Psalm 27 Study Sheet

1. The Hebrew word for “my light” is ori ( alef-vav-reish-yod ); the Hebrew for “fright” is ira ( alef-yod-reish-alef ). While the two words have different verbal roots, the fact that they share letters suggests that the poet intended to draw a connection between them as opposing forces.

2. The first half of the verse has an alef in each word but the last (and that word is pronounced as if it has an alef namely Adonai.

3. God tells Moses that no one may see God’s face and live, but that God will make the divine goodness pass before him (Exodus 33:19–20). The poet asks for something similar: to be able to look upon (Hebrew: lachazot linguistically related to a prophetic “vision”)—God’s no-am . The word no-am is usually translated “pleasantness”—a rather pale word in English—but it is also used to describe David in II Samuel 23:1, n’im z’mirot Yisrael , usually translated (somewhat inexactly) “sweet singer of Israel.”

4. The Hebrew verb is l’vakeir , “to visit,” implying a temporary presence. Following the poet’s wish “to live in the House of Adonai all the days of my life,” her hope “to spend time” reflects her rueful understanding that the stay will realistically be much shorter than she desires.

5. Which does the poet want: to be hidden in God’s secret places, or to be exposed in the open, high on a rock? The two images share a desire for protection. Raised high on an impregnable rock formation, the poet is as secure as if hidden, perhaps even more so. She also has the advantage of being able to observe the pursuers’ movements and even to taunt them from her secure position. Both the tent and the rock are frequently used symbols for God’s relationship to Israel—God was encountered in the Tent of Meeting, and the rock is a frequent image (in the Book of Psalms especially) for God’s protecting power.

6. This is a puzzling verse. A more literal translation of the Hebrew is “To You my heart has said, ‘Seek my [My?] face.’ Your face, Adonai, I shall seek.” Because Hebrew has no capital letters, it is unclear whether “my/My face” refers to God’s face or the poet’s. NJPS renders this verse: “In Your behalf my heart says: ‘Seek My face.’” Asking God to seek out a human face is indeed unusual. But the Priestly Blessing—“May God lift up His face to you” (Numbers 6:26)—could be understood as a prayer that both God’s face be known to you and your face be known to God. If indeed the poet is asking that her face be known to God, this is both an audacious and a poignant request: “Look at me, God, notice me; I certainly notice You—I am constantly seeking Your face.”

7. Malbim suggests that this refers to olam haba (the world-to-come) or to the re-born Garden of Eden. It may also reflect the poet’s desire to see God’s goodness in this life (that is, before death).

As we have often said, the enemies the poet perceives may be understood as internal enemies—and during the month preceding the High Holy Days we often experience our sins, our wrongdoings from the past year, as “enemies” waging war upon us, devouring all the good deeds and self-worth we have tried so hard to accumulate in the past year. But the poet, experiencing God as light and victory, expresses the confidence that God’s presence will quash the influence of these misdeeds—after all, the month of Elul is considered an acronym for ani
l’dodi v’dodi li , “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” from the Song of Songs (6:3). While God’s love is not specifically mentioned in the psalm itself, pleas like “Be gracious to me” (v. 7) suggest it. Nor does the psalm specifically mention another theme of Elul, which is the responsibility of the people Israel to respond to God’s forgiving love by engaging in acts of t’shuvah , turning back our sins into repentant actions and good deeds.

Evidence that the poet is aware of the powerful temptations of sin can be found in the major yearning of the psalm—“to live in the House of Adonai all the days of my life,” to “look upon the sweetness of Adonai and spend time in the Palace.” Without the faith that the poet would be able to do this, consequences too fearful to voice await (v. 13). Is that our wish too? Sometimes on the High Holy Days we feel as though we could stay in the synagogue all the time, drinking in its serenity, listening to its uplifting music and hopeful words—but we know that the challenge of this season is to emerge from the majesty of the palace, from the intimacy of God’s sukkah, from the rousing tones of t’ruah , and carry the majesty, the intimacy, and the aroused awareness into the world outside the synagogue, seeking God’s presence in the hurly-burly of life, throwing up a sukkah in every corner of the world we inhabit, striving to make the goodness of God apparent not only to our own eyes, but to those we love—and those we perceive as our enemies—as well.

A personal word about this psalm. When I was jailed in St. Augustine, Florida, in June of 1964 with sixteen other rabbis from the Central Conference of American Rabbis, before the rallies that resulted in our short imprisonment, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had invited us to join him in this demonstration, was searching through his Bible for an appropriate psalm to rally us to what lay ahead. I found out many years later that the one he read to us was this one, and his reasoning was clear. In a city run by the Ku Klux Klan, to exhort us all—blacks and whites, men and women, young and middle-aged—to emulate the poet’s faith (“The L ORD [the way I’m sure he read Adonai ] is my light and my victory; from whom should I feel fright?”) was the greatest confidence-booster I can imagine. “If a camp encamps against me”—the Klan, a phalanx of the National Guard whose sympathies were in doubt, local townsfolk who still sold fruits and vegetables where Blacks had once been sold in the city’s old slave market—we determined, as hard as they might be pounding, that “our hearts would not fear.” That June night was very dark—but all of us knew a great light.

Rabbi Richard Levy

Songs Ascending