“I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms…transmitted safely to this day from poets who wrote three thousand years ago… You Jew journeying in your old age through every risk to stand once on Syrian ground! You other Jews waiting in all lands for your Messiah!”
These quotes are from Walt Whitman's poem Salut Au Monde! It’s a famous ode, nowadays a little problematic, attesting to the full spectrum of love and the many expressions of the human experience on this earth.
The Syrian land is what we know of as the Holy Land, the ones that many Jews, for many generations, longed to once again call home, and regain when the Messiah finally arrives. Whitman published this in 1856, before the modern rumblings of the Zionist idea would become a movement -- but he knew of the deep longing felt by many generations since this psalm was written, with its built-in longing for the sacred safety of a homeland. Poetry is often where the deepest urges hide, and this set of poems likewise contains a few of the deepest pockets of pain and yearning in the Jewish experience throughout time, and space.
Psalm 132, almost the last of the 15 Psalms of Ascent, contains one of the kernels of this ancient hope, along with the oath that the return will happen, one day. It’s not only the people’s exhaustion from exile that is the source of the sorrow here - it is also God’s exhaustion. In this Psalm it’s the Hebrew God who wants to go back home and finally rest. This may be one of the original biblical sentiments that would yield the myth of the Shechina - the Divine Feminine that accompanied her children, the people of Israel, throughout their exiles.
It’s not atypical for ancient cultures to imagine their local deities attached to a specific geography. Even when the empire no longer exists and the temples have been toppled - the memory remains connected to the place of birth. But it’s fascinating that as Jewish history evolved beyond its original homestead, so did the mythology and theology. The exile of the divine became the comforting presence of God everywhere - in time and not in space -- while at the same time the strong sentiments of wanting to return to Zion were kept alive through the generations of prayers.
Today’s psalm claims that it is not only the people who want to go back - it’s also the deity. God makes an oath to King David, the poet: The Davidic line will stay in power -unless his heirs will stray - which they will- and they did. In case that happens - the Divine oath continues - and they lose the kingdom - they will one day return, and the Messiah, of David’s line, will then lead them to security - not just the people, but also their God:
זֹאת־מְנוּחָתִ֥י עֲדֵי־עַ֑ד פֹּה־אֵ֝שֵׁ֗ב כִּ֣י אִוִּתִֽיהָ׃
“This is my resting-place for all time;
here I will dwell, for I desire it.
Ps. 132:13
Does God need a resting place? According to the Jewish myths of exile and yearning - yes, like us, made in divine image, God does. It’s a literary projection that speaks to the enormous size of the collective loss and the ongoing resilience of this belief in the eventual return.
What held up as a fantasy for 2,000 years is now a lived reality, with many obstacles and Messianic zeal that give too few among us rest and safety, likely not even the divine.
As the age-old prophecy meets political realities, it’s helpful to remember that so many of these images were born of anguish and were meant to offer hope and direction when none seemed to be found.
What would it take to reimagine this messianic vision? Can we recreate the longing for a homeland big enough and safe enough for all its people, with the oath that was delivered here fully fulfilled - with rest assured for all of us, including the very essence of who and what we are?
On the cusp of the Day of Atonement, with big questions ahead of us, and deep need for healing and repair, I hope these poetic parts help us put some of the pieces together, a jigsaw puzzle of longing that is perhaps ultimately beyond space and time.
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