‎ שירת הים:

Our perek is similar; the refrain is כי לעולם חסדו. That refrain may just be written in the first 4 and last psukim, but I imagine it was actually said after each verse, like אז ישיר. And it is a שירה about military victory, just like אז ישיר, but here it’s not a specific battle. It’s an idealized one. David is creating the archetype for how we rejoice in victory.

The first 4 psukim are introduction: come everyone join me in thanking/acknowleging ה׳. He is addressing the same three groups: ישראל,‎ בית אהרן and יראי ה׳ (which we’ve understood as the righteous non-Jews) that we saw in פרק קטו.

The rest of the perek is structured like an overture—it’s almost exactly the same as Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. It tells the story of a battle, the chaos of war, and the triumphant return of the victors. But instead of being a paean to Russian nationalism, it’s a paean to the true source of victory, הקב״ה.

David calls out מן המצר, from“the straits”; he is constricted with no options, no place to go. ה׳ answers במרחב, with wide-open spaces. Anything is possible even when everything looks impossible.

ה׳ לי בעזרי—David has those who will help him but the only one Who matters, the One that gives him the strength to look at his enemies, is הקב״ה: ‎ טוב לחסות בה׳ מבטח באדם.

What’s interesting is that we don’t know what the problem is yet. David is expressing his faith but we too are מן המצר—our point of view is very restricted. טוב לחסות בה׳, fine, but from what?

If we think of this cinematically, we have been in a close-up of David, who is clearly under stress. Then the camera pulls back: כל גוים סבבוני. He is surrounded by his enemies. He is in the midst of battle. But he is not afraid; ה׳ will save him.

בשם ה׳ is short for ובשם ה׳ אקרא; that is David’s repeated leitmotif from הלל: in all times and places, I call out to ה׳.

I would translate אמילם as Hirsch does: from מול, “opposite”. בשם ה׳ כי אמילם means “with the name of G-d I can face them”. This connects to David’s prayer in the first half of הלל:‎ צרה ויגון אמצא׃ ובשם ה׳ אקרא; אנה ה׳ מלטה נפשי.

Then סבוני כדבורים, like bees, and כאש קוצים. Both express the same image: bees sting and die; brush burns quickly and loudly but burns out.

There’s an interesting poetic technique here. All the psukim so far have had a simple parallel structure; two clauses per verse, 6 to 8 syllables each, which is easy to sing (think of how we sing מן המצר). Then the peak of this section, פסוק יב, has three clauses and everything falls musically apart. The parallelism is lost. The 1812 Overture does the same thing, as the simple musical line devolves into chaos as the French army attacks. It gives us a sense of the chaos of battle. The poem falls apart because everything is falling apart.

When the dust clears, David suddenly is addressing his enemies: דחה דחיתני לנפל. You, my enemies tried to pressure me, but וה׳ עזרני. He’s thumbing his nose at them from the top of the next hill.

Then scene changes to the שירה of the victors in the immediate aftermath of the battle: קול רנה וישועה באהלי צדיקים. They quote directly from the ur-שירה,‎ אז ישיר:‎ עזי וזמרת י־ה; ויהי לי לישועה.

Similarly in Isaiah:

And ימין ה׳ עשה חיל is an echo of אז ישיר as well: ימינך ה׳ נאדרי בכח; ימינך ה׳ תרעץ אויב.

So we’ve seen David go from the midst of battle, to victory, to singing his victory song.

Then David makes it personal: יסר יסרני י־ה; ולמות לא נתנני. My whole life is like that: it is not perfect but things will work out. That is David’s approach throughout תהילים,‎ גם זו לטובה. It’s the message of סבוני כדבורים דעכו כאש קוצים, and the message of the previous perakim: נדרי לה׳ אשלם; נגדה נא לכל עמו׃ יקר בעיני ה׳ המותה לחסידיו and לא המתים יהללו י־ה; ולא כל ירדי דומה׃ ואנחנו נברך י־ה.

He then visualizes himself coming to the בית המקדש to offer his קרבן תודה.‎ פתחו לי שערי צדק, as he says in תהילים כד:

He can’t believe it’s true; he was a nothing shepherd and now is the king of Israel. The gemara sees this as a conversation between David and his family when he is anointed:

David is the one who united all of Israel, with its united capital in Jerusalem. He describing himself entering the בית המקדש, to bring his קרבן תודה.

Then something surprising happens: the tone changes completely: אנא ה׳ הושיעה נא. The grammar also changes; David for the first time is addressing ה׳ directly, rather than the people. I think that this is David breaking the fourth wall. He isn’t really going to enter the שערי צדק. There is no בית המקדש. The one thing he wants more than anything else, he cannot have. So for a brief moment, he cries out in despair. And that introduces an oddity in how we say Hallel: we repeat the last 9 psukim.

But that’s not really right: אנא ה׳ הושיעה נא; אנא ה׳ הצליחה נא is one pasuk and it certainly looks parallel, so we shouldn’t repeat it. And what’s worse, is that not only we repeat the words, we split up the pasuk in order to do that. And that is wrong:

Mordy Goldenberg’s shiur for the Amud-a-week program deals with many of these sorts of issues, but a simple answer is brought by the חתם סופר:

The אתנחתא allows us to split up the pasuk, but doesn’t force us to. The מנהג that has developed in how we say Hallel treats the two halves of the pasuk as separate psukim, and not even parallel to each other.

Another point about אנא ה׳ הושיעה נא; אנא ה׳ הצליחה נא: If you look carefully at the way it is printed in the siddur, there is a difference between הושיעה and הצליחה: There’s a little line next to the חיריק under the ש of הושיעה:

That’s intentional. Most words in Hebrew have the stress on the ultimate, last syllable. משה is mo-SHEH, not MO-sheh. Some words have the stress on the penultimate, second-to-last, syllable: ויאמר is va-YO-mer, not va-yo-MER. Those are the only two choices. The Artscroll (and many other siddurim) assume ultimate stress, called מלרע, and indicate the penultimate stress, מלעיל, with the little line, called a מתג.

So it’s ho-SHI-ah and hatz-li-CHAH. Chazanim who are careful in their pronunciation will make a point of this. The טעמים in the Koren תנ״ך reflect this; there’s a ◌֣ under the יוד in הֽוֹשִׁ֣יעָה and there are two טעמים on הַצְלִ֘יחָ֥ה, and the rule is that the stress is on the second טעם.

However, it looks like the Koren is wrong. The manuscripts of תנ״ך all agree that the טעמים look like:

(One of the wonders of the internet is being able to look at the entire Allepo codex)

So both הושיעה and הצליחה look like they are מלרע. That’s odd, because in every other case in תנ״ך they are both מלעיל, for example:

And the only other example of הצליחה:

But the מנחת שי, a 17th century grammarian, noted the problem:

He seems to be the origin of the way the pasuk is printed now.

Rabbi Mordechai Breuer takes issue with the Minchat Shai (thanks to Phyllis Shapiro for bringing this to my attention):

I’m willing to accept that the Koren תנ״ך is wrong, and that the real טעמים are those of the כתבי יד. But that doesn’t necessarily tell us how the word is stressed (there are lots of טעמים that are written on the end of the word where the accepted stress is elsewhere) and I think the Minchat Shai’s argument from silence is very strong. I am going to continue to say Hallel with הוֹשִׁיעָה מלעיל, הַצְלִיחָה מלרע.

(There’s a technical reason for saying that Rav Breuer may be wrong: there’s a דחיק in נָּא, which implies the previous word is מלעיל. So either we have an error in the כתבי יד, or an exception to the rules of דחיק.‎ ואכמ״ל)

But it makes the question stronger: we seem to be going out of our way to say the two halves differently, implying that they are in fact not parallel.

So we have two almost identical phrases, אנא ה׳ הושיעה נא and אנא ה׳ הצליחה נא that we go out of our way to separate, to pronounce differently, and to imply that they have different meanings. I don’t know why, but I can speculate. The perek as a whole is a dramatization of the act of saying Hallel: victory over our enemies and celebration that acknowledges ה׳'s role and culminates in offering קרבנות in the בית המקדש. But in the middle is our אנא ה׳: David realizes that his פתחו לי שערי צדק is only playacting; he is bringing קרבנות not in the בית המקדש but in the temporary משכן.

And this is our Hallel as well. The Hallel we say today is the Hallel of the redemption that hasn’t happened yet. And the two halves of the pasuk are not only not parallel, they are mutually contradictory.

אנא ה׳ הושיעה נא is asking ה׳ to save us, to come down from heaven and make it all better. אנא ה׳ הצליחה נא is asking ה׳ to allow our own actions to succeed. And these are the two models of גאולה:

The גאולה will come. The question is whether that גאולה will be a הצלחה, the fruit of our own efforts, or a ישועה, when ה׳ finally decides that it’s been long enough.

And then back to David and his song of thanks. He cried out אנא ה׳, taking him (and us, his audience) out of the הלל, but then he recovers. As this virtual parade reaches the בית המקדש, the כהנים call out ברוך הבא בשם ה׳ and he can bring his חג to the מזבח. This corresponds to the previous לך אזבח זבח תודה; ובשם ה׳ אקרא of פרק קטז. There is the קריאה בשם ה׳ of prayer, and the קריאה בשם ה׳ of thanksgiving.

And that is what the entire פרק means: א־לי אתה ואודך. This is a personal song of thanksgiving, and one that all of us join in: הודו לה׳ כי טוב; כי לעולם חסדו.