“God begins where words end.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel
One morning, many years ago, I sat on a beach and began to recite my Hebrew morning prayers, by heart. The words of gratitude and praise came easy, mumbled since childhood, sometimes more intentional, and sometimes not. But on this morning, quietly on an empty beach, the words suddenly vanished, and what rose instead was an insight: Before there were words in my ancestral tradition, verses of poetry and prayer repeated by wise poets and elders - there was just silence, quiet contemplation, breath and stillness, in and out.
Yet the words, auspicious, hallowed, venerated and safeguarded by each generation are actually mere vessels - not the ultimate purpose of prayer. The stillness is what it is all about.
Other words came into my mind that morning - words I also vaguely knew by heart but only later learned where they come from: Today’s psalm.
“For You, Silence is Praise.”
The poet of these pslams, as all poets do, used words to paint the infinite, with knowledge that they’ll never do but they are what we have.
But if you didn’t know the Hebrew origin you’d likely miss the silent praise that’s at the center of this poem. Most translations into English choose a more opaque translation:
לְךָ֤ דֻֽמִיָּ֬ה תְהִלָּ֓ה אֱלֹ֘הִ֥ים בְּצִיּ֑וֹן וּ֝לְךָ֗ יְשֻׁלַּם־נֶֽדֶר׃
Praise befits You in Zion, O God;
vows are paid to You;
Ps. 65:2
Robert Alter got it right:
“To You silence is praise”
In his commentary he writes:
“Despite many divergent interpretations of the Hebrew noun dumiyah, the most likely meaning, in view of other biblical occurrences of the verbal root it reflects, is “silence.” The speaker begins this psalm of praise--in a paradoxical gesture regarding speech and silence familiar in poetry in many languages, all the way to the early modernist French poet Stéphane Mallarmé--by affirming that the subject of the poem, God’s greatness, is beyond what language can express, so that silence alone is due praise. The poet, however, cannot remain silent, and he goes on to celebrate God’s goodness.”
What my intuition taught me that morning on the beach was already hidden in this psalm, which goes on to describe the mighty force of the divine - on every hill and every beachfront, praising, wordless or not, the energy of life itself:
מַשְׁבִּ֤יחַ ׀ שְׁא֣וֹן יַ֭מִּים שְׁא֥וֹן גַּלֵּיהֶ֗ם וַהֲמ֥וֹן לְאֻמִּֽים׃
“who stills the raging seas,
the raging waves, and tumultuous peoples.
Ps. 65:8
With time, the words, still loved, still helpful roadsigns, sit back and let the silence swallow, gently, the morning.
Each wave and every breath a gift of quiet presence, praise, and prayer, poetry in motion, day by day by day. Shhhhhh.
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This reminds me of the book Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. Beautiful book. And thank you for this. I love this Psalm.