Keeping Faith with the Psalms

Daniel F. Polish

Description

Explore your spiritual life. Create a personal theology. Challenge and
test your faith—all using the Book of Psalms.

The Book of Psalms has been beloved by generations of readers. It offers solace in times of trouble, holds out hope for rescue and redemption, and helps to answer some of the difficult questions raised by faith. The Book of Psalms is more personal than other books of the Bible; instead of telling stories with God as the central actor, the psalmists talk to—and about—God.

Keeping Faith with the Psalms leads you into the Bible to discover ways you can use the Psalms to shape your own personal spiritual outlook. Daniel Polish does not give any simple solutions, but reveals how you can discover answers for yourself through the Psalms. You will explore:

• Meeting God in Nature
• Finding God in Torah
• Finding God through the Historical Experience of the Jewish People
• The Problem of Evil in Our World
• Facing Our Mortality
• Finding Our Relationship with God
• Jerusalem as Symbol and Reality
• What Does the Lord Require? The Call to Social Justice

Through the threads of meaning, questions, and perspectives offered in the psalms themselves, Rabbi Polish’s guide offers an intimate look at the issues that touch and influence your personal theology.

Sujets

• Sacred Writings
• Philosophie et théologie
• Psalms
• Judaism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 03 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580236003
• Langue: English

Extrait

Keeping Faith with the Psalms: Deepen Your Relationship with God Using the Book of Psalms
2004 First Printing 2004 by Daniel F. Polish
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please mail or fax your request in writing to Jewish Lights Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address / fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to [e-mail].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Polish, Daniel F. Keeping faith with the Psalms : deepen your relationship with God using the Book of Psalms / Daniel F. Polish. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-58023-179-9 1. Bible. O.T. Psalms-Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Spiritual life-Judaism. 3. Judaism-Doctrines. I. Title. BS1430.52.P65 2003 223 .206-dc22 2003015275
Grateful acknowledgment is given to the following sources for permission to use material: Momento Mori, written by Moishe Leib Halpern and Text, written by Aaron Zeitlin, from Voices within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets , edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf, 1980. Translated by Ruth Whitman. Used by permission of Ruth Whitman. I Will Go Away, written by Zvi Shargel, from Voices within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets , edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf, 1980. Used by permission of Howard Schwartz. Isaac Leybush Peretz, written by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, from Voices within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets , edited by Howard Schwartz and Anthony Rudolf, 1980. Translated by Kathryn Hellerstein. Used by permission of Kathryn Hellerstein. Gitanjali , written by Rabindranath Tagore, and extract by Joshua Loth Liebman, from Gates of Prayer-Shaarai Tefila: The New Union Prayerbook for Weekdays, Sabbaths and Festivals , edited by Chaim Stern, 1975. Used by permission of CCAR Press. Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn , 1987, The Jewish Publication Society. God Is a Sad Maharal, Like a Mousetrap, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, The Jewish Publication Society. Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright holders of all material used in this book. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions that may remain, and asks that any omissions be brought to their attention so they may be corrected in future editions.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Manufactured in the United States of America
For People of All Faiths, All Background s Published by Jewish Lights Publishing A Division of LongHill Partners, Inc. Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237 Woodstock, VT 05091 Tel [phone] Fax [phone] www.jewishlights.com
For my wife, Gail my Peshe Gittel
My inspiration for writing this book
As she is my inspiration for so many things
Who has brought so much that is beautiful and lovely into my life
With gratitude and love.
Contents
Introduction
P ART I T HE Q UEST FOR G OD : U SING THE P SALMS TO K NOW G OD
Searching for the Presence of God
1 Meeting God in Nature
2 Finding God in Torah
3 Finding God through the Historical Experience of the Jewish People
P ART II T HE Q UEST FOR I NSIGHT : U SING THE P SALMS TO U NDERSTAND O UR F AITH
4 The Problem of Evil in Our World
5 Facing Our Mortality
6 Finding Our Relationship with God
P ART III T HE Q UEST FOR C OMMITMENT : U SING THE P SALMS TO L IVE O UR F AITH
7 Jerusalem as Symbol and Reality
8 What Does the Lord Require? The Call to Social Justice

A Personal Afterword
Index of Scriptural References

About Jewish Lights
Copyright
Introduction
The Psalms of David
The songs he sang,
So beautifully
Rang and rang
At God s Mercy Seat.
They came to a lowly house
In a humble street,
They came to a workshop,
To the Synagogue at prayer,
To the watchman on the hill,
To the market square.
All sang Psalms,
As King David sang,
To the glory of God
And the glory of man
The Psalms of David,
King David s song,
The song of all Jews,
To all peoples belong.
They belong to the world.
The Psalms-a thought-
Man s cry for help
Has comfort brought.
The Psalms-plea and praise,
Of many and one,
All together and alone.
Through our days,
Our Psalms sing sweet.
King David s song
We repeat.
(A. Almi, Psalms )
Of making many books there is no end ( Koheleth /Ecclesiastes 12:12). When we read Koheleth /Ecclesiastes, we usually assume that the author of those words was a reader like ourselves, complaining about the fact that the flow of books seemed endless. Or, as one current slogan reads, so many books, so little time (although at the time Koheleth /Ecclesiastes was written, this was hardly likely). But for anyone who has ever written a book, the statement takes on a different meaning. No book is ever actually ended. No work is really finished or complete-certainly in the author s mind.
As soon as my book Bringing the Psalms to Life: How to Understand and Use the Book of Psalms (Jewish Lights Publishing) was in proofs, I knew I had more I wanted to say about the psalms-or rather, more that the psalms wanted to have said about them. Bringing the Psalms to Life was about relating Psalms to the personal experiences of our lives and the emotions with which we react to them. This new book tries to relate Psalms in the same way to the religious questions that all of us ask at some point in our spiritual journey. In addition to helping us deal with the challenges that arise in the course of our lives, Psalms can also help us think about some of the most perplexing questions of religious belief: How do we know God? How can we think about God? The Book of Psalms also offers us the opportunity to confront hard and important religious dilemmas: How do we deal with the fact of our mortality? How do we understand what makes a life righteous? What sense can we make of the idea of an afterlife? How do we account for the presence of evil in our world? Looking at these questions helps us enter further into the Book of Psalms. I am not suggesting that there is such a thing as a consistent way of answering religious questions in the Book of Psalms. Clearly, Psalms does not have a consistent perspective on the most important religious issues-or one single way of understanding issues. Still, the Book of Psalms does offer us important resources from which we can draw perspectives and insights to help us refine our own understanding. We can use Psalms to help us shape our own personal religious worldviews.
If you have opened this book with no sense of what the Book of Psalms is about-where it came from, who wrote it, and so on-you will not find those questions answered here. There are many good books that I would send you to for answers, including the first chapter of my own earlier book. If you are looking for a book that explains why generations of people have turned to psalms for comfort and inspiration-again, you will find those issues explored in my earlier book. Keeping Faith with the Psalms addresses a more specific question: What beliefs make up our own personal theology? In this book we will explore what the Book of Psalms can contribute to that quest.
Many times the Book of Psalms talks in questioning tones rather than in terms of certainty. For every

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
(Psalm 23:6)
we find verses whose character is one of uncertainty or perplexity-often urgently so.

What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that Thou thinkest of him?
(Psalm 8:5)

Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle?
Who shall dwell upon Thy holy mountain?
(Psalm 15:1)

Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord?
And who shall stand in His holy place?
(Psalm 24:3)
These verses of Psalms reflect another facet of our lives-the desire to understand the important issues, to gain clarity about the things that matter most to us. Part of being a person of faith involves not only the desire for intimacy with God but also the desire to understand more about God and the questions that flow from our relationship with God. The Book of Psalms offers us glimpses of ways we can answer these ultimate questions and from these glimpses build structures of faith in which we can live our religious lives.
There is one very important way that the Book of Psalms is different from other books of the Bible-especially the books of the Torah (the Five Books of Moses). In those earlier books, God is an active participant in human affairs, and people know God through interacting with God. In Psalms, as in our own experience, God is not the protagonist of the drama; rather, the psalmists talk to God and talk about God. Psalms is more like our own faith experience than other books of the Bible. In Psalms, a number of ways to understand God are presented and elaborated upon. As a result, Psalms can be a very important resource for us as we work at developing our own religious understanding.
In Bringing the Psalms to Life , I suggested that the Book of Psalms was beloved by generations of readers because it offered solace in times of trouble and held out hope for rescue and redemption. Perhaps another reason that Psalms was beloved was because it helped believers answer some of the hard questions that faith raises. Belief is not steady-state : unwavering and unchanging. And faith does not mean that we don t have a desire for clearer understanding of the concepts that make up our religious perspective. Reading through Psalms does not offer us a presentation of one systematic way of understanding things religiously. But it does offer us facets of truth, aspects of answers, glimmers of deep understanding to questions that arise naturally from living a life of faith.
Psal