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The Sabbath and the Psalmist’s Challenge

This tension between two possible worlds is reflected in the nature of the Bible’s description of creation itself.
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December 11, 2024
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When we lean back and thank God for the food we just ate, the last thing we want to do is lie. Yet, at the conclusion of Grace After Meals, the traditional text, citing Psalm 37, instructs us to recite “I have been young, and am now old, but I have never seen a righteous man abandoned or his children seeking bread.” On what planet, one can’t help but ask, might a person saying this with a straight face live? After all, the suffering of the righteous has long been endemic to life on Earth. And evildoers hardly ever seem to get their just desserts. 

The Psalmist, hallelujah, was no naive nitwit. In countless other verses, including in the very same chapter, the speaker acknowledges the sad reality that “I have seen the wicked in great power, spreading himself like a leafy tree in its native soil.” 

Then why the purposeful seeming-delusion about divine justice?

Perhaps, suggests the Bible scholar Jon D. Levenson in his new book “Israel’s Day of Light and Joy: The Origin, Development, and Enduring Meaning of the Jewish Sabbath,” the verse is meant to offer us the opportunity to straddle two states of reality. There is the ideal and the real. The former is the realization of our values, our spiritual and societal aspirations made manifest. The latter is our lived reality. Of course, we have all seen or experienced tragic, inexplicable suffering. But the purposeful aspiration for an ultimate and blissful alternative is the audacious hope we hold on to in our prayers, amidst the tribulations in our own time. 

This tension between two possible worlds is reflected in the nature of the Bible’s description of creation itself. There is Genesis’ description of a world that God saw all He had made and it was “very good” (1:31). In this world, there is order and distinction, flourishing serenity. Yet, lived reality soon offers a lesson in chaos. Forbidden fruit is consumed. Foreign deities are worshiped. A society steeped in violence results in a cleansing flood. Quotidian life with all its injustices and mythical Eden stand, forever more, on non-intersecting tracks. 

This duality is mirrored in what Levenson refers to as “the enchanted world of the Sabbath and the workaday reality of the other six days of the week.” Sunday through Friday constitutes the messy cacophony of toil, disappointment, oppression, accomplishment, injustice, loss and love that is our lives. Shabbat is a taste of an Edenic existence, “a taste of the World to Come,” as one traditional Shabbat song puts it. It is the “palace in time,” to use Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous phrasing, places us in that parallel, peaceful and just mode of being. “It is no surprise,” writes Levenson, “that the day that consummated creation came to serve as a template for the era when all history would, in turn, reach its consummation.”

As the late Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) put it in his own reflection on Shabbat’s spiritual potential, “the Sabbath forces us to pull away our eyes from the digital flow and rejoin the natural world,” perhaps even the perfect, primordial one and future blissful one, in which righteousness reigns and evil is defeated. “The genius of the Sabbath lies in the way it restricts us from certain activities, and, thereby, frees us to experience others, including conversations – big ones with God and less grand ones with family and friends.”

Writing in “To Heal a Fractured World,” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks shared an insight into our verse in Psalms. Perhaps, fittingly, he had originally heard it over the Shabbat table at one such conversation with friends. “I cherished an interpretation Mo Feuerstein offered (he had heard it, I think, from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik) of one of the most difficult lines in the Bible: ‘I was young and now am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging for bread’ (Ps. 37:25). Edmund Blunden, the World War I poet, wrote an ironic commentary on it:

‘I have been young, and now am not too old; And I have seen the righteous forsaken, his health, his honour and his quality taken. This is not what we were formally told.’ The verb ‘seen’ [ra’iti] in this verse, said Feuerstein, is to be understood in the same sense as in the book of Esther: ‘How can I bear to see [ra’iti] disaster fall on my people?’ (Esther 8:6). ‘To see’ here means ‘to stand still and watch’. The verse should thus be translated, ‘I was young and now am old, but I never merely stood still and watched while the righteous was forsaken or his children begged for bread.’”

Our aspiration for a return to God’s, and humanity’s, Edenic state is, then, no passive prayer. Shabbat’s unplugging is, rather, an opportunity to recharge. It presents us with the tiniest taste meant to inspire our bridging of those parallel tracks. Through our actions and our kindnesses, we merit the reality of our violent, vacillating days finally matching our prayed-for Godly and “very good” ones.


Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”

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