Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee – "Through not For"

One of the many mistakes we religious types can make is we think God's blessings are for us. Only for us to be kept to ourselves and not shared with others. We're exactly backwards. Genesis 12 promises to make God's chosen Israel a blessing to the nations. God elects Israel so as through Israel to bless all the nations.

God's blessings are the sort you can't keep unless you give them away. The prepositions are really important. God's blessings are not to Israel, they're through Israel for everyone else.

Psalm 79 is a song of national devastation. The worst has happened to Israel. She is a waste, her servants die and lay unburied. The nations shake their heads in pity.

When the worst happens, it's a good idea to revisit the basics. The story is told of a Texas high school football team getting beat 79 to nothing at halftime. The coach realizes he needs to start at the beginning, so he holds up a pigskin and says, "Gentlemen, this is a football."

The basics. One might think the Psalmist is weirdly focused on the opinion of Israel's neighbors, unless you remember this foundation story. Israel is elect to bless its neighbors to show them who God is and what humanity can be. But now the neighbors pity and mock and deride us, and some of those neighbors are the very ones who conquered us without pity.

The psalmist prays, "God, pour out your anger on them, give us vengeance against them, pay them back worse than we were treated." So here, Israel is again situated in the midst of the nations, but now passing on not blessings but retribution.

The restoration of equilibrium. Don't judge unless you face the story of devastation Israel has here.

Well, here's a deep truth, a basic, foundational biblical teaching. When the worst has happened, look up, God is about to move.

When the unimaginable has happened, exhale. What more can they do to you?

When the worst has happened, rejoice. What else do you have to fear?

Our Jewish elder siblings are about to mark Rosh Hashanah, the beginning of the Jewish New Year. It might be a strange time to say happy New Year to one another, but we Christians have also marked the New Year at other times than January 1st. To be technical, the Christian New Year starts with Advent late November, early December. But I think this is better.

For centuries, we mark new years on March 25th, exactly nine months before Jesus' birth. We call it Annunciation Day. When the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and says, "You're going to have a kid," and she says, "I am a kid."

And the angel says, "Shut up, you're going to have a kid, and this kid will be God's kid and will save everybody. What do you say?"

And all Creation and all the Angelic host, and even God, waits for the word of an unmarried Jewish teenager from the sticks. What will she say to God's wild scheme to save Creation?

Okay.

Or, to be a little more biblical about it, "Here am I the handmaid of the Lord? Let it be to me according to Thy word." March 25th is perfect for the New Year. It's when God begins repairing everything we've ruined.

Once in a while, Annunciation Day matches up with Good Friday. This got our ancestors to wondering, as they do, the martyrology of Jerome marvels this way: "On March 25th, our Lord was conceived and crucified, and the world was made."

That's the day God starts good things. Early Church folks figured it must also have been the day of the crossing of the Red Sea, the Exodus. And apparently, if you're paying attention to Tolkien, that's the day the ring of power is thrown back into Mount Doom. Annunciation Day, New Year.

Back to basics, our Jewish elder siblings sometimes know devastation better than most of us Christians. The Shoah is still living memory, and October 7th, 2023, was the worst attack on Jews since the Nazis.

Here in Toronto, when my church does joint events with synagogues like Rabbi Yael's, we Christians get to experience the price of security that our Jewish neighbors assume daily.

Synagogues, similar in size to us, spend half to three quarters of a million dollars a year on security, the literal price of being Jewish in Toronto. I can imagine the good you could do with six, nearly seven figures.

In the Psalm, we pray that God would hear the groans of the prisoners and move. That's an echo of the exodus, when God hears our groans in slavery and comes down, an echo of slaves on this continent and elsewhere. When God hears our cries and moves, and then all the nations see and fear and give God praise.

God, would you hear the captives' cries now once more?

We Christians, a Gentile church grafted in Jesus Christ into the promises of Israel, see ourselves in Gentiles streaming to Zion offering praise. Prophets like Micah and Isaiah promise that, at the end of time, even Gentiles, can you believe it? Even Gentiles will worship Israel's God. The very people who once sacked and ruined and pillaged Jerusalem will fold the hands in prayer and sing the praise of Abraham's God and come to Zion bringing gifts.

That's the blessing of God through Israel to all the nations. We have lively disagreements with our Jewish friends about the nature of the Messiah and when he's coming, and so on. But we agree that blessings aren't meant to stop with God's people. They pass on to the nations on New Year's Day and every day.

We also agree on this. Here's a basic. In the Psalms, God likes praise, we like being alive, so we strike a grand bargain with God.

In prayer, you restore us to life, and we will never stop praising you, never until the praise of God covers the earth, like the waters cover the sea.

Rabbi Yael Splansky – "Insisting on Song: Cracking the Code on Psalm 79"

This Psalm, 79, is introduced as Mizmor la Asaf, a song of Asaf. The 12 Psalms of Asaf are attributed to someone we don't know much about. We can assume Asaf was a Levite, a descendant of the Line of Moses and a great musician who filled Jerusalem's temple with ritual song. I try to imagine what kind of melody Maestro Asaf attached to these haunting verses about the destruction of Jerusalem's first temple in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians.

Perhaps he is the one who began the long-standing Jewish inclination to set our music in minor keys. Psalm 79 sounds like a lament. Elohim ba 'u goyim Benachalatecha tim 'u et heichal Kodeshecha samu et Yerushalayim le 'yim.

O God, foreign nations have entered your domain, they have defiled your Holy Temple, and they have turned Jerusalem to ruins. But Rashi, the great 11th century sage from the Jewish academies along the Rhine River, insists that Psalm 79 is not a lament, but a song and an occasion for singing. Why? Rashi answers, "Because God poured out his fury on the wood and stones of the temple, rather than utterly destroying his children."

I find this to be a very moving and very challenging testimonial of faith. In his own time, Rashi was an eyewitness to the massacres of the first crusades. And somehow he was willing to see God's restraint in the devastation because some survived.

Rashi's own teachers were murdered and their books burned, so he devoted the rest of his life to writing down every teaching he ever received from them. And in this remnant of the Jewish people, Rashi sees God's grace. It could have been worse. God completely destroyed only the temple, only the wood and stones, but allowed some of the Jerusalemites to survive the sword and the fire.

Only some were taken as captives into exile. Rashi determines that there is something praiseworthy about the survival of the few, something even song-worthy. By chance, Rashi survived the crusades. And instead of lamenting all that was lost and all that was taken, he rescues God from theological ruin and declares that Psalm 79 is not a lament, but a song.

I have to say that when it was suggested we would study Psalm 79 together, I couldn't help but read it through the lens of the massacre of the early holiday morning of October 7, 2023. It is the trauma that still haunts Israelis and Jews throughout the diaspora. Our history of fire and blood has returned, we have been forced back into history, the history that many believed was over and gone.

The Psalmist recalls שָׁפְּחו דַּמַם כְּמַיִּם. Their blood was shed like water. And out of the 251 hostages who were taken that day of October 7, children, women, elderly men, 50 hostages remain in the tunnels of Gaza to this very day.

The Psalmist cries out תַּבו לְפָּנֶחָה אֶנְכָּת אַתִּיר. Let the groans of the captives reach you, reprieve those condemned to death. And, adding insult to injury, the Psalm describes the abandonment of the nations of the world who look on and say that the attack was somehow justified.

היינו חרפה בשכנינו. We have become a mockery among our neighbors. The scorn and ridicule of those around us. Echoes of the personal loneliness and the national isolation described by the Psalmist, are felt again today. Which is why the friendship of Rev. Biasi and his congregation, the Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto, are so appreciated and so important.

In preparing for today, I found myself revisiting a Talmudic text that I hadn't thought about in years, and I discovered something there I never noticed before. The Babylonian Talmud, completed around the year 500 of the Common Era, is made up of 36 volumes. On page 31 of Tractate Kiddushin, we find the following story: One day, Rabbi Abahu said to his son, Avimi, "Give me water to drink."

Avimi went at once to fetch the water, but by the time he came back, Rabbi Abahu had fallen asleep. So what did Avimi do? He waited and stood over his father, with the water in his hand, until Rabbi Abahu woke up. Now I knew that story and I thought it ended there, it could have ended there, but it doesn't.

It continues: It is taught that Avimi was rewarded for how he performed this sacred obligation to his father, and what was his reward? God helped him in his studies of Psalm 79. Because Avimi provided for his father as respectfully and as patiently as he did, God gave him insight to successfully interpret Psalm 79.

So let's unpack this Talmudic tale. What might it come to teach us first, that Psalm 79 is not easy to grasp? The rabbis here admit, friends, if you are struggling to understand the meaning of this Psalm, you are in good company.

What else do we learn here? That there is something about the way this grown son, Avimi, attended to his father that helped him crack the code on this Psalm? What insight did he gain from that experience of standing over his sleeping father?

How did that cup become heavy in his hand? What could possibly be the link between the private, quiet, precious mitzvah of honoring an elderly parent and the very loud and chaotic and public destruction of Jerusalem a thousand years earlier? Truth is, I don't really know, but I suspect it might have something to do with Verse 5: Ad Ma Adonai. Te 'enaf lanetzach. How long, o God, will you be angry forever?

This question of how long is asked 15 times in 10 Psalms in three different ways: Ad ma, ad matai. Until what? until when? What are you waiting for?

I taught this series of psalms during the pandemic, when we in Canada were in lockdown for a long stretch. And this was the question, how long will this go on? When we know how long we have to endure hardship, it's somehow easier to endure. But when the timeline is open-ended and unknown, it's harder to be patient, it's harder to be brave.

Avimi must have asked these questions while standing over his father. For how long am I going to have to stand here holding this cup? How long before I can get back to work? Or to my own kids who need me?

How long is my father going to sleep? How long is my father going to live? How long before I become an orphan? Avimi's personal experience earned him insight into the Psalmist's question, "How long?" It is a rhetorical question that does not expect an answer.

We can ask, but only God knows. Time belongs to the eternal one. Similarly, the Jew of history asks Ad Matai, Ad ma, Until when? Until what?

The Psalmist asked it about the destruction of the first temple at the hands of the Babylonians. Jesus must have asked it during the build-up to the destruction of the second temple at the hands of the Romans. Rashi asked it during the time of the crusades.

My grandfather asked it during the Holocaust. I ask it now. A kind of answer comes in the very last verse of our Psalm: Fa 'anachnu amcha v'tzon mar 'itecha noda lecha le 'olam le'dor va'dor nisaper tehilatecha.

Then we, your people, the flock you shepherd, shall glorify you forever, from generation to generation, we shall tell your praises. The answer to the question, "Until when?" is forever. The answer to the question, "Until what?" is praises.

Many of us find this to be an unsatisfactory answer, but it was enough for the Psalmist, and, with God-given insight, it was enough for Avimi. And it was enough for the great Sage Rashi.

Generational praise is the assignment come what may throughout the harsh history piled onto our people. Our task is to praise the God of all life, despite the suffering, stand there and sing psalms of praise to God who is above and beyond history. This is a sacred task, a sacred burden.

Le'dor, va'dor, from generation to generation, but we get to pick the song's key, major or minor.