Originally broadcast July 2, 2010
PAMELA GREENBERG (Poet and writer, The Complete Psalms): I began the translation at a very dark time in my life. I came to religion as an adult really as an act of desperation. I felt I needed to believe in something, and I struggled with depression. I had an intuition that in the psalms I would find something of the relationship to God that I was looking for.
The psalms are full of longing for God, a longing to experience God more intimately. I think mostly for Christians the psalms represent exactly what they do for Jews, which is the person of faith standing up in relation to God in a very honest and genuine way, and I think in that way they speak to all of us.
The great thing about the psalms is that they address really the whole spectrum of human emotion, from intense despair and feelings of abandonment by God, feelings of betrayal by humankind, fear of mortality, to great joy and jubilance.
(reading from translation of Psalm 23): “And when I walk through the valley overshadowed by death, I will fear no harm, for you are with me.”
In translating Psalm 23, I was very aware that it is the psalm that people are most familiar with, and so I wrestled with it. It seemed to me to be a psalm that addressed the fear of mortality, and it’s about death but it’s really for the people who are living, and it’s also about the kind of spiritual death that we experience in our lives, distance from God.
The psalms are very important to people who are suffering, because illness can leave us feeling very distant and cut off from God, and for people to feel that there’s a way to talk to God, even from those periods of intense, almost unbearable torment was very transformative.
To my mind, anger at God is a part of religious life. In Psalm 39, for instance, the psalmist is saying, “I am getting ready to walk away from you. My interaction with you brings only pain and sorrow. Answer me before I leave.” And to me that’s religious speech.
I did wrestle with, I would say, particularly with the concept of the enemy in the psalms. Psalm 109, verse 8, which is a psalm that wishes destruction upon the enemy in very vivid terms, and that kind of thing terrifies me. You do find within the psalms wishes for revenge upon the enemy. In my understanding, those expressions are really meant to diffuse the kind of human anger that we experience by articulating them, by placing that revenge in the hands of God rather than in human hands.
The psalms are very much concerned with justice, while at the same time looking around the world and seeing the injustice of the world and crying out to God saying, “God, you who created the heavens and earth, why can’t you create justice on earth?”
The psalms that praise God are also important because they situate joy within the context of a relationship with God, which makes joy more than simply moments of happiness within a person’s life. But it sort of gives joy more of an eternal context.
The ending of the Book of Psalms is a crescendo of praise. The very last psalm, Psalm 150: “Praise God with cymbals that ring loudly. Praise God with cymbals that come crashing down. Let everything that breathes praise God. Shine forth your praises on God.”
VERGHESE: (Speaking to students) This is what’s called pulmonary redistribution. Have you heard that term? It’s an early sign of heart failure. Who’s got good hand veins that I can borrow?
VERGHESE: I’m the first to admit that the resolution of a hand feeling the belly doesn’t compare with the resolution of a CAT scan scanning the belly, but only my hand can say that it hurts at this spot and not at this spot. Only my hand can say that. Only my hand can say that this pulsatile mass, which might be an aneurism, is also painful, which is therefore maybe a leaking aneurism. You know, there are nuances to the exam that no machine is going to give you.
Woman at Book Club: You said that what really inspired you to write the book was you wanted to write a book that would get people interested perhaps in medicine. But there was so much in the book about faith and different types of faith, and so how did you come to have so much of this, of another theme in your book?
BROTHER DAVID: We cannot be grateful for war. That’s an unmitigated evil. We cannot be grateful for exploitation, for untimely death. But we can be grateful in every situation. The key word is “opportunity.” If you catch onto that, then if we are in practice, when something comes along for which we cannot be grateful, spontaneously we will—our mind will say, “Well, what’s this the opportunity for now?” And there’s always an opportunity for something positive, usually the opportunity to learn something new, even in the worst situations, or for the opportunity to do something. If we learn of an injustice we have the opportunity to stand up and to speak up and to do something.
BROTHER DAVID: “Word” is not just vocabulary, but “word” is everything that speaks to us, and in this sense a flower can be a word that speaks to me. A poem as a whole can be a word that speaks to me, a piece of art, everything. It speaks to me. It tells me something, it tells me something about ultimate reality. That’s a mystic insight that every human being can appreciate, I think, and experience, if we only allow ourselves.
OLSON: A pioneer in the Christian-Buddhist dialogue, he returns frequently to Tassajara, a Zen monastery in California where he lived for several years. As part of the dialogue with Buddhism, Brother David trained in Zen meditation and joined in Buddhist rituals. He says the task of interreligious dialogue today is to understand the meaning beneath the words of particular creeds or beliefs, to discover the faith that underlies these words that we all share.
ABERNETHY: Kidder says at sessions like this one over 20 years he has talked ethics with 40,000 people. The first step is easy, he says: telling right from wrong. You ask, is this illegal? Against the rules? If not, another question:
ABERNETHY: Kidder says younger children lie, but don’t cover it up. Older kids do both.
ABERNETHY: Of all the ethical issues the group raised, the most troubling was how to handle computers and new social media like Facebook.
KIDDER: There is now so much power and so much immediacy in the technology that a single unethical decision put into the system can have consequences that it never could have had 30, 40, 50 years ago.
MOTHER: They want their kids to be connected with the family again.
When Washington was elected president, Jewish communities around the nation sent him letters of congratulations, and they did so along with other religious communities around the country. Washington replied to a number of those letters, but the most famous reply was to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, stating that the government of the United States would give “
At the same time freedom makes possible the potential for integration at a level that Jews had experienced at very few times in their history, it also makes possible the ultimate choice, which is to not be Jewish, and in some ways this is one of the inner dramas of the American Jewish experience. It’s negotiating between heritage and homeland.