Psalm 137:he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

You know the begining of it even if you think you don’t know any of the Psalms. It has been sung even on Broadway as the basis for a ballad in ‘Godspell’. The guy with the big ‘S’ on his chest sings it and everyone gets weepy. Shosh really loved that one. We saw that show together three or four times in different theaters and had planned for it to be the first production we mounted after college. Then she was killed. Sometimes it feels like I’m stuck in a moment I can’t get out of about her, because she was taken unexpectedly with things unfinished before they had even really begun. Maybe it aches lately because I think of the woman she would have become. We were friends. I can’t imagine what parents who lose a child go through. Psalm 137 is not the weeping of one parent for one child, but of a people for the loss of their nation and themselves. It a grief as profound as humanity is capable of expressing. 

Psalm 137 begins with the musicians at the river Babylon weeping and hanging up their harps. Their tormentors demand of them that they sing the holy joyous songs of Zion. They ask, how can they sing the holy songs in a foreign land? The singer then swears an oath that his hand should never play or his tongue never sing if he should forget Jerusalem or not consider it his truest joy. Then he imprecates God to remember what the Babylonians did to Jerusalem, how they tore it down to it’s foundations, and finally he curses the daughters of Babylon by saying that happy will be the man who does to them what had been done to the Children of Zion; their infants snatched from their hands and dashed on the rocks.

A theme that runs throughout Holocaust literature is to ‘never forget’. Never forget the trains, never forget the camps, never forget the slaughter of the innocents. The survivors of a genocide may well want to forget, to scatter to anonymous safety and never speak of the horror they witnessed again. Psalm 137 is a song of witness and rememberance, a way for the captive Jews to retain their identity and dream of Jerusalem. It is a song of defiance that exhorts the listener to remember the crimes of Babylon, to keep the memory of Jerusalem fresh, and ends with an emotionally vivid image that is unforgettable. Seventy years after the destruction of the First Temple the Persians defeated Babylon and 40,000 Jews returned from exile. The Persians funded the rebuilding of the Temple. The singer of this Psalm did his work well as the Jewish faith and tradition were still intact even if immeasurably transformed by the time they emerged from this captivity.

The last lines of Psalm 137 are very unsettling, so much so that when it is set to music those lines are never sung, which is why they may come as a shock to people who, for example, have seen ‘Godspell’ but haven’t read the Bible. Most of the Psalms are praise songs that were sung in the temple and as such kind of flow by in a blur when they are read today. They’re generally similar in theme and content in that they are praising God and celebrating the building of the Temple. These are the songs that the singer of 137 is refusing to sing to his captors. For me, 137 gives the rest of the Psalms a powerful context that demonstrates these are not empty verses of pretty words but rather the sacred songs of a people who survived genocide and slavery. The pain of the singer of 137 can be understood thousands of years later by people who live in a nation undreamed of by the singer or his captors; it is truly universal.

Psalm 137 has nothing to do with abortion, homosexuality, or any of the things that contemporary people argue about. To take pieces of Biblical texts and then use them to justify our positions on gay marriage or contraception is to do a disservice to the texts and our positions. Recently in debate with antichoice advocates who support Dobson’s attack on Obama I have cited scripture that undermines their position and their response has been to show a liberal acceptance of relativism in regard to translation and interpretation of Biblical verses that isn’t there at all when the discussion is concerning, say, Genesis and evolution or Leviticus and homosexuality. Dobson attacked Obama for that very same sort of reading of the text. It seems that fundamentalists will insist that their Bible is the inerrant and exact Word of God until it no longer suits their arguments for it to be so. The Bible is many things; literature, a historical document, and a sacred text. It is not a magic book that replaces our need to think for ourselves. It is not a magic book that means only one thing or converesely, whatever we want it to mean. To believe it is a magic book that does anything other than contain what it contains is to misunderstand what it contains.