Introduction: Why Illuminate the Psalms
(n.b. this version lacks the footnotes present in the published book)
Why should I, the artist, and you, the reader, invest our time in an illuminated book of a selection of the Psalms? Before opening these parchment leaves, let us explore how a visual interpretation rendered in parchment, ink, paint and gold can help us better imagine these verses, help us both reach back to the original inspiration of the Biblical Psalms, and yet find contemporary equivalents for these awe-inspiring situations. The illuminations herein thus present a visual interpretation, a visual midrash on the selected psalms, which I hope will give not only aesthetic pleasure in their shimmering gold and color, but also a means of recapturing the sense of awe embodied in these verses.
Why do we relate to Psalms? Let us examine how we, living in a world that seeks human rather than divine intervention to solve our problems, relate to ancient Temple liturgy. The essay Beyond Literary Devices: Introduction to Psalms in this volume discusses the unquestioning faith inherent in the tradition of the “Psalmist,” the search for the face of the Divine. Today we search for human solutions and cures to countless problems, but we still often look for assurance that the “strong hand and outstretched arm” will pull us to safety. And so, although in a process accomplished by the second century of the Common Era Judaism had transformed Temple ritual into a portable world of prayer, learning and law, and since the days of the Church Fathers Christianity has found “Jerusalem” in the human heart, rather than in a single geographic location, we still place the 150 Psalms at the heart of our religious rituals and private prayer.
Abraham Joshua Heschel examined the meaning of awe expressed in the Psalms and throughout the Hebrew Bible:
Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
However profoundly the Psalms plumb the tie between humanity and the Divine, however they convey awe of the divine presence in the human world, one might suspect that when we encounter these poems in their regular ritual context, their emotion and profundity are often muffled by habit. In traditional Jewish homes, for instance, Psalm 126 is sung immediately before the Grace after Meals on Sabbath and festivals, but how often do we pause from our enjoyment of the presence of family and friends at our tables to really focus on the dream of returning to Zion? In Sabbath morning synagogue services, the Torah scrolls are returned to the Ark to the rhythmic singing of Psalm 29, but who of us really imagines earthquakes, storms and lightening-split trees? When do we really focus on the awe embodied in those lines? We recite Tehillim on behalf of the ill, entreating the Lord to heal and save, yet how often do we take the time and emotional energy to probe the essence of the literal words and contemplate why we invoke those particular poems to pray for healing.
This book offers an opportunity to consider the Psalms more deliberately, and to realize the strengthening power of their words by offering the verses in the context of an illuminated book. In Arnold Band's introduction to the Psalms as a literary form we have already probed their lasting appeal. Now, let us explore what a visual interpretation adds to our appreciation of these powerful poems. In particular, what does an illuminated manuscript offer that other visual presentations do not?
At the simplest level, pictures catch our eye, encouraging us to stop for a moment and consider the image and the words that inspire it. Once we slow down to consider the text and painting, however, the choice of the visual imagery accompanying the text invites a reverie of thoughts related to the literal text of the psalm. The images chosen for the illuminations of each psalm taken together create a visual midrash, exploring the import of that poem in our own lives, in our own world. The reader, I hope, will be drawn to consider the imagery in the illuminations, to contemplate and compare its message to his or her own life. Thus, while scholars have described Psalms as an inner dialogue between Psalmist and Almighty, in looking at the illuminations of these unique poems, we are encouraged to participate in a three-way conversation between Psalmist, God and ourselves.
Through this inner conversation we articulate our emotional or spiritual challenges, we may meditate upon our own relationship with the Divine, and, if we accept the availability of the Almighty, we may confront the awe of the divine, we may reach a state of confidence that we are not alone in resolving our challenges. For instance, in a world of often-nihilistic popular culture, where the challenges of raising a healthy family may seem overwhelming, Psalm 128 celebrates the serenity and satisfaction—in Jewish tradition, “nahat,”—of a flourishing family. In the illuminations of that psalm, the eagles nesting in the olive tree may remind the viewer of biblical and midrashic ideas that God offers a model of the perfect parent, protecting the Chosen People as an eagle protects its young. While this allusion draws upon textual sources that may be obscure in modern society, the accompanying commentary on the illumination explains the image.
The specific choice of visual images enables us to relate Psalms not only to the early monotheism of the first millennium B.C.E., not only to the days of the Temple in Jerusalem but also to contemporary thought and circumstances. Through fusing words and pictures we may draw the ancient words more directly into the world of our own experience. It is through relating the psalms to our own world that we can experience an immediate, personal response of dialogue and emotion. Quite apart from choices of colors and other graphic decisions, it is through these images—whose choice is indeed an intellectual decision—that the emotional content can be expressed. In Psalm 128 a scene of a flourishing garden conjures up the joy that the psalm promises the parent. Thus, in illuminating Psalm 8, I fill an explosive and whirling star form with imagery and verses drawn from modern science, from Sophocles and Shakespeare, to celebrate the extraordinary abilities which God has bestowed upon humanity and evoke our awe at God's infinitely greater power.
A visual interpretation, a visual midrash of these psalms can convey these complex thoughts with intellectual and emotional immediacy. Textual commentaries offer an important key to understanding the value of the poems; indeed, the insights of diverse commentaries on the psalms will play an important role in the visual interpretation of these texts. Modern literary analysis such as that offered for each psalm in this collection offers an essential key to revealing the import of the words not in the minds of later commentators, but in the minds of the poets who wrote them. But although one can surround the psalm with verbal commentary alone, how much more immediately emotive, how much more thought-provoking, how much richer an experience may be realized through such a visual interpretation! Indeed the visual imagery I choose may summon not only the dialogue between Psalmist and Divine, but indeed the inner conversation among the reader, the Psalmist and the Almighty.
The illuminated manuscript offers a kind of fusing other than that of words and pictures, mentioned above; it offers a means to bridge the gap between contemporary experience and earlier religious traditions. Illuminated manuscripts come to us from an age preceding ours of instant word-processing and electronic communication, and are common to the traditions of both Judaism and Christianity (as well as other religions). Our cultural landscapes have been decorated by illuminated haggadot5, bibles and prayer books for over a thousand years. Medieval Christianity, in particular, developed the tradition of the illuminated psalter, of which many celebrated examples have survived. When both contemporary and ancient imagery can complement the text in the traditional form of an illuminated manuscript, we can experience a fusion of our communal past, our present, and, if we are praying, perhaps even our hops for our future.
The act of looking at an illuminated manuscript has been described as an “intimate experience,” and as such may lend itself to this contemplative inner conversation in a different way than other media, such as wall-mounted paintings or more modern typeset and illustrated books. An illuminated manuscript may facilitate this inner conversation differently, and perhaps better thanthese other. Unlike the wall-mounted painting, the illuminated manuscript (or, more often, its reproduction) can be held in one's lap and quietly contemplated at close range, shared with others or read privately in the time or place of the reader's choice. A more standard typeset and illustrated book may certainly be read at any time or place, shared or privately. The isolated illustration floating in a sea of black typeset lettering might provide a break from the text, but is not unified with it, and requires separate concentration. In contrast, the manuscript form, enriched by meaningful imagery and provocative design, with integrated text and images, lends itself to close, leisurely contact and thus offers the viewer an intimate intellectual, emotional and aesthetic experience that supports the inner conversation among the reader, the Psalmist and the Divine.
Readers of my earlier work, The Song of Songs: the Honeybee in the Garden, may already be acquainted with my approach to crafting visual interpretations, visual midrash, of biblical text. As I wrote in that work, I consider it essential that any given scene begins with a representation that we recognize from the world of our own experience. Following Erwin Panofsky's exposition of "disguised symbolism" in the work of the masters of medieval northern Europe, most notably Van Eyck, a reproduction of whose “Arnolfini Marriage Portrait” has hung over my worktable since college days, I choose and arrange objects in ways that make logical sense in the narrative setting. The imagery included will be drawn from diverse sources, from midrash, from other biblical texts whose meaning relates to the Psalm at hand, and from modern society and science. While the overall painting usually creates a coherent, easily understood physical reality, parsing the symbolism of individual items within it reveals a more complex world of ideas. Just as the literary analysis you will find for each psalm probes the structure and contemporary significance of the literal verses to help us appreciate the subtle nuance of the psalm, the artist's commentary accompanying each psalm's pair of illuminations explains the iconography of the paintings. It is these images and ideas that compose the full symbolic meaning of the paintings. It is these images and ideas that, I hope, will encourage the inner conversation between us, the Psalmist and God.
Within the Book
An anthology of thirty-six psalms was chosen for illumination in this volume; the texts of all 150, however, may be found in the Appendix. The thirty-six illuminated here represent a varied and representative sampling of the emotional and spiritual expressions embodied in the 150 psalms. This anthology includes psalms of personal and communal joy, rejoicing and gratitude, prayers for healing and redemption in times of desperation, including a number of the psalms famously singled out for healing by Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav. The anthology incorporates psalms expressing the love of and longing for Jerusalem, psalms included in daily, Sabbath and festival liturgies for both public synagogue and private home use, including the entire Hallel cycle, several Psalms of the Day, psalms included in mourning rites, the introductory psalms for the Grace after Meals, and finally, a number of psalms from which Jewish tradition derives popular folk songs sung at weddings and other life-cycle celebrations. The commentary materials for each set of illuminations mark the particular place of the given psalm in Jewish tradition.
Each psalm is illuminated in both Hebrew and English. The translation included along with the original Hebrew is the New Jewish Publication Society translation (NJPS) published during 1960s; however, for the sake of resonance for those accustomed to other translations derived from the King James Version (KJV), in some cases where the NJPS translation differs significantly with the KJV, and fidelity to the Hebrew is not sacrificed, words drawn from the KJV or the older JPS translation published in 1917 have been substituted. These substitutions are noted within those psalms' commentary materials. Along with the illuminations themselves, you will find commentary materials. The first element of commentary is a concise literary analysis of the psalm at hand; full appreciation of the psalm's subtlety and power often depends upon appreciating its nuances of word-choice, grammar and structure. We hope that this analysis, presented in terms accessible to the educated lay-person, will deepen your appreciation of the psalm. Following the literary analysis you will find a commentary on the illuminations. Because the imagery in the illuminations draws not only upon the psalm, but also from a wide range of biblical and midrashic texts, poetry, modern archeology and science which are often not in the forefront of popular consciousness, I include these commentaries to assist you at enjoying the richness of the psalm and its visual interpretation.
The choices and interpretations of the psalms included in this volume reflects the Jewish tradition within which we, authors and artist, live and work. However, just as Psalms occupy a central role in Jewish liturgy and many home and life-cycle rituals, they have formed the core of Christian prayer since its inception. Jesus, as a Jewish rabbi, quoted Psalms liberally in his teachings, and the earliest Church Fathers founded Christian prayer on Psalms. Monastic movements recite the full Book of Psalms in regular cycles, and the medieval traditions of psalters, breviaries and books of hours, and indeed Gregorian chant are based on readings of the Psalms. In the high Middle Ages, the psalter was regarded as the only biblical text which a Christian lay-person might read freely on his or her own, and thus as the basic text for teaching reading skills. At the outset of the Reformation, Psalms remained key texts for Luther and Calvin and became the basis of Protestant prayer and source-material for hymns. A fervent and well-read Lutheran, Bach's Passions are largely based on texts from Psalms. The very first book published in the American Colonies was the Bay Psalm Book, produced in Massachusetts in 1640. It is outside the scope of this work to explore the interpretation of the Psalms within Christianity. However, given their importance within Christian traditions, we observe here the manner in which each of our chosen psalms figure in Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox liturgies. Thus, the commentary materials for each illuminated psalm will present a brief discussion of its place in Christian liturgical traditions. We should note that every branch of Christianity also prescribes private lay readings of psalms for various occasions (as does Judaism), as well as complex monastic cycles in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but here we treat public liturgical reading and chanting. Again, given the diversity of these traditions, the scope of this work allows mention only of those uses of the psalms familiar to lay-people, without exploring historical development and regional or sectarian variations or monastic custom. The commentary materials mention the use of the whole, or the greater part of the psalm at hand, rather than the inclusion of individual verses or phrases in prayer services. The Roman Catholic Lectionary has been the primary source for the Catholic tradition, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and the Revised Common Lectionary the sources for Protestant custom, and the Orthodox Divine Office for the Orthodox churches. Undoubtedly, distilling so many complex practices and traditions into brief statements requires judgment that may result in apparent generalizations or omissions, and I beg the reader's understanding. I hope these discussions will help all of us to appreciate the common inspiration, confidence and comfort that our communities find in these glorious poems that we share.
Finally, I hope that this volume will not only give aesthetic pleasure, but help us all “be strong and of good courage,” in the words of Moses and the Psalmist, as we pursue our three-way conversation between ourselves, the Psalmist and God.