Working It
I will extol You, my God, O King, and I will bless Your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You, and I will praise Your name forever and ever. Psalm 145:1-2 NASB
Every day – How does the Twelve Step phrase go? “It works if you work it.” Defeating the yetzer ha’ra means working a plan. Ah, but defeat does not mean destroy, does it? We do not destroy the yetzer ha’ra. If we did, our lives would end. The yetzer ha’ra is the necessary enemy. The yetzer ha’ra is the force that propels me to act in the world, to make choices—some for good, some for evil. The yetzer ha’ra is the enemy within, an enemy that causes us to desire life in all its fullness. The secret to working this plan is to stop trying to destroy that inner power. Instead, we must channel that strength so that it is domesticated to the desires for the good, to serve the One True God who promises to replace the goals of the yetzer ha’ra with the intentions and purposes of His own when we work the plan.
So here’s the first step of twelve—the plan of the Twelve Disciples (and don’t forget that one of them betrayed the Master. There is always a dark possibility lurking in the shadows of the soul). The first step is praise. The first step is praise every day. It doesn’t matter what your circumstances. Your waking mood makes no difference. Praise is not dependent on the one praising. Praise is a response to the worthiness of the One praised. And since He is always worthy, we praise Him every time.
What, then, is praise? Is it simply acknowledging that God is sovereign? Is it merely bowing before Him? “To fear God is to be moved by a sense of awe, like that which one experiences in the presence of a great and awe-inspiring king. In every move that one makes, one ought to feel self-abased before the greatness of God.”[1] yirat YHVH is the foundation of praise, but it is more than experiencing awe. Ira Stone adds that fear of God is “the experience of overwhelming trepidation at the infinite nature of our responsibility for the other,” in contrast to “the experience of gratitude for the possibilities of infinite joy available to us in meeting that responsibility.”[2] Just as yetzer ha’ra and yetzer ha’tov are essential counterpoints for human living, so the praise of the Lord involves both yirat YHVH and ahavat YHVH (fear of God and love of God). Praise is the expression of that counterpoint, the living assertion of the infinite responsibility and the infinite joy surrounding life with YHVH.
Step One is more than deferring to the status of the King. Step One is engaging in a life of obedience to the commandment considered equal to the Shema—to love your neighbor as yourself. This is praise performed. The utterance is the summary of a contract to act. Step One is an every day renewal, a chance to focus once more on the weight of righteousness and the buoyance of fulfillment.
Topical Index: praise, yetzer ha’ra, yirat YHVH, fear, joy, Psalm 145:1-2
[1] Ibid., p. 10.
[2] Ira Stone, commentary on Moses Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim, p. xx.
I think the yetzer ha-ra aches with the need for praise. It seeks praise at every point. It must have praise. If I believe that nothing is more important than myself, then that ache gets turned around, and I seek to gratify, to extol, to grasp for myself, all praiseworthiness. I have suspected that the deepest need of the human, which is love, is what spawns that need to be counted worthy of praise, which is the glory that crowns achievement. That is not wrong! Love provides the connection that that achievement must be based on if it is to mean anything. If my achievement was solely and purely for me, my tree would fall in a forest with no ears. I need somebody to hear! But, in order to do that, I have to have succeeded in reaching across that divide. We ache with the need to matter, which is purpose. I need others to fulfill myself.
To praise Him Who is worthy of praise, then, I must seek the glory of Another with all my heart, mind and soul. The intent follows the focus. If I focus on His will, His desires and His glory, then my actions will follow that intent, like baby ducks follow their mama. Actions are the fruit of focus. To praise Him, then, involves much more than the action of words. To seek His glory, I must start out looking at Him, asking Him, wanting His Way, desiring His approbation. True glory in my life will show up when I have succeeded in glorifying Him. Someone wise said “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth ‘thrown in’: aim at Earth and you will get neither.”
I think the glory that the yetzer ha-ra seeks is something it will only get when it submits to the quest that seeks the glory of Him. When I reach out to all around me with the intent to uplift, to beautify, to restore dignity and worth to others, I am seeking to restore praiseworthiness in creation. His image was to be reflected in His creation, including myself, but the glory He created me to walk in is the glory that I restore to all else. I am a steward, which means that my identity, my purpose, is wrapped up in all that I was given to steward. This would include all of nature, as well as the well-being of all my fellow men. I am not well off unless everything and everyone else is. To seek to praise Him is to seek to restore His image in creation, for He is praised by the true reflection of His glory. All His works praise Him, says the Psalmist. How? They reflect His glory back to Himself, and He is satisfied that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”. We are safe, we are fulfilled, we are glorified, only when His image is perfected in us, and His image in us is that search to restore His image in the creation that He gave us to steward. I praise Him when I seek to restore His praiseworthiness in all around me, which is the action of returning the focus back upon Him, for that is my purpose.
Some people keep a prayer journal. My wife keeps a praise journal. Here are a couple of entries:
My work is but scope and spyglass to You, God. May You look and be unsurprised to see Your own work.
Every day, every month, the moon walks across the sky, and does not faint. I want to walk like Your moon.
I thought this was so beautifully said in “Man is not alone” by Heschel:
“The antecedents of faith are the premise of the wonder and the premise of praise. We praise before we proof. While in regard to other issues, we doubt before we decide, in regard to God we sing before we say. Unless we know how to praise Him, we cannot learn how to know Him. Praise is our first answer to the wonder.
To be overtaken with the awe of God is not to entertain a feeling but to share in a spirit that permeates all beings. “They all thank, they all praise, they all say: There is no one like God” As an act of personal recognition our praise would be fatuous, it is only meaningful as an act of joining in the endless song. We praise with the pebbles on the road which are like petrified amazement, with all the flowers and trees which look as if hypnotized in silent devotion.
When mind and soul agree, belief is born. But first our hearts must know the shudder of adoration!”
“The yetzer ha’ra is the necessary enemy.” OR, our best ally, as It reveals who we truly are when supposedly no one is watching, nor knowing our thoughts/hearts nor identifying our deeds in terms of righteousness and purity of spirit.
That then needs to be disciplined, that the yetzer ha’tov may rule over all our emotions and spirits, “to focus once more on the weight of righteousness and the buoyance of fulfillment.”
Praising YHWH daily in every situation will always put the yetzer ha’ra to flight, firstly in ourselves, to acknowledge that He alone is in control whenever we face critical condemnation, like false accusations/”witnessing”, from which we have no defense.
Praising YHWH does wonders.