What helps you create containers of protection and presence?
Incense has been used in rituals in all ancient cultures and remains a favorite way to add aroma and intention in many contexts to this day. The pillar of smoke connects earth and heaven, and whatever aroma it burns briefly shifts our familiar into liminal space/time. The ancient Hebrew temple rites included fresh incense every dawn and dusk, with 11 ingredients.
For the poets of this psalm, exiles reminiscing on the long-gone days of their temple, daily incense becomes yet another form of enduring substitutions.
They replaced the burning herbs with poems, prayers and the palms of their hands:
תִּכּ֤וֹן תְּפִלָּתִ֣י קְטֹ֣רֶת לְפָנֶ֑יךָ מַֽשְׂאַ֥ת כַּ֝פַּ֗י מִנְחַת־עָֽרֶב׃
Take my prayer as an offering of incense,
my upraised hands as an evening gift.
Ps. 141:2
The Midrash on Psalms, written centuries later, ponders the meaning of "take my prayer" and puts words in the mouth of the poet to whom this chapter is ascribed - King David.
“David said:"My master. When the temple was in existence we offered incense before you. Now that we don’t have an altar and we don’t have a high priest accept my prayer and open up the heavens so my prayer can enter.”
The setting is, of course, impossible. David lived before there was a temple in Jerusalem. The Midrash blurs realities to give gravity to the words that are supposed to be like smoke. It took centuries for the longing for the temple ritual to subside, and to eventually evolve to a set of daily prayers. No longer priests, but local sages would become the ones to connect communities to the sacred. Not with sacrificial animals or daily rites of fire - but just with melodies, memories, hand gestures, and words.
Psalm 141 pleads for protection, and offers us an ancient helpful tool for tending to our own temples of self protection. Their creative adaptation is an invitation for taking our own sacred time, perhaps at dusk, to lift up our words, like incense, lifting up our palms, ‘our upraised hands an evening present’ of quiet presence and contemplation, to make of each sunset a psalm. In the quiet palms of our hands.
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