Session 3 - Module 1 - Meditating on Psalm 1:1-3 - Reading the Bible as Meditation Literature

All right, the big event, let us turn to Psalm 1 and 2. Part of the reason for the selection of Psalm 1 and 2 is that Psalm 1 is about meditating on Scripture. Like that's the portrait of this key figure. So that's mainly it, but also Psalm 1 and 2 are unique within the first block of Psalms in the Psalm scroll. The first section of Psalms 3-41 are all of them, except a couple of interesting exceptions that break the rule, connected to David in the little heading that comes before the poem. So Psalm 1 and 2 are not connected to David explicitly, like a Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness or anything. So in that sense they are anonymous. And then in Psalm 3 starts a block of David poems. So Psalm 1 and 2 are set apart in that way. And this is not a class on the Psalm scroll, but if it was, we'd spend some time meditating on Psalm 1 and 2 as the introduction to the main themes and ideas in the Psalm scroll itself. But these two poems are designed to be read as two aspects of something that is similar at the core. And the relationship between them is all implicit. And you have to haggah to work to find the relationship between the two. So it's on the individual level of the poems, as we work through them, we're going to see how all the ideas from the last session come into play. But one of the last things we'll do in this class is to think about the two poems side by side as wholes and how they relate to each other and some interesting things pop when you do that. So the translation in the notes is my own translation. It's not good English. I think it's great Hebrew in English. So it's going to feel clunky, but what I'm trying to do is represent features of the Hebrew that become more obvious in English so that you can haggah on them. So we're just going to take it line by line. How good is life for the man who does not walk by the counsel of the wicked and in the path of sinners he does not stand and in the seat of mockers he does not sit. Okay. I'll play tour guide for a moment. Notice how the effect of reading it aloud makes you notice a cadence to these three lines here. Doesn't walk in the counsel of the wicked and in the path of sinners does not stand,

in the seat of mockers does not sit. There's a cadence to it, and that's because these three lines, they have identical elements. There is a negative verb, does not walk, does not stand, does not sit. There is a person named who's the opposite of good life man, and the opposite of good life man is these three, the wicked, sinners, mockers. But then there's these nouns associated with the wicked, sinner, mocker. It's counsel of the wicked, path of the sinner, seat of mockers. So what I've tried to do in the font treatments is use similar visuals to represent the things that match. So the verbs match, the opposite guys match, and then these nouns all match. This is a good example of triple parallelism. Here's what's interesting, that triple parallelism makes you go back and notice how the first words are set outside of the parallelism, aren't they? Now in English, how good is life for the man who hides, and I can't find a way to do this in English, but it's three Hebrew words that are set up in a rhyming symmetrical structure. I've tried to represent it so you can at least see in patterns and colors. There's a vowels, e vowels, and then the silent letter aleph, and then this sh sound. So it's three words that have similar letters arranged in a symmetrical shape. This word ashre is spelled with the same letters as this word asher. And it all sounds the same. So notice that it comes in three words. that are grouped together that introduce three lines that are also closely grouped together. So a three words introduces a set of three lines, which I think will become significant once we begin to go out to the layers of the poem. Just like we did with breath and word and water and spirit, let's notice the structure of these parallel lines. Notice how the verbs position here in lines two and three moves to the end. And that's true in Hebrew, and I tried to represent that in English. Let's go through kind of in a focused way. Let's go through the verbs. Let's notice the verbs in relationship to each other. What do you notice when you hold the verbs in your mind together as three different aspects and broken up into three lines, but put them together in your mind as a whole, and what do you notice when you just notice those verbs?

What not to do. Okay. Negatives. They're all negatives. So that's a similarity. The good life is defined by what it's not in three ways. There's a progression. Walking, standing still, sitting down. Great. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So from movement to stillness or from movement to stasis, movement to rest. So here, let's haggah. Actually, I'm going to ask you to haggah, since you noticed this. Tell us a little story from walking to standing to sitting, and maybe even let's match it up with these nouns in the bold, counsel, path, and seat, because seat is the noun of the verb sit. So I'm putting you on the spot, Seth, but you noticed this. So tell me a story about how these lines create a whole. Yeah, there's a man, and he has what he's supposed to have. He's walking in the ways that he's supposed to be in. There's like movement, and he's seeing the counsel of the wicked. He is not walking in those ways because he knows the good ways that he's supposed to be in, and he sees this way that he could go that is the path of the sinners, and he's not even finding a place in that path. He's not even standing still there, let alone walking in it, and he moves on to see the place where maybe the mockers have found their version of peace, their version of goodness that doesn't match the good way, and he's not going to sit in that place. That's great. Okay, so notice where your mind went. You were prompted by these metaphors of like the history of a person's life decisions, moral life decisions, is like a journey, and a path, walking a path is, you just did this intuitively, like is habituating your decisions, habitual decisions or patterns of decision-making. And so, with you walk in it, it's this emphasis of continuity, repetition, but once you stand, it's cessation of movement, but also speaks to you're there now, you're in it. And then to sit now in that pattern is like, I don't know, fully committed? Are you stuck? Something like you're in a rut? Or isn't it interesting? Because normally you think of from movement to sitting, you think of going from activity to cessation. But once you join this path metaphor to the bad guys, this is like a portrait of getting stuck in a pattern of destructive decision-making until it becomes not just your pattern of walking, it's like you're in it as a place. It's a fascinating image, isn't it? Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Other observations about these three lines? St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century makes an observation, posits one, regarding relationality

that the good man, the blessed man, he's the kind of man who does not habit the places of the wicked. And so he says, could it be that this man is out walking about imprudently and on his way he encounters a wicked man? And as he begins... and they're talking with him, they're walking on the way, and then he's intrigued. Well, tell me more about this way that you live. And he stops in the street, and so the wicked man begins to entice him deeper and deeper. And then he says, well, let's go over here and let's sit down. And it becomes this progression of intimacy within the wicked as the wicked draw you down into themselves. So, yeah, you can think of the verbs and then the bad guys. Walking alongside someone has a different sense than standing with someone and then sitting with. So an increase of intimacy or familiarity. Yes, great. It's a great observation. I used to think of this verse as choices that the good man will take, which are essentially the same choices as the wicked take, but at a different time. So when the wicked are walking, he'll say, that's OK. And he's just going to sit down. He's not going to walk with them. And where they're standing on that path and they're maybe asking him to stand, he's going to say, it's OK, I'm going to walk. And he'll walk.

And so that opposite choice of what the wicked take. And I think of it as like the road less traveled, because often we're pressured to take those choices because of peer pressure or whatever it is that drives us. And often we should not. And we should choose what is not intuitive in those situations. Thank you, Sai. You just drew attention to something that's really interesting. So to sit in a seat is a pretty natural thing to say for the last one. You sit in a seat. We're all doing it right now. But when I think of a path, I normally think of walking on a path. But notice how standing is what you do in the path. And then walking is connected with counsel. Counsel speaks to people huddling together to make a plan. And that's a weird thing to walk in. It would actually make a lot more sense to stand in the counsel, because you're a part of the circle making the bad plan. So it's interesting that the verbs actually are matched with not their natural connection. Walking isn't matched with path, and stand isn't matched with counsel. In other words, there's an interchangeability to those lines. And so what I saw you doing was actually just kind of swapping

them in your imagination. And actually, it was kind of like that Ulipo, the poem made of 10 stanzas with interchangeable lines. And in a way, there's something similar going on between these verbs that actually it's productive to swap the lines. It's almost like Lego blocks or something. Each line has three blocks, and you can just kind of like, what if I put the yellow one up in the red slot? And it means something. That's what you were just doing. And there's a part of how highly structured this is that makes me, and the mismatch of walking and standing in their lines. But it's not like it's bad poetry. Seems to me it's intentional to kind of make you look at each line in the relationships in a different way. It's great. What stood out to me when you speak of counsel, like seeking counsel from a friend or seeking counsel from a mentor, getting their perspective on something, and maybe to inform the direction in which you should go. And so that was what stuck out to me with the combination of the word walking. And then standing in the path of sinners, was a path of like this is just their way of life now. And to stand, to stand for something,

like what your convictions are, what you're like committed to that way. And then the seat of mockers, I just imagine like people just sitting just like, you know, saying all the things they shouldn't be saying. And there's a level of comfortability there. And even if you're not comfortable to sit in that counsel, says a lot about what you're standing for as well, and how that informs your own way of being. Great. Yes, so you're noticing how the verbs and the nouns can swap places in your mind. And you're finding some meaning there. You're noticing how there's actually an important relationship in the lines as they are, too. And so this is one of those moments They're like, both are productive. And they're actually, both lead to a meaningful insight. And notice how we've gotten here isn't by starting with what sticks out to you. Which is fine to do that if you want. But we're asking is, how is it designed? And how does the design guide me to feel like I'm catching a ball somebody else threw me? I'm letting the design structure pass me something. That then I meditate on in a personal way. But it's personal, guided, not just by what's in my imagination, but by what's actually there in some way.

May I ask your translational decision on asherah, as good as life? Yes, yeah, yeah. So asherah is, so it's traditionally translated blessed. There is a perfectly good Hebrew word for blessing that appears right in Genesis 1 on through, the word bareich, or baruch, which describes, you know how you talk about somebody who God has given them the gift of God's own shalom, safety and harmony. Asherah is the term that's consistently used when you and I want to hold up someone who is bareich and say, man, that's the good life right there. That's the kind of life that we all hope for, aspire to, and want to move towards. So asherah has to do more with how you and I perceive someone who God has chosen to bless. And by rendering both asherah and bareich with the same English word, I think obscures that little nuance of difference. I like the phrase, how good is life? Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so here's what I'm gonna invite us to do. We're gonna take a step forward to the next set of lines. We're gonna do the same thing, observe. But then we're gonna back up and look at how one and two, what happens when you look at one and two together

as if they are one thing and see what pops out. And so in terms of like a reading method, we just observed. All we did was observe. And then we saw something there that I feel like we're not making up that it's structured this way. And we let it guide our minds. Let's go on to the next line, shall we? Rather, in the instruction, remember that's the word Torah, in the Torah of Yahweh is his delight. And on his Torah, he meditates day and night. So notice there is a symmetry, there's the patterning. The word instruction of Yahweh occurs at these two moments. So it's, you could say two poetic lines related to God's instruction. What about them? So this rather is a little binder to verse one, isn't it? It's a contrast. So here's three things the good life man doesn't do. Flip it, well, what does he do? Does he only not do things? That's a pretty boring life, only not do things. What does he do, right? So you're flipping it. So you get this word that transitions you. Well, what's the positive? The positive statement is both are phrasing two lines about Yahweh's instruction. What about it? One, it's just his delight. He just thinks it's the coolest, most beautiful,

wonderful thing in the world. And on his Torah, he meditates day and night. You could say these A lines are the same. They're about Yahweh's Torah. So what's different between them is the B lines. So delight and meditate, just set right alongside each other. So let's haggah. What is the relationship between delighting and haggah? So now you know something about haggah. How would you describe that relationship? I would say it's like love. Your love is your delight, which makes you just wanna spend time with your lover day and night. And that's what Torah's meant. It's not like some instruction that you're supposed to obey out of fear, some set of rules that you have to stand by. It's actually love of God expressed. in his, like, desire, and when you delight in it, you're actually in love with him. And the spirit makes you in love with God. And then you don't want to let go of it. You just want to be with your lover. Like, when you're in love, you don't want to have other plans, you want to just go spend time with the one you love. Well said. We focus our attention on people and or things

and you find delight. It's really hard to focus your attention on something if you're not just taken with it. It's actually, it's kind of misery to have to do that. Right? Yeah. It's almost like a statement of that principle of, you know, if you're trying to kick a habit that is, you know, just not helping you or is actually harmful to you, it is much easier to stop a bad habit by starting new habits, as opposed to just stop a bad habit. So there's something of that going on here. Is that word, delight, is that the same word as Eden? It's a synonym, but I love your instinct. Hafez. Yeah. Yeah, I think in my own perspective, I think there's another way in which, in my own process of saving knowledge of God, came about in reading the Ten Commandments, which is kind of strange. Most people look at the Ten Commandments and they're like, that is the most boring part. But I found profound beauty in that the Ten Commandments revealed to us the deep character of God. And so this aspect of, why do I look at his Torah? And knowing him, I love him, as Ziya was saying. And knowing him, I love him. My friend and a pastor in my life

preached a sermon on that line, and it always stuck with me. It was helpful of like, there's a cyclical nature to that. Like, it was almost like, don't feel shame if you're not delighting in it yet. But actually, the more I meditate on your scripture, I'm going to delight in it, and vice versa. The more I delight in it, the more I want to meditate on it. So it just becomes this cycle of like, delight, meditate, delight, meditate. We're going to get to this in a second, but what would you say, then, is the thing that the wicked person is delighting in? Because there's like a contrast. Like, rather, his delight. So we didn't hear the word delight in the first part. Yeah, okay, excellent, great. In other words, what you are, the contrast of our good life man with the bad guys up in one. What's the relationship of one and two? That's where your mind is going. So, let's do it, all right? Let's hold it in there. If you pause now and compare one and two both together, what do you notice? Remember our observation about how it seems more natural to say,

walk on the path of sinners, but walk was positioned up here as a way of life in the planning and thoughts of the wicked. It is interesting, this phrase, counsel of the wicked, instruction of Yahweh, because counsel and instruction are often parallel, ideas in biblical poetry and elsewhere in the Bible. So, you have different sources of instruction and planning on direction. That's interesting. Another one is, it's hidden in English, but notice every one of these lines has a preposition, doesn't walk by the counsel of the wicked, on the path of sinners, in the seat of mockers, in the instruction, on the instruction. So, those are all different English words. They're the same word in Hebrew. Here's three things that he doesn't walk. It's the letter B or bait in Hebrew. So, he doesn't walk by, on, or in. This, rather, in and on is his delight and meditation. So, there's a very deliberate contrast. What the good life man does is the source of his delight. Does that give me some sort of back illumination to this portrait of the bad guys? Are they bad guys just because they're bad guys? What is it that motivates and drives someone to do anything? Sia just gave us a wonderful little reflection on how we do what we are taken with, and captivated by, and there's an aesthetic,

emotional, right, draw there. And that leads to a reflection back here, where, what is it? How do I find myself in paths or habits of decision? making that actually are not good for myself, but I keep doing them. I must be getting something from it. I see the opposite of love, which is hatred. Hatred is depicted in the word mockers. You mock someone you hate. And when we look at the world around us, the world is filled with hatred. Different tribes fighting each other all the time. We read this in the Bible, too. And it's actually because of our fallen nature. We gravitate towards our differences more than our similarities, even in the church. I was once picturing, weirdly, a runway where you're watching everybody walk their path, and you're sitting in that seat laughing and pointing and delighting and being so happy in your judgment seat towards others. So maybe that's the contrast. And it kind of justifies it, because as you laugh at others, you want to make yourself feel better and forget about the condition that you're in. Perhaps we could have ended up with the same discussion by just asking first, what sticks out to you? We started with, what is similar in terms of the design of these two lines? And how does the similarity draw your attention to things that are similar, but also they're really different? What's the relationship of mocking and delight? That's where this all started. And that's a really productive meditation, actually. You can actually do this with friends. But as a facilitator, it is about focusing the conversation to begin with things that are not my imagination, that are really there. And then once you notice what's really there, then I feel like, let's respond to what's there, and then let the conversation kind of unfold. We'll keep doing it, but I'm just providing a meta-commentary right there. Onward, verse 3. So, we went from, how good is life for the man who, three things he doesn't do. Two things he does do, but the two things are really one thing. He delights and therefore haggaz on Yahweh's instruction. And he will become like a tree, planted by streams of water, which gives its fruit in its time, and its leaf does not wither. And everything he will do, he makes successful. So, just a couple of observations. We've shifted to a new metaphor of people are like trees. So, that's an analogy or a comparison set

up here, the word like does. What's interesting is, the first line establishes that good life man is like a tree. Then our next two lines, you're just living within the people like tree metaphor, because he doesn't say, and it's like he gives fruit in its time, and it's like his leaf doesn't wither. You're just inhabiting it fully as a metaphor. You're just watching a tree, and the guy has faded into the background. But then in the last line, you leave the tree metaphor, and you come back to good life man, because while trees produce fruit and don't wither, it's a little odd to say a tree goes about doing things and is really successful at the things that they do. That sounds like you're talking about a human again. So, notice how you begin and end with the human, but the human is like a tree, which then allows you to live in the tree metaphor for the middle two lines. I'm just noticing the flow of thought. So, once that's its basic shape, what's the purpose? Think of other ways you could have said it. He will be really successful, no matter what he does, like a tree. There's many ways you could have worded it. So, what is it about this particular shape? What does it strike in your minds, and what do you notice from how it's designed? I think the verbs become and do stand out to me. It's more important to be the person that we are supposed to be before we even begin to do what we're supposed to do. It's more important to become first. And it is important to become that tree that is planted by the streams of water, which I think by the streams of water, To me, it's God himself. So not any tree, like in the desert, where it's striving to grow, but a particular tree that's by stream of water, where it's going to pull nourishment from that water. By the roots, it has spread to that water, so that it will bear fruit. And the fruit is actually what happens in our character. And I think it's very similar to the fruit of the spirit, really. The water being the spirit, and that fruit is what happens in our character.

And God is more concerned about what happens to us in our character, and how we impact the world around us, as opposed to what we do. But it's interesting that as we choose that first, what we do actually follows that. We don't even have to try. Blessing kind of follows us, like the Psalm 23 says. Hmm, thank you. Yeah, thank you for those observations. I don't know if I've noticed this before, but somehow you drawing attention to the be and the do, which that for sure is intentional, that the being precedes the doing. But what I noticed while you were talking is that the stream is something that happens to the person that makes them become that. Whereas when you get to the end by the doing, the focus is on what now the person does that goes out from them. So it's almost like who we are is gonna be shaped by something outside of ourselves. And then once that has shaped us to be who we are, then we will produce out of that. The streams of water make me become something that once I become that, I do it. And then the success and the activity goes out from me. Then you get the metaphor of the leaf and the fruit in the middle there. It's so interesting,

because that like speaking of influence ties back to Psalm, the one and two verses with the instruction, the counsel of the wicked and the instruction of Yahweh, juxtaposing what is influencing the good man or the other. You're saying you're linking the Torah instruction with the stream. Yeah, yeah, that's right. This seems like a progression in my mind here, like a tree is planted, then it gives fruit. And then the next step might be like withering, but this one does not. Yes, yeah, right. Perpetual, the fruit in its time speaks to a seasonality, right? But the perpetual leafiness, yeah, fruit comes and goes depending on the time. But then there's also something that transcends the seasons. So yeah, thank you. So we've got this, what do you say? There's a cyclical nature to the fruit, but then there's like a permanence. Seasonality versus permanence. In the Catholic tradition, we have this phrase, agere sequitur esse, which is Latin for act follows being. The type of being you are will reveal itself and how your actions are lived out. And so the tree here being lower on the hierarchy of being, by its very nature, it produces fruit. It doesn't have to think through it, it just does it.

Whereas humanity, we have this divine life as part of us and this freedom to choose. And so the blessed man, the one whose life is good, as he chooses, as he habituates the action of meditating upon the Torah, it becomes so innate to him that merely by his nature, he does this act of loving God. I no longer have to think about loving God because my nature is so habituated into doing this that I just live this way. And so by becoming, as he draws into himself the Torah, these streams of water, as the tree does, then by nature, he just begins to do it. Yeah, you could say, looking about now, kind of thinking about one through three as a whole, I'm just gonna restate what I heard you say. There's that. So verse one focused on the good life man, proactive, intentional action and choice. Whereas verse three, he feels very passive. Something's happening to him, right? The water is happening to the tree and then the tree just does this of itself, so to speak. So here is, there's a passive. passivity and the naturalness, whereas here in verse 1 there's like an activity and intentionality. And then the pivot between those is who's shaping you, or what, right? The instruction. And whether your delight leads you to mock, which is the end result of this chain of almost like degenerating of humanness, or your delight can open you up to something that makes you produce beauty and fruitfulness, but in a way that it's almost like it takes no effort. But really it was the proactivity and the receptivity, verses 1 and 3, that stuck out

to me. How do you define successful more? A two-part question. My translation says prosper. I think that often trips me up in a way, where I think about the devil's advocate of like, what is this actually promising? And what about someone who does all this and becomes all this, but they don't feel or they don't experience being successful or prospering? And it's just like an archetype of, yeah, the majority will be this, but also bad things happen. Like how much can I bank on this to be true for all of us? That tension always like trips me up. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You almost have to let, being the introduction of the Psalm scroll, have to let the rest of the Psalm scroll fill out what defines success. Because what mostly is going to define success is going to be the David archetype, who spent a long period of his life being successful, but only being recognized as successful in the eyes of God. And mostly he was on the run, afraid for his life. And then once he did achieve success, he totally like ruined it through, right? Inappropriate sexual desire. It's sort of like you get a very simple binary portrait of the good and the bad, failure and success. And then once that's there, then the rest of the Psalm scroll problematizes both of those and fills them out more. But Psalm 1 doesn't do it by itself. And in a way, Psalm 2 will come along and nuance things and then 3 and then 4. But thank you for raising that. Okay. I have to artificially stop us. One, just to give us a brain break for the moment. Then create space to take in the second half of the poem, the three lines. So, to be continued, but let's pause for a moment before we move on to the second half.