On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand

Lord, all my desire is before You; and my sighing is not hidden from You.  My heart throbs, my strength fails me; and the light of my eyes, even that has gone from me.  Psalm 38:9-10  NASB

My desire – Edward Mote (1797 to 1874) wrote the famous hymn, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.”  If he had had a Hebrew worldview, he might have changed the lyrics: “on Torah the solid rock I stand.”  Speaking of solid rocks, it seems appropriate to try to answer yesterday’s question, that is, “What do we do when we live in a world where everything is falling apart?”  The psalmist viewed this question in a very personal way.  His health, his reputation, his confidence in God, and his overwhelming sadness about life’s circumstances forced him to set aside the daily, mind-numbing routine and face the music.  How can I keep believing when the sovereignty of God seems so absent?  The lyrics speak in personal terms, but it’s pretty easy for us to identify, both personally and corporately.  There’s a line from the movie Blood Diamond that states the case (perhaps obvious).  “When was the last time the world wasn’t falling apart?”

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If the world, in some sense or another, has always been falling apart (cf. Heschel, “History is a nightmare”), what, then, is the biblical response?  Soloveitchik identifies some crucial assumptions aimed at a workable answer:

1. Torah, that is, God’s intention for Man in the created universe, is a revealed truth.  It does not depend on historical circumstances or empirical verification.  It is the creation ideal that will eventually become the experiential reality.
2. Any action based upon the Halakhah of Torah transfers this ideal into the real, making the possible into the actual.
3. The actualization of the ideal, that is, the creative effort to manifest Torah in this world, is a crucial step toward the ideal no matter how incremental it may seem.

“ . . . longings for the full and complete realization of the ideal world in the very nub of concrete reality, for that era when the Halakhah will shine in all its majesty and beauty, in the midst of our empirical world.  Then all of life will benefit from the image of this exalted and resplendent divinely willed construction.”[1]

“Halakhic man’s relationship to transcendence differs from that of the universal homo religiosus.  Halakhic man does not long for a transcendent world, for ‘supernal’ levels of a pure, pristine existence, for was not the ideal world—halakhic man’s deepest desire, his darling child—created only for the purpose of being actualized in our real world?  It is this world which constitutes the stage for the Halakhah, the setting for halakhic man’s life.  It is here that the Halakhah can be implemented to a greater or lesser degree.  It is here that it can pass from potentiality into actuality.  It is here, in this world, that halakhic man acquires eternal life!  ‘Better is one hour of Torah and mitzvot in this world than the whole life of the world to come,’ stated the tanna in Avot (4:17), and this declaration is the watchword of the halakhist.  Not only will the universal homo religiosus not understand this statement, but he will have only contempt for it, as if, heaven forbid, it intended to deny the pure and exalted life after death.”[2]

We can read these verses quite differently.  The psalmist’s desire is not the lusts of the yetzer ha’ra, as though we were to read this as a confession, but rather the longing for the ideal, the manifestation of God’s full and uncompromised will in His creation.  This is taʾăwâ (desire), what is placed before God.  “My sighing” is not regret or remorse but rather the frustration and discouragement of living in a fractured world.  His emotions are not hidden from God.  He recognizes the depression that accompanies attempts to transform the ideal into the real.  The psalmist captures precisely our frustration.  The world is still falling apart.  Our efforts for righteousness, for justice, for truth seem paltry, ineffective.  Evil is emboldened despite our prayers and our trust in the sovereign Creator.  So, we need Soloveitchik’s reminder.  “The ideal of halakhic man is the redemption of the world not via a higher world but via the world itself, . .”[3]  “Your will be done on earth.”  Now go back to work and don’t give up.

Topical Index: desire, taʾăwâ, halakhic man, redemption, Psalm 38:9-10

[1] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man (JPS, 1983), p. 29.

[2] Ibid., p. 30.

[3] Ibid., p. 37.