Psalm 1 – The Opening to Psalms

TEXT

1. Happy is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor stood along the path of sinners, nor sat in the company of the insolent;

2. rather, the teaching of the LORD is his delight, and he meditates on that teaching day and night.

3. He is like a tree planted beside streams of water, that bears its fruit in its season, whose foliage never withers, and whatever 1-it produces thrives.-1

4. Not so the wicked, who are like chaff that wind drives away.

5. Therefore the wicked will not survive judgment, nor will sinners, in the congregation of the righteous.

6. For the LORD embraces the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is doomed.

1. Alternatively, "he does prospers."


COMMENTARY

Psalm 1 opens the door to the Book of Psalms. Its form is, in effect, all but a declaration that poetry, not prose, is the best medium for exploring the soul. Its contends that righteousness is the path of only a minority, which in its loneliness finds its strength through faith.

I begin my comments on Psalm 1 with reflections on where it is placed, not to judge it by its context, but rather to allow us to explore its internal qualities. I take note of the most frequently suggested explanation for its placement at the beginning of the book and then posit and expand on two alternative theories.

The Accepted View and Two Alternatives

Most modern commentators suggest that Psalm 1 was chosen to serve as an introduction to an existing corpus (for most, the entire Book of Psalms). Technical support for this view includes: (a) Psalms 1 and 2 (the latter also thought to be imported as an introduction) do not begin with a reference to David, as do almost all of the psalms in the first section, and (b) in some manuscripts, Psalm 3 is listed as the first psalm. In terms of content, Psalm 1 emphasizes obeying God and His Torah, which, the commentators suggest, speaks to the Second Temple emphasis on law and obedience and is thus appropriate to the time of editing (reflecting the “Critical” assumption that First Temple Judaism was less “law” and “Torah” oriented than Second Temple Judaism).

Psalm 1 serves as a nearly ideal opening in two other ways as well, which might be seen as either alternatives or complements to this reasoning. First, it is simply wonderful poetry: the use of words, thoughts and structure all combine to present a challenging, deep and provocative religious poem. Thus, this psalm “announces” that Psalms will not be a collection of simple articulations of piety, but rather will be religious poetry of great art and profound thought.

Second, this psalm focuses on one of the grand themes of the Book of Psalms: the righteous set against the evildoers. This bifurcation appears frequently, almost as a worldview. The conception seems to be that there are many of “them” out there, and Psalms will often dwell on “their” success as opposed to the (temporary, immediate or puzzling) suffering of the righteous. Psalm 1 establishes this worldview at the outset, all the more powerfully because it does not (as do later psalms) lament the situation to any great degree. Rather, it presents what the psalmist sees as existential truth. If one is to accept this description as accurate, the society that was the backdrop of the Psalms included many evildoers and was no more pious than later generations, including our own. The psalms, then, are the voice of a lonely minority.

Here following, I dwell on aspects of these two attributes: the outstanding poetry and the bifurcation to good-and-evil. I then add a few additional comments.

The Poetry: The Opening of the Psalm

The opening of the first psalm is riveting. In Hebrew, the psalm begins in pronounced assonance—ashrei ha'ish asher—a clear testimony to a crafted poem. Indeed, the form immediately draws one’s attention: “happy is the man” is set parallel to three defining phrases and, as often throughout Psalms, an opening “triple” bears significance.

Although some commentators see the three phrases as reinforcing synonyms, others have found a careful structure, with subtlety and progression. The verbs are tantalizingly different: he neither walked… nor stood… nor sat. For Kirkpatrick, these are the three stages of becoming one of “them”: one adjusts, one persists, and finally one associates. Radak sees the verbs as comprising all possible forms of actions—if one is awake, he is in one of these three situations. An ancient midrash (Midrash Psalms 1:7) emphasizes the difference among the verbs, implying that the verb order is a warning: be wary, for each act leads to the next. (Do not go; but if you go, do not stand; but if you stand, do not sit.)

These are but three interpretations among many offered to highlight the quality of the poem—and as with much great poetry, it leads to thought, to questions, and to various possibilities, most certainly including personal considerations. (I hasten to add that great poetry often has different levels of meaning. One should not exclude multivalence without substantiation.)

We might further illustrate with comments on the open nature of the poetry in verses 1–3. (1) Note the three descriptions in verse 1 of what to avoid: counsel, path, company. Are these synonyms or cumulative? In the view of Moses Almosnino (sixteenth century) the warnings delineate categories of evil: “counsel” implying thought, “path” implying action, and “company” implying gossip. (2) Does verse 2 provide new advice, or is it the result of verse 1? Almosnino thought it to be the latter. (3) Do verses 2 and 3 define the good person comprehensively? According to Joseph Ibn Yahya (sixteenth century) the two verses encompass thought, speech, and action. (4) The prospering or thriving at the end of verse 3 could be that of the tree or the person. Which is it, or are both implied? (5) The verb describing the righteous in verse 2 is alternatively “studying” the teaching, “uttering” or “meditating on" —all translations are possible. Which might be primary? (I comment below on verse 1 being in the negative, another major stylistic choice.)

As an opening psalm, it is as if these verses announce that the “life of faith,” which the Book of Psalms is beginning to extol, falls into the realm of poetry, not preaching. It is poetic art: craft and skill are used to reflect on the intricacy of life with its challenges, with complementary implications and occasional ambiguity. Poetry invites a dialogue: the reader is challenged, often not by confrontation with some strong single contention, but through an invitation to deal with multiple meanings and nuanced interpretations, which implies that s/he has an active role in understanding the Psalms. If that message were the sole contribution of Psalm 1 to the beginning reader, it would, I contend, be sufficient.

White Written on Black

Psalm 1 deserves detailed attention to many of its phrases and structures. Having chosen to limit my comments in these essays, I focus here on the contrast that dominates the psalm. (See my comments above on this contrast as an ideal opening for the Book of Psalms as a whole.)

The speaker of Psalm 1 makes his contention clear at the outset. The happy individual is differentiated from those others—the evil, the sinners, the eloquent deceivers. Indeed, throughout most of the first psalm, and exclusively so in the first half, “they” appear in the plural and “he” as an individual. One envisions the lonely man of faith, an exception to the many unrighteous who dominate the scene. They are around in great numbers, as in the metaphor, like the chaff. He is the one tree, incomparably worthier and more solid, but very much in the minority.

Beginning and end, through structure and words, the speaker paints his picture of white (the righteous) on a black (the wicked) background. Strikingly, the poem starts out with what this person is not to do, with whom he should not associate in order to be happy. Indeed, the word framework (“inclusion”) of the poem (an opening and closing word or phrase, often indicative of content) is not the “righteous” but the “wicked”—and that is where the poem begins and ends.

To strengthen the point, the poet creates a chiasm (a section structured a-b-b-a) in verses 5 and 6. The outer framework is the word resha’im (the wicked), within which the word tsadikim (the righteous) appears twice. The reader’s attention is then drawn back to verses 1–4 to find essentially the same thing (with a less clear terminological basis), the two outer references to the evildoers frame two statements about the righteous. Were one to need further emphasis, one could note seven nouns referring to evildoers, with differing terms (sevenfold repetition is a “complete” number in Biblical literature), and only two terms for the righteous. The negative defines the positive; the “fulfilled” or “happy” person is described only in contradistinction to the wicked. Brueggemann, Message, puts it this way (p. 39): “There is no middle ground… Life—like the psalm—is organized in a sharp either/or.”

Writing on another psalm (Psalm 15) Weiss (Mikra’ot Kikavanatam, p.147) adds a refinement. The negatives, he notes, are all in the perfect (past tense) and the positives are either adjectives or in the imperfect (future). There is an order to achievement: first there is what one must not do and then he or she is free to pursue the happier life. (A psychologist friend points out to me that we humans always find it easier to define what not to do than what to do.)

Thus Psalm 1 establishes evil not only as the opposite of righteousness, but as its background. Righteousness seems to be a counterculture.

Reassurance and Piety?

Having dwelt on the phenomenon of bifurcation, I proceed to explore the psalm’s meta-message. Frequently this psalm is seen as a highly pietistic, didactic declaration of reward for the Torah-observant, a reassurance and compensation in the face of the proliferation of evildoers. In fact, some commentators condemn this psalm for simplistically implying material reward for the righteous. This promise, we are told, ranges from deception to naiveté.

However, this suggested explanation of the central message of Psalm 1 falls short on two counts: first, in that the “reward” is probably not a reward at all and, second, in that there is a better reading of the poet’s use of contrast.

In terms of the “reward” for being good, consider the interpretation of Meir Weiss (ibid. pp. 111–134). He finds no reward and punishment in these lines, but simply a description of the mindset of the righteous. As they understand it, he says, their deeds lead to something, as opposed to the deeds of the evildoers. I suggest that this is echoed in the opening word of the psalm, ashrei, which is most often translated as “happy.” However, clearly the term is more profound than that, i.e., deeper than our contemporary use of the word “happy.” Ashrei implies peace, satisfaction, fulfillment and tranquility of worldview. (Martin Cohen, noting the term’s centrality, points out that it appears a total of twenty-five times in nineteen different psalms!) Thus the speaker opens with the only “reward” he acknowledges, but that is less reward than description, and the image of the fruitful tree expands upon it. His claim is that the person of faith is “ashrei,” having a deep conviction of the rightness of his ways, of their long-range influence and permanence, and of their benefit to the world.

Second, there is, in fact, a better (and deeper) understanding of the psalm than promised reward. Asking just a few rhetorical questions (all answerable by: “probably not”) opens the door to this understanding: Is this the best way to describe the righteous—as the antithesis to the wicked? Is the overwhelming dominance of the evildoers an accurate reflection of society? Does the promised “reward” fully compensate for the observed proliferation of evil?

Given our negative responses, one is drawn to the mindset of the speaker as an explanation for the text. Might not his focus on the obverse—on the evil—reflect a personal history, a fantasy or a subconscious desire? One indeed wonders whether the speaker does not protest too much. On some level, this black background seems to reflect a real struggle in his mind and soul (or at least his subconscious). Ostensibly a clear unambiguous declaration of faith, the text might reveal an individual who has reached his conclusions through a certain attraction to those other options, attractions that are reflected in his adamant proclamation of his own non-association. Seen thusly, he feels lonely, a member of a small minority. In his belief and understanding that he has the LORD’s approval, he finds strength for a lifestyle that is hard to maintain.

(To better appreciate this understanding, one should recall that the author of the poem is not necessarily the speaker. The latter is often a fictional imagined figure, and it is of great help in analyzing many of the psalms to consider how the poet saw the speaker. This is no accidental revelation of subconscious, but the author’s revelation of the subconscious of the poem’s speaker.)

The poet has left us a fascinating piece to contemplate. Both the firm assurance and the framing of good within evil reveal, I hold, an internal struggle—perhaps unconscious, perhaps a reflection from the past, but in any case real. It is here that the reader pauses (again and again) and it is here, most appropriately, that the Book of Psalms, this poetry of the soul, begins.

* * * * * * * *

Additional Notes

1. Some, on realizing first, that both Psalms 1 and 2 are introductory; second, that neither is attributed to David; and third, that there is a word (ashrei, happiness) that could be viewed as an inclusio (enclosure) if they were one psalm, would combine the two psalms into one. (This reading appears as early as in the Talmud – Brachot 9a.) However, there is simply no unity of theme nor is there extensive term or phrase repetition; moreover, Psalm 1 has its own internal inclusio (two terms: derech, way and resha’im, wicked). The contention thus falls.

2. A complementary framework has been noted: in the beginning the righteous are defined as not joining the community of the wicked, whereas at the end of verse 5, the wicked are not allowed to join the assembly of the righteous.

3. In private communication, some readers have suggested a thought that is worth consideration, namely, that Psalm 1 responds to some degree to the opening of Genesis, specifically the story of the Garden of Eden. This reading sees the psalm as advice to avoid the trap into which Adam and Eve fell (the evil), the tree recalling the tree of life in the garden. Indeed, one early Aramaic translation refers to the tree in Psalm 1 as the tree of life.

4. There is much debate on the meaning of "Torah" in our psalm, suggestions ranging from the Pentateuch to a larger scope of written text, to communicated divine will, and on to intuited divine will. The issue is fascinating, but probably irresolvable.



The author of these essays is Rabbi Benjamin Segal, former president of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and author of The Song of Songs: A Woman in Love (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2009). This material is copyright by the author, and may not be reproduced. If you are interested in using the texts for study groups, please be in direct contact with the author, at psalmblog@gmail.com.