Psalm 137, entire

[1] By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

[2] On the willows there we hung up our harps.

[3] For there our captors asked us for words of song,
and our tormentors, for mirth:
"Sing to us from the songs of Zion!"

[4] How could we sing the song of the LORD on an alien land?

[5] If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill,

[6] May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

[7] Remember, O LORD, against the sons of Edom
the day of Jerusalem's fall, those who said:
"Tear it down!  Tear it down to its foundation!"

[8] O daughter of Babylon that will be devastated:
Fortunate is the man who repays you what you have done to us;

[9] Fortunate is the man who will seize and dash
your little ones against the rock!


      Morning Prayers talk, Wednesday, 10 December 2003

                Blessed be the Baby-Killers?
        The dark side of Psalm 137 [Rivers of Babylon]


A shocking conclusion, I think you'll agree.  It's not just the image
of the bashed brains of Babylonian babies that can still shock us
now, some twenty-five hundred years after this Psalm was written;
not even finding this image in the Bible -- God knows, there are
enough disturbing images in the Bible, even in the Book of Psalms.
But in this particular psalm!  The opening lines are so familiar;
they have been recited for centuries and centuries, and sung in church,
in the concert hall, on the pop airwaves, and even on the Broadway
stage of _Godspell_.  During our Revolutionary War, this psalm
must have been so well known that the hymn composer William Billings
could write a "Lamentation over Boston" to the text "By the rivers
of Watertown we sat down, and wept when we remembered ... Boston",
after the colonists were driven out of the city.  I'm not kidding;
you can find it yourself on the Internet: [sing first phrase].
But hardly anybody -- not Billings, not the creators of _Godspell_,
not today's Morning Choir -- hardly anybody ever sets to music
those last few verses.  It's not just the transition from the
"songs of Zion" to infanticide that's so jarring, but also that repeated
word "fortunate" -- "ashrei" in Hebrew.  "Ashrei" is a favorite word
in the Psalms, indeed the opening word of the very first psalm,
which we just read.  The Latin Bible even renders "ashrei" as "beatus"
-- blessed, as in "Blessed is the man who fears the LORD" [Ps.112:1].
But "Blessed is the man who dashes thy babies on the rock"!?
How did we get there from the rivers of Babylon?


Well, first there's the famous oath, where the Psalmist goes from
the plural -- *we* sat down, *our* captors, how can *we* sing --
to the singular, and swears: "If *I* forget thee, O Jerusalem,
may my right hand..." may my right hand what?  The translators
can't agree: "may my right hand forget its skill"?  "...forget
its cunning"?  "...be forgotten"? "may my right hand wither"
[as in the Bible used by Harvard's Memorial Church]?  The Hebrew
word means "paralyzed": "may my right hand be paralyzed".
But it's the same verb as "forget", and most translators use
some form of this verb to keep the effect of reciprocity:
if I "eshkach" (forget), may my right hand "tishkach" (be paralyzed).

It goes on: may my right hand be paralyzed; may my tongue cleave
to the roof of my mouth -- that is, may I also lose the power of speech!
This is not an arbitrary pairing.  The doctors and neuroscientists
in the congregation will recognize the devastating symptoms
of a major stroke to the dominant, left side of the brain,
which controls both speech and the right side of the body.
Even in 2003, such a stroke is a horrifying and irreversible misfortune.
To the Judean exiles in Babylon, it could only be divine retribution.

Once the poet of this psalm has accepted this principle of reciprocity
for himself if he ever forgets Jerusalem, he goes on to apply it to the
"sons of Edom" -- the Babylonians -- who sacked Jerusalem and reveled
in its destruction.  He prophesies that Babylon, in turn, will be devastated,
and states explicitly the principle of reciprocity: "repay you for what
you have done to us".  That this repayment will be *divine* retribution
is implicit in the address "Remember, O LORD", and maybe also by the use
of "ashrei".  The final, startling verse of the psalm, with the same
"ashrei": "Fortunate the man who will seize and dash your little ones"
-- must then be the spelling out of "what you have done to us".


This also throws new light on the opening few verses, up to the cry
"How could we sing the song of the LORD on a foreign land?".
On the surface, this makes no sense -- the LORD is everywhere,
in Jerusalem but also in Babylon.  Going only by the first verse,
we might be reminded of the homesick Southerner who cries a river
but canna sing the blues in Cambridge.  Then it gets worse: not only
are we exiles, but it is the Babylonians, those who captured us,
who would hear the songs of our hometown.  Only at the end do we learn
that they also destroyed our homes, seized *our* little children,
and dashed our children against the rock as we watched helpless --
and now they want us to entertain them with the songs of the LORD!


In the event, the Babylonian exile lasted only 48 years.  Six centuries
later began a second exile that would last almost two millennia.
The oath, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem...", became a key text
for the Jews, dispersed throughout the known world and often subjected
to abuses and injuries comparable to those of the first exile.

I ran across a unexpected echo of this psalm some five years ago,
while researching the musical background for my opera,
which is set in a mid-1800's Jewish community in Eastern Europe.
Most of the tradition of Jewish music was handed down orally, without
the benefit of music notation, which Jews often viewed with suspicion
since it was the notation of church music.  In 1838, Salomon Sulzer,
a famous Viennese cantor, published one of the first collections
of synagogue music transcribed from this oral tradition into
Western music notation.  Its title: "Schir Zion" -- the song of Zion!
Two words that capture a profound ambivalence.  Not only is this
literally the song of Zion in a foreign land, but also on the terms
of the masters of this land: that is, in the musical notation of their
religious music.


The second exile ended for many Jews only a few generations ago,
with the founding of Israel in 1948 and the unification of Jerusalem
in 1967.  But that is another psalm -- the 126th, probably written
after the return from the first exile -- for another talk, another day.

Thank you.