Meet the Divine Family

Ps. 29:1

Can we see the forest through the trees, hear the still small voice of mystery through the nonstop noise of our busy buzzing lives? What is the unity that we need so badly within this deception of competing narratives that sometimes counter each other but at core are all one?

Can we pause to ponder words we’ve sung too many times to notice what they really are about? 

Today’s PSLAM invites us to pay close attention to the inner hum of the holy, attune ourselves beyond the business of doing to attain a calmer sense of being in the world.

Perhaps that is why it was incorporated by the mystics to be one of the poems that leads us every Friday afternoon into the presence of the Sabbath Queen. It’s in the Shabbat liturgy of almost all Jewish denominations, with multiple melodies. 

The divine name is found 18 times in this psalm, and the divine voice is heard 7 times: a sacred symmetry of sound that welcomes us into the spaciousness that is the sabbath, calling us to see beyond the forest and perceive the trees, beyond the noise to become part of the music.

It’s an invitation to move from the mundane into a deeper state of perception. 

But there is more to these exultant phrases.

Hidden in the very first line is a wink at older mythological traditions, that perhaps predate the Sabbath Queen and tell of a divine reality full of beings, creatures, numinous and known. It evokes a world populated by more than meets the eye — perhaps even our inner reality, rich with voices from the past and present.

I’ve sung this psalm so many times, often with tears and deep intention, and yet, I’ve never quite paid attention to the opening words with their confusing mythic memory of multiple divine beings:

מִזְמ֗וֹר לְדָ֫וִ֥ד הָב֣וּ לַ֭יהֹוָה בְּנֵ֣י אֵלִ֑ים הָב֥וּ לַ֝יהֹוָ֗ה כָּב֥וֹד וָעֹֽז׃

A hymn by David: 

Give it to GOD, All you Children of Gods;

Give it to God, with glory and strength! 

Ps. 29:1

Wait. Who are the children of Gods - in the plural??  Is it us? Other translations keep this more vague, and possibly theologically safer:

“Ascribe unto the LORD, O ye sons of might”  is the JPS 1917 translation, or “Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty” is the King James version.  

But the Hebrew original is quite clearly talking about ‘B’nei Elim” - literally, ‘Sons of Gods’ - so who are they and what’s this doing here? 

Robert Alter was curious too, chose to translate it as ‘O sons of God’ and wrote the following note:

“This is the first clue of many that have led a whole line of scholars to see this psalm as a translation or close adaptation of a Canaanite psalm. It has been variously claimed that in the original text, it was Baal as thunder-god, not YHWH, who imposed his awesome voice over the whole world. None of these arguments is entirely convincing. Though there are parallels to certain wordings here in Ugaritic poetry (the one cache of Syro-Palestinian poetry, several centuries prior to the Bible, that has physically survived), that scarcely proves that this poem is a translation. 

Canaanite poetry was the literary tradition that constituted the most immediate background for biblical poetry. It would be surprising if the biblical poets did not make use of images, phrasing, and even mythological elements from the antecedent tradition with which they and their audiences were acquainted. 

As to the address to the “sons of God” at the beginning of the psalm, it should be noted that these celestial creatures appear not infrequently elsewhere in the Bible (Here they are beney ‘elim; more commonly, they appear as beney ‘elohim). They are best thought of as the flickering literary afterlife of a polytheistic mythology--God’s royal entourage on high, His familia, as Rashi called them, invoking a Latin term that had entered Hebrew during the time of the Roman empire. Literal belief in them may have survived in popular religion but is unlikely to have been shared by the scribal circles that produced Psalms.”

However our faith evolved over the generations, some polytheistic sense of the sacred that defies our understanding still lingers at the core of this chapter and the entire corpus of our literature. Whether there is a divine entourage of cherubim along with choirs of angels, or not, is hardly the point. What matters is that we are not alone.

When we gather in our synagogues on Friday evenings to lift our voices together, the seven sounds that echo from this psalm become our very own symphony, our way to give it back, to let our voices echo off each other, raise our vibration and consciousness. That’s who the children of the divine are about.

There is a build up through this psalm that leads us to its aspirational conclusion. Every one of the seven sounds shakes nature up, lets mountains dance like goats, trees rustle, and desert dunes reshape themselves like water -- and at the end, when the chaos of nature has calmed down for this brief moment of Shabbat, the ever-elusive peace is attained, if only for a moment.

This is the strength that is sought from the first verse onwards, and this is the blessing we need so much and sing of so often: Serenity that comes after the storms.

This last verse is the one that my mother, may she live long and healthy, like many other matriarchs before her, recites each Friday dusk after she lights the Sabbath candles, invoking our ancestors and blessing the entire family — all children of the divine, and beyond:

יְֽהֹוָ֗ה עֹ֭ז לְעַמּ֣וֹ יִתֵּ֑ן יְהֹוָ֓ה ׀ יְבָרֵ֖ךְ אֶת־עַמּ֣וֹ בַשָּׁלֽוֹם׃

 May strength be granted to GOD’s people;

may GOD bless our people with peace.

Ps. 29:11

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