By Rev. Dr. Martin Rumscheidt
St. Andrew's United Church, Halifax

Psalm Twenty-Three on the Way to an Extermination Camp

 

In the early years of the twentieth century, two renowned Jewish scholars, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, translated the Jewish Scriptures into German. I want to read their text of Psalm 23 to you, translated into English. As you listen, you will hear both gender-exclusive language and the typically Jewish piety of not uttering God's, the Holy One's name. It is also a rendition that you will quite likely not be familiar with.

HE is my shepherd, I am deprived of nothing. - On fields of grass HE encamps me and to waters of calm does HE lead me. - The soul HE brings back to me and, for the sake of HIS name, HE leads me on roads of truthfulness. - Even when I must go through the deep gorge of death's shadow, I fear no evil: - YOU are with me, YOUR staff, YOUR support, they are my comfort. - YOU lay a table for me before my very assailants; my head YOU caress with oil, - my cup: it is plentiful. - Only what is lovely and good pursue me all my life's days. - I return, come back to YOUR house for the length of days.

I have a sense of loss, but also an experience of discovery, when I hear this rendition; I quite literally feel these deeply learned and, even more, deeply pious Jews' thrilled amazement at, but also grateful comprehension of, what King David, the alleged writer of this hymn, said about and to the God he worshipped. My loss, yes, is smaller than the discovery: I miss the cadence of my mother's reciting this Psalm to me in the version I learned as a child. I miss the language she used precisely because it was hers, the language of the context of my first love. Buber and Rosenzweig do not praise God, do not utter their wonderment at God's caring tenderness and tender caring in Mother's voice and word. And yet - and yet - how the unfamiliarity of their cadence, of their speech opens the vista on precisely that tender, caring God, the HE, the YOU of and to whom they speak with old King David.

Today, I want to try to do something like that too in your hearing.

It is my experience that the openings to the goodness of God - a God who takes risks and is prepared to face harm and injury for the sake of all her creatures - that the openings to that God's goodness are embedded for most of us in experiences which are not pure happiness, serenity, untroubled joy and delight. There is so often - would you not also say with me: even all too often - that deep gorge with whatever shadows, in which sight opens up on God's tender care.

I will tell of such a deep gorge, take you there with me.

A Polish writer, named Wilk Wilczynsky, a man who survived a Nazi concentration camp, wrote the following after the end of World War II. "I followed that tragic procession of suffering at a distance, followed those many people on their way to the marshalling yard and the loading ramps. In the throng I spotted Dr. Janusz Korczak, at the head of the children and the staff of the orphanage. He carried one child in his arms and held another by the hand. At the head of this band of children, of these orphans, there waved a green flag, green - the colour of hope - just as in Dr. Korczak's children's story Little King Matt. In that story, the children had asked that they fly a green flag and tell of their longing for a better world. I have heard from others that on that day, on their way to Treblinka, they sang songs."

Can you picture this scene in your minds? Those children were acting out a favourite story of theirs in the streets of Warsaw in 1942.

I can no longer hear, sing or read this twenty-third Psalm without this march of children coming to mind. - In Poland, it is said of Dr. Janusz Korczak that he was a teacher with grace, a writer of deep sensitivity, a pediatrician prepared for sacrifice, a Jew of integrity and a true humanitarian. To this day he is honoured with praise. All that is said of him is surely true; yet, he was so much more: when I picture him at the head of this throng of orphaned children, being herded to the death-trains, I see a picture of a shepherd. Dr. Korczak - a shepherd of children.

And what might they have sung? Psalms of lament? Psalms of hope - the hope the green flag fluttered for? Would not the time in the ghetto, the long months of humiliation, have robbed them of hope? Were they not exhausted, apathetic, scared? I wonder: were there among them some, the aging doctor perhaps, or even a child, who found what it takes to sing with confidence or to whisper it, this Psalm of their forebears: HE is my shepherd, I am deprived of nothing, …?

How are frightened people to hope when the green pastures, the encampment on fields of grass, have become the death-camp where there are no still waters, no waters of calm but, instead, sprinkler systems of poison gas?

Did they recite it, this twenty-third Psalm: the children of Treblinka with their good shepherd, the Jews of sixteenth century Prague and their Rabbi Yehudi Loew ben Bezalel during the pogroms, the Jews in the year 70 c.e. in Jerusalem when their temple was burned by the Roman occupiers, the Jews in Jeremiah's time in exile on the sticky, sweaty banks of the rivers of Babylon? Did they? Or did they all do as it says in Psalm 137, "hang their harps on the willows?" Or did the Jews of all those generations grow mute like their fathers? Did they have a shepherd to lead them on roads of truthfulness, a shepherd whose staff and support gave them comfort, one who laid a table for them right before the very eyes of the assailants: the Babylonians, the Romans, the Christians, my people the Germans? Fill their cups until there was plenty?

In the face of what Jews faced over centuries, can this song of the shepherd be more than a lyrical-romantic illusion? The suspicion is around that it is just that: an illusion, lyrical and romantic, yes, but an illusion nonetheless. The emancipated, more or less rational human mind relegates the image of the shepherd and the flock of sheep to the bin labeled "romanticism." And that is not only a gesture of resistance against the idea of comparing human beings to sheep, the incarnation of stupidity. In his composition "Messiah," Handel has beautiful music mask the Bible's utterly true depiction of our human stupidity before God: "All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way." (Isaiah 53:6) Sheep are just dumb, we say, and autonomous people don't want shepherds over them, especially the kind that always know in advance what is right for sheep. God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit as a friend or partner, okay, but not: I am Jesus' little lamb. I find it worthy of note, for example, that many churches and their clergy have ceased using the word "pastor" - the Latin for "shepherd" - preferring the word "minister" - the Latin for "servant" - but servant in a position of high responsibility. In the ancient world, kings loved to call themselves "shepherds," loved to think of themselves as those who cared for their subjects, even ready to take risks for them and prepared to face harm and injury for their sake. And so I wonder why we clergy and our congregations prefer the term "minister." I am only asking, but I am asking.

Psalm 23 - HE is my shepherd - is, deep down, a song of revolution. For where is there revolution except where God and kings become shepherds, where clergy, too, seek to be no more than care-givers and servants, where the only legitimate power is the power of love? Where, in the insightful way Paul Tillich put it in his work Love, Power and Justice, "Love is the power of justice; power is the love of justice; justice is power of love." This Psalm does, indeed, sing of the deep gorge of death's shadow, where life may indeed be lost, of the depths where dying casts its shadow and where the adversaries, the assailants on life circle around the table of life, the very table the provider of life lays. And it sings of the revolution when unending run-arounds end in coming into God's house - a place not of pious tea-time hours spent with God in inconsequential chatter but the place where the insulted, humiliated, the oppressed and abused sing God's tomorrow into our human today. And at the head of that tomorrow goes the shepherd and a flag of hope - a green flag, do you think? - unfurled, symbolizing hope for our pained humanity and its story of suffering, a flag waving as it did before, and for, the children of Dr. Janusz Korczak. This Psalm can be a powerful anticipation of hope in the abyss, the gorge of death's shadow; where it is sung - as we shall do in a few moments - it begins to work putting the power of God's tomorrow against the paralyzing power of reality today.

I like God as a shepherd: ever since a Jewish baby was born in a stable and died prematurely and violently on wooden, crossed beams like a sheep on a slaughter-bench, it has come close to me, this revolutionary vision. And there have been people such as Janusz Korczak - he, like Jesus, was Jewish - who wanted to be no more than shepherds, but who were more than lords and masters by simply being simple shepherds. This Polish Jew, whom my people killed, let tomorrow light up in today: for a bunch of Jewish kids - for me - for all to whom this story is told.

And we proclaim, in this place, today, here and now: the shepherd is here. Reason good enough to declare: we are not alone. Thanks be to God.

Amen       

May there be no day for you when you are alone; may there be no day for you when you no longer know the way; may there be no day for you when you have to say "I can't stand it any more!" No day shall there be without sisters and brothers. And no day shall here be without the consolation of Christ.

(A benediction by Dorothee Soelle)