THROUGH THE DESERT

   I have long been fascinated by the lengthy Psalm 119, that curious love-song to the Law. One of its most striking features is the repetition of certain words: "Law", "commandments", "statutes" and "testimonies". They keep turning up in slightly different contexts, and strongly suggest a formal pattern. When I started looking them up on the Web, I found there are eight in all, and
this useful downloadable PDF lists them in Hebrew, in the usual translation, and gives the places and ways they are used by the Psalmist, as well as his responses to each.
 
   The overall impression one gets is indeed that of a formal song, but a formal song of passionate gratitude to God the Lawgiver: the gratitude of a nomadic desert people for a signpost, for a clear path through the wilderness, a path that shows shifting sands to be avoided, oases where one may rest and be refreshed, and at the end a promised land of milk (protein and fat, hard to come by in the Nefud) and honey (the universal sweetener before sugar, giving energy and pleasure). As so often, it teaches a Christian how absolutely the Old Alliance belongs to his own faith as well. I may believe that there is a new Torah, and that a living guide is even more precious than an Ordnance Survey map; studying such a Psalm in any depth explains why the new Torah in no way banishes or replaces the old but fulfils it: not an iota or punctuation mark of the old shall be eliminated, it keeps its full and glorious value.
 
   Moreover, one thing the Fathers teach us is that beyond studying the Psalms there is another approach:  praying the Psalms. For some psalms, this is both simple (though not necessarily easy) and evident: the Penitential Psalms and the Psalms of Praise, for instance. For others, it is much more difficult. Sometimes it's harder because of the spiritual depth and complexity: Psalm 22, even without its immense Christian resonance, has a range of thought and emotion that takes years to absorb fully into prayer. And what about 119? Its very length and insistence makes it difficult to pray: we tend to think, 'OK, enough already, I get the point, no need to go on and on . . .' The change-ringing of the terms for God's Word is alien to our ideas of both poetry and prayer.

   So how to pray Psalm 119? I think the answer lies in the list I cited above, in the notes on the full range of meanings attached to each term; and in a constant application of all these meanings to one's own life and experience. For instance, simply following and meditating upon the mishpatim, to us almost inexplicably glossed as 'judgements, ordinances', leads us to the insight that such judgements are those that express and echo God's loving-kindness by their justice. And that, in turn, sheds light upon on the one hand Angela Merkel's decision to receive positively the greatest possible number of refugees in Germany, and other hand my wife's decision to go and visit our 96-year-old peasant neighbour who lives a placid old age but is happy to be remembered. If one admits to one's reading of Psalm 119 such background and such echoes, praying  the psalm becomes both possible and a delight.

AFTER ALL THOSE YEARS

                                     Rembrandt, "Simeon in the Temple" (1669)

“Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace”

Nobody told the old gentleman that this particular eldest male child, this anonymous infant, was what he had been waiting for all those years. There must have been many of them, as every eldest male child had to be presented to the Lord in the Temple: given to God, and then bought back for a couple of symbolic pigeons. So here is this provincial couple, a carpenter and his wife, bringing in their offspring for the ceremony. And there is old Mr Simeon, who has been told that he will not die before the Meshiach has come, pottering around in a corner; and suddenly he points like a game-dog. Shuffles over. Lifts a corner of the blanket covering the kid. Peers. And a vast quiet comes over his features. He lifts up his eyes, and possibly his arthritic hands, and says, “Thank you, Lord; now you’re letting me go. Now I have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all mankind: a light for the goyim, and a glory for Israel.” But then he turns to the confused parents, and tells them what else he sees; looking ahead. “This child,” he says, “is going to be the the rise and fall of may people in Israel. He will be an icon of controversy. And you,” he says, turning to young Miriam, “will have a sword thrust right through your heart. Many people’s secret thoughts are going to come out into the open.” And after this salvo, nodding heavily, he turns and shuffles off.

But there is more. Anna, an 84-year-old widow who spends all her time in the Temple, praying, and is known to be a prophetess, a seer, also comes over – probably having heard Simeon exclaim. She sees the parents in confusion and in real distress – understandable, after what they have heard from the old man. She, too, peers into the future, but sees it differently from her friend Simeon. What she sees is crowds: the crowds of people who, as Paul would later write to the Jews, live in the slavery of the fear of death. The crowds who need redeeming. The crowds who need the Meshiach, the Anointed, to do what He has come for. She reassures the parents: their son is not just an icon of controversy, a sword through his mother’s heart. He is what Jerusalem is waiting for; and beyond Jerusalem, Israel; and beyond Israel, the world.

Why is the Presentation in the Temple the festival of lights, the blessing of the year’s candles, Candlemas? Three reasons; it is the right time after the birth for the firstborn son to be presented and bought back; it is the middle of winter, between the solstice and the equinox; and it is the commemoration of the “light to lighten the Gentiles”. We – groundhogs and Super Bowls notwithstanding -- live with the consequences. Light that is born; controversy; and all those crowds, all those people in dire need of the love we have been left to bring to them.