בָּרוּךְ שֶׁאָמַר *Blessed is He who spoke.*An introductory blessing to the Verses of Praise that follow, mainly taken from the Psalms. Their essential theme is God as He exists in Creation, designing and sustaining the universe in wisdom, justice and compassion. At their core are six psalms, 145–150, the last in the book of Psalms, which correspond to the six days of creation in Genesis 1. בָּרוּךְ שֶׁאָמַר וְהָיָה הָעוֹלָם Blessed is He who spoke and the world came into being. In the sharpest possible contrast to the mythology of the pagan world, creation unfolds in Genesis 1 without clash or conflict between the elements. God said, “Let there be” and there was. There is an essential underlying harmony in the universe. All that exists is the result of a single creative will. The world is fundamentally good – the word “good” appears seven times in the opening chapter. The opening section of this two-part blessing is a ten-line litany of blessings, corresponding to the ten times in Genesis 1 in which the phrase, “And God said” appears: the “ten utterances” by which the world was made (Avot 5:1). בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה Blessed are You. The second part of this two-part blessing is an introduction to the biblical passages that follow. וּבְשִׁירֵי דָוִד עַבְדֶּֽךָ With the songs of Your servant David. A reference to the psalms that form the core of the Verses of Praise.

הוֹדוּ לַיהוה Thank theLORD*.A joyous celebration of Jewish history, this is the song David composed for the day the Ark was brought, in joy and dance, to Jerusalem. הוֹדִֽיעוּ בָעַמִּים עֲלִילֹתָיו Make His acts known among the peoples. According to Radak this is a reference to the miraculous afflictions that struck the Philistines when they captured the Ark (I Sam. 5). מְבַקְשֵׁי יהוה Those who seek the LORD: including those of other nations (Radak). בַּקְּשׁוּ פָנָיו Seek His presence: in prayer (Radak), or contemplation (Malbim). וּמִשְׁפְּטֵי־פִיהוּ The judgments He pronounced: the warnings God sends in advance through His prophets, as Moses warned Pharaoh of the impending plagues (Radak). לְאֶֽלֶף דּוֹרFor a thousand generations:* a poetic way of saying “forever.” אַבְרָהָם, יִצְחָק, יַעֲקֹבAbraham, Isaac, Jacob. God made a promise to each of the three patriarchs that their descendants would inherit the land. וַיִּתְהַלְּכוּ *Wandering.*Each of the patriarchs was forced to leave the land because of famine. וַיּֽוֹכַח עֲלֵיהֶם מְלָכִים For their sake He rebuked kings. A reference to God’s affliction of Pharaoh (Gen. 12:17) and Abimelech, King of Gerar (Gen. 20:18) for taking Sarah; and Laban when he was pursuing Jacob (Gen. 31:24, 29). מְשִׁיחָי My anointed ones. Although only kings and priests were anointed, here the phrase is used as a metaphor meaning “chosen ones.” אֱלִילִים, וַיהוה שָׁמַֽיִם עָשָׂה Mere idols; it was the LORD who made the heavens. The pagans worshiped the sun, moon and stars as gods, not realizing that none was an independent power. Each had been made by the One God.

יִשְׂמְחוּ הַשָּׁמַֽיִם Let the heavens rejoice. A sentiment typical of the radiant vision of the Psalms: the universe moves in accordance with both the natural and moral laws that ensure its order and stability. Nature is not something to fear, but to celebrate. וַיֹּאמְרוּ כָל־הָעָם And let all the people say. This was their response to the song sung the day the Ark was brought to Jerusalem (Ralbag).

רוֹמְמוּ Exalt. A selection of verses from the book of Psalms, on the themes of divine justice and compassion, moving seamlessly from national to individual thanksgiving.

לַמְנַצֵּֽחַ *Psalm 19.*A magnificent psalm in three parts, corresponding to the basic tripartite structure of Jewish belief: Creation, Revelation, and Redemption. The first seven verses are a hymn about Creation as God’s work. The second section (verses 8–11) is about Revelation – Torah – as God’s word. The third is a prayer for forgiveness, ending with the word “Redeemer.” What connects them is the idea of speech. First is the silent speech of the universe, the “music of the spheres,” that the universe continually utters to its Creator. Then comes the audible speech of God to humankind, the revelation of His will in the form of the Torah. The Psalmist speaks ecstatically about the power of Torah to transform those who open themselves to its radiance. In Creation we encounter the world that is, but in Revelation we catch a glimpse of the world that ought to be, and will come to be when we align our will with the will of God. Finally comes the speech of humanity to God (“the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart”) in the form of prayer. שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין Yet who can discern his errors? The Psalmist notes the fundamental difference between humans and inanimate nature: the latter automatically conforms to the will of its Creator, but mankind does not. He therefore prays to be protected from sin, deliberate or unwitting. יִהְיוּ לְרָצוֹן אִמְרֵי־פִי May the words of my mouth. A beautiful prayer we say at the end of every Amida.

לְדָוִד *Psalm 34.*David, fleeing from Saul, took refuge in the Philistine city of Gath. There he was recognized, and knew that his life was in danger. He decided to pretend to be insane, making marks on the doors of the gate and letting saliva run down his beard. The Philistine king, dismissing him as a madman, told his servants to remove him. Thus David was able to make good his escape (I Sam. 21:11–16). He composed this psalm as a song of thanksgiving: “This poor man called, and the LORD heard… None who take refuge in Him shall be condemned.” God is not on the side of those who embody the arrogance of power: “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

תְּפִלָּה לְמֹשֶׁה *Psalm 90.*A magnificent poem, the only psalm attributed to Moses, on God’s eternity and our mortality. However long we live, our lives are a mere microsecond in the history of the cosmos. Wisdom consists in knowing how brief is our stay on earth, and in the determination to use every day in service of the right, the just and the holy. The good we do lives after us; the rest is oft interred with our bones. אִישׁ־הָאֱלֹהִים The man of God. This description also occurs in Deuteronomy 33:1, prefacing Moses’ final blessing to the people. אֶֽלֶף שָׁנִים…וְאַשְׁמוּרָה בַלָּֽיְלָה A thousand years…a watch in the night. A dramatic contrast between God’s time-scale and ours. Note the succession of poetic images conveying the brevity of human life: it flows as fast as a swollen river, as quickly as a sleep or a dream, it is like grass in a parched land that soon withers, it is like a sigh, a mere breath, like a bird that briefly lands then flies away. וּמַעֲשֵׂה יָדֵֽינוּ כּוֹנְנָה עָלֵֽינוּ Establish for us the work of our hands. Help us create achievements that last. According to the sages, this is the blessing Moses gave the Israelites when they completed the building of the Tabernacle.

יֹשֵׁב בְּסֵֽתֶר Psalm 91. A psalm for protection at a time of danger. There is no life without risk, and courage does not mean having no fear; it means feeling it, yet overcoming it in the knowledge that we are not alone. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” and faith is the antidote to fear. The psalm radiates a sense of confidence and trust even in a world full of hazards.

הַלְלוּיָהּ *Psalm 135.*Psalms 135 and 136 are a matched pair, describing the same events: the exodus from Egypt and the battles prior to the Israelites’ entry into the Promised Land. What Psalm 135 says in prose, Psalm 136 says in poetry. Both are joyous celebrations of the redeeming power of God in history. Blaise Pascal thought that the history of the Jews was proof of the existence of God. Israel are the people who, in themselves, testify to something greater than themselves. Their miraculous survival is a signal of transcendence. פֶּה־לָהֶם וְלֹא יְדַבֵּֽרוּ They have mouths but cannot speak. Those who put their faith in forces that are less than human, themselves become less than human. Many have been the idols of history: power, wealth, status, the nation, the race, the state, the ideology, the system. None has lasted, for each has crushed the human spirit. None has given rise to stable systems of liberty and dignity.

הוֹדוּ *Psalm 136.*This psalm, known as Hallel HaGadol, “the Great Hallel,” is one of the earliest forms of a litany, a prayer in which the leader utters a series of praises to which the congregation responds with a set reply. Jewish prayer contains many litanies, most notably during Seliḥot, the penitential prayers prior to and during Yom Kippur, and the Hoshanot said on Sukkot and Hoshana Raba. כִּי־טוֹב For He is good. The phrase ki tov occurs repeatedly in Genesis 1: “And God said, Let there be…and there was…and God saw that it was good [ki tov].” Rabbi Jacob Zvi Mecklenburg (Germany, nineteenth century) suggested that the phrase be translated, as here, “and God saw, for He is good.” The phrase does not mean merely that what God created was good. It means that He created because of His goodness. One who is good seeks to share good with others. It was God’s desire to share the blessing of existence with others that led Him to create the universe.

רַנְּנוּ Psalm 33. A joyous creation psalm inviting us to sing God’s praises on the earth He created and in the midst of the history He guides. To the Psalmist the universe has a moral as well as physical beauty: “The earth is full of the LORD’s loving-kindness.”

מִזְמוֹר שִׁיר *Psalm 92.*The sages interpreted the opening of this psalm as meaning not just “a song for the Sabbath day” but also “a song sung by the Sabbath day,” as if the day itself gave testimony to the Creator, which in effect it does. By being the day on which we do no creative work, time itself makes us aware that we are not just creators; we are also creations. The more we understand about the nature of the universe, its vast complexity, and the way it is finely tuned for the emergence of life, the more we sense a vast intelligence at work, framing its “fearful symmetry.” Yet the psalm speaks not about creation but about justice. The universe is not simply matter and anti-matter governed by certain scientific laws. It is also – as Genesis 1 tells us seven times – “good.” But how can we consider it good if, all too often, evildoers seize power, injustice prevails, the innocent suffer and the guilty escape punishment? The psalm tells us that our time-horizon is too constricted. We look at the short term, not the long. Evil may win temporary victories but in the long run, right, justice and liberty prevail. Tyrants may seem impregnable in their day, but evil empires crumble, and are condemned by the full perspective of history. That is what “a fool cannot understand” but the wise know. The Sabbath of the psalm is thus not the Sabbath of past or present but of the future, the Messianic age, the “day that is entirely Shabbat,” when there will be neither master nor slave, oppressor and oppressed, when hierarchies of power are abandoned and humanity finally recognizes the universe as God’s work, and the human person as God’s image. That is the ultimate Shabbat to which all our current Sabbaths are a prelude and preparation.

יהוה מָלָךְ *Psalm 93.*Almost all ancient polytheistic myths saw the sea as an independent force of chaos against which the gods were forced to do battle. The great revolution of monotheism was to insist that there is only one creative power, that the universe is fundamentally good, and that chaos is merely order of a complexity we can neither understand nor predict. This is beautifully expressed in this psalm which sees the roar of the oceans as part of creation paying homage to its Creator. God is beyond – not within – nature, time and space.

יְהִי כְבוֹד May theLORD*’s glory.*An anthology of verses, mainly from the books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Chronicles. God created the universe; therefore He is sole Sovereign of the universe, ruling nature through scientific law, and history through the moral law. Those who pit themselves against God are destined to fail: “Many are the intentions in a person’s mind, but the LORD’s plan prevails.” Israel, as the people of the eternal God, is itself eternal, and though it often suffers persecution, it will never be destroyed, for divine compassion ultimately prevails over divine anger: “The LORD will not abandon His people.”

אַשְׁרֵי *Happy are those.*Psalm 145 was seen by the sages as the quintessential expression of the book of Psalms, especially the creation psalms that dominate the Verses of Praise, because (a) it is an alphabetic acrostic, praising God with each letter of the alphabet (with the exception of nun, a letter omitted lest it recall nefila, the fall of ancient Israel), and (b) because it contains the line, “You open Your hand, and satisfy every living thing with favor.” It is also (c) the only poem to be explicitly called tehilla, “a psalm” (the book of Psalms is called, in Hebrew, Sefer Tehillim). Added to the psalm are verses from other psalms: two at the beginning, which include the word Ashrei(happy) three times; and one at the end, which ends with Halleluya. It thus epitomizes the book of Psalms as a whole, which begins with the word Ashreiand ends with the word Halleluya.

הַלְלוּיָהּ *Psalm 146.*A hymn of praise to God’s justice and compassion. Put not your faith in mortals but in God, who cares for the oppressed, the hungry, the victims of injustice, and those who have no one else to care for them. The supreme Power supremely cares for the powerless.

הַלְלוּיָהּ *Psalm 147.*God, the Shaper of history (“gathers the scattered exiles”) and Architect of the cosmos (“counts the number of the stars”), is nonetheless close to us, healing the broken heart and ministering to our emotional wounds. לֹא עָֽשָׂה כֵן לְכָל־גּוֹי He has done this for no other nation. Although there has been a covenant between God and all humanity since the days of Noah, only to Israel did He reveal an entire body of laws, the detailed architectonics of a society under the sovereignty of God, dedicated to justice, holiness and respect for human dignity.

הַלְלוּיָהּ Psalm 148(previous page)*.*A cosmic psalm of praise, beginning with the heavens, sun, moon, and stars; then moving to earth and all living things, culminating with humanity.

הַלְלוּיָהּ *Psalm 149.*A song of victory. Israel emerges triumphant over those who seek to destroy it, not because of its strength but because of its faith. חֶֽרֶב פִּיפִיּוֹת A two-edged sword. Literally, “a sword of mouths.” Israel does not live by the physical sword but by words: the power of prayer. Thus the “sword of mouths” echoes the previous phrase, “praises of God be in their throats” (Or Penei Moshe).

הַלְלוּיָהּ *Psalm 150.*The last psalm in the book of Psalms, gathering all previous praise into a majestic choral finale. More than a third of the words consist of various forms of the verb “to praise.” כֹּל הַנְּשָׁמָה Let all that breathes. Note the universalism of this closing verse, one reason why “the book of Psalms has spoken to people through the ages across the borders of nations, languages, and sectarian divisions” (Robert Alter).

בָּרוּךְ יהוה לְעוֹלָם Blessed be theLORD*for ever.*A passage marking the end of the Verses of Praise, consisting of four verses from Psalms, each opening with the word “Blessed,” thus echoing the opening paragraph, “Blessed is He who spoke.”

וַיְבָֽרֶךְ דָּוִיד *David blessed.*There now follow three biblical passages that strictly speaking do not belong to the Verses of Praise, either in source or subject matter. The Verses of Praise are “songs of Your servant David” – that is, passages from the book of Psalms – and they are about “He who spoke and the world came into being,” about God as Creator and Sovereign of the universe. None of the following passages belongs to either category. They are (1) the national assembly convened by David shortly before his death to initiate the building of the Temple under the aegis of his son and successor Solomon; (2) the national assembly gathered by Ezra and Nehemiah to renew the covenant between Israel and God; and (3) the song sung by the Israelites after they had crossed the Reed Sea and become “the people You acquired.” These were key historic moments when the Jewish people came together as a collective body to praise God and pledge their loyalty to Him. Their presence here marks the transition from private to public prayer, which is about to begin. A tzibbur, a public, is more than a mere assemblage of individuals, just as the human body is more than a collection of cells. It is an emergent phenomenon, a higher order of being. At this moment of transition, therefore, we undergo a metamorphosis, and we do so by a historical reenactment, retracing the steps of our ancestors as they cast off their private concerns as individuals to become a community of faith dedicated to the collective worship of God.