Sights and Insights
Devotion for Nov. 9, 2021
When the LORD restores Zion’s fortunes,
we should be like dreamers.
Then will our mouth fill with laughter
and our tongue with glad song.
Then will they say in the nations:
“Great things has the LORD done with these.”
Great things has the LORD done with us.
We shall rejoice.
Restore, O LORD, our fortunes
like freshets in the Negeb.
They who sow in tears
in glad song will reap.
He walks along and weeps,
the bearer of the seed bag.
He will surely come in with glad song
bearing his sheaves.
(Psalm 126, Robert Alter translation)
This fall, I have slowly been making my way through the Psalms in Robert Alter’s recently published three-volume annotated translation of the Hebrew scriptures. Alter is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley and has spent decades working on bible translations and commentaries.
His notes and renderings of Psalm 126 have particularly struck me this week. He views the psalm as having been written while still in exile in Babylon. The song, then, imagines what it will be like to return home. “The anticipated gladness, then,” he writes, “is imagined to be so intense that it would be like a dream – the realization, we might say, of a wish-fulfillment dream.” It is an image of what it would feel like to return to what had been, to a sense of normality. The first verse indicates an anticipation of a return to the glories of old; a full return to the previous condition. It is within this sense of anticipatory gladness that the theme of glad song emerges. The joy will be so intense, the psalmist feels, that they will be unable to help themselves from singing songs of joy. This psalm itself, the psalmist hopes, will be transformed from a wish to a reality. It will go from a song about an imagined future to an actual present. It will become a glad song itself, rather than one about a longed-for reality.
This rendering of the psalm has stuck with me because of the sense of longing that so many have about a return to the previous condition. As re-opening stops and starts, it becomes hard to tell what is an imaged response to the realization of a wish-fulfillment dream and what is a reasonable and concrete expectation. Is a return to the glories of what was right around the corner? Or are we still far off, unsure of whether such a return is even possible? We find ourselves in a kind of exile where we can think of returning but not yet quite expect it. We can imagine the joy of a return to normality, but in all likelihood it seems that the reality will be less exciting.
The end of the psalm has the image of the bearer of the seed bag as one who is both saddened and hopeful. He is crying while also planting seeds in the hope that they will sprout. The psalm then ends with a note of hope: surely the time will come when the sadness will pass and instead of seeds he will return with a harvest. It is not a note of accomplishment, but rather one of persisting in hope. It is an encouragement to keep imagining the glad songs of return, even if the reality of that return seems far off. Trust that the time of gladness will arrive.