The Missing Nun (Someich Hashem L'Chol HaNoflim)

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 77.

I told you yesterday there's a letter missing from Ashrei. Let me show you, because this is one of the most beautiful things hiding in plain sight in your siddur.

Ashrei is an acrostic. Every verse begins with the next letter of the aleph-beis - aleph, beis, gimmel, all the way down. The full alphabet, every letter, every tool, nothing left out. Except - there's a hole. You go aleph, beis, gimmel… you reach the mem verse… and the next verse should start with nun. And it doesn't. The nun is gone. David runs the whole alphabet and skips a letter.

Why? The Gemara in Berachos - daf 4b - asks exactly this, and Rabbi Yochanan gives an answer that takes your breath away. The letter nun, he says, is the letter of nefilah - of falling. There's a verse in the prophet Amos, chapter 5, that begins with a nun: Naflah lo sosif kum betulas Yisrael - she has fallen, the maiden of Israel, she will not rise again. The most devastating sentence about the Jewish people in all of Tanach. And it starts with a nun. So David - who is building a song of pure praise - looks at that letter and says: not in my psalm. I will not let the falling of Israel sit inside my praise of God. And he removes the entire letter.

But David doesn't just delete the falling. Watch what he does next - this is the genius of it. The very next verse, the samech verse - the one that comes right after the missing nun - is the one we're saying today: Someich Hashem l'chol hanoflim - God supports all who fall. V'zokef l'chol hak'fufim - and straightens all who are bent.

Do you see what he did? He pulled out the nun - the falling - and replaced it, immediately, with the catch. He didn't pretend people don't fall. The fallen are right there in the verse - hanoflim. He just refused to let the fall be the final word. He took the falling out of the prophet's mouth of doom and put it into God's hands. The sentence in Amos says "fallen, will not rise." David answers, in the very next breath: fallen - and held. Fallen - and lifted. The fall is real; it's just no longer the end of the story.

And the Gemara goes one step deeper. It says that in Eretz Yisrael they re-read the verse in Amos with hope - naflah v'lo sosif linpol od, kum betulas Yisrael - she has fallen and will fall no more; rise, maiden of Israel. And Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak says: even according to the painful reading, David came and supported them with ruach hakodesh - with the next verse. Someich Hashem l'chol hanoflim. God holds the fallen. Even the despair gets caught.

Now here's the question that unlocks the whole thing. Who writes like that? Who builds an entire song around "God catches everyone who falls"? Only one kind of person. A person who has fallen - many times - and felt the catch.

And that's David. Not the children's-book shepherd boy. The real David. A soldier with a sword, a man who killed in battle. Hunted in caves for years, sleeping on stone, running for his life. A man who sinned - and was held to account, harshly, in public. A man whose own son raised an army against him. A man who buried children. Who knew betrayal, and loneliness, and the floor.

And those same hands wrote the words we cry at funerals, sing under the chuppah, whisper in hospital rooms at 3 a.m. Here's the reframe I want you to never forget: the poetry is deep because of the brokenness - not in spite of it. You cannot write "Someich Hashem l'chol hanoflim" - God catches all who fall - unless you have fallen, and felt yourself caught. David's Tehillim don't reach us from a palace. They reach us from the cave. From the run. From the guilt. From the floor. That's why, three thousand years later, a Jew in pain opens Tehillim and feels David sitting right next to him, saying: I know. I've been here. And I'm telling you - He catches you.

There's a line in Mishlei - sheva yipol tzaddik v'kam - a righteous person falls seven times and gets up. We read that wrong. We think the tzaddik is righteous despite the seven falls. No. He's a tzaddik through them - because every fall taught him the catch. The falling isn't the opposite of the rising. It's the raw material.

So tomorrow, when you reach that gap where the nun should be - notice it. That little silence in the alphabet is David refusing to give falling the last word. And the next thing he says is the truest thing in the whole prayer: Someich Hashem l'chol hanoflim. You are allowed to fall. You are not allowed to believe the fall is the end. Because the hand that opened in Potei'ach es yadecha is the same hand that catches you here.

Tomorrow: we leave Ashrei and open the next psalm - Haleli nafshi es Hashem - Psalm 146 - where the soul itself starts to sing.