Halleluyah, Halleli Nafshi

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 78.

We finished Ashrei. And now something shifts in the davening, and I want you to feel it before we get into the words.

For the last stretch of Psukei D'Zimrah we've been building. Baruch She'amar opened the section. Then Hodu, then Yehi Chevod, then Ashrei - and Ashrei ended with that line, tehillas Hashem yedaber pi, my mouth will speak God's praise. And now David does something almost startling. He doesn't move on to a new topic. He writes five more psalms - 146, 147, 148, 149, 150 - and every single one of them opens with the word Halleluyah and closes with the word Halleluyah. Five psalms, bookended, top and bottom, with the same word. That's how the book of Tehillim ends. Not with a request. Not with a conclusion. With praise, five times over, and then it just stops.

We're going to spend the next stretch of days in those psalms. So today, the doorway: the first line of the first one.

Halleli nafshi es Hashem - praise God, O my soul.

Stop there. Look at who's being addressed. It doesn't say "I will praise God." It says praise, my soul - David is talking to himself. He is issuing an instruction to his own inner life. And that's a strange thing to have to do, isn't it? If you actually felt it, you wouldn't need to command it.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks made an observation about praise that I think about constantly. He pointed out that gratitude and praise are not natural human reflexes - they are acquired skills. The natural human reflex is to notice what's missing. Complaint requires no training whatsoever. Nobody has ever had to teach a person to be dissatisfied. But praise? Praise has to be summoned. It has to be told to show up.

So David, the greatest poet in Jewish history, a man who could presumably access an emotion when he wanted one - even he opens by giving his own soul an order. Halleli nafshi. Soul, get up. We're doing this.

And I find that enormously freeing. Because it means the standard for davening was never "wait until you feel it and then say the words." The standard is: say the words, and instruct the soul to catch up. The verse is not a description of a state you're in. It's a command you give yourself on the way in.

Now the second half of the verse, which is where it becomes personal.

Ahalela Hashem b'chayai - I will praise God with my life. Azamra l'Elokai b'odi - I will sing to my God b'odi.

That word b'odi is hard to translate and it's the whole verse. Od means "still." B'odi - "while I still am." While there is still an I. While I'm still here.

The classical commentators read this as David putting a fence around the mitzvah of praise. The dead do not praise God, he says elsewhere in Tehillim - lo hameisim yehallelu Kah. Praise is something only the living can do. It is a function of being alive, of having breath moving through a body, of having a mouth and a morning. Which means the window is not indefinite. B'odi - while I still am.

That's not morbid. That's clarifying. It means the praise you're saying at 7:15 this morning is not a rehearsal for some more serious praise later. This is the window. This is what b'odi refers to. Right now, in this room, with the coffee not fully working yet - this is the "while I still am."

And put the two halves of the verse together, because David built them to lean on each other. The first half admits that praise doesn't come naturally - you have to order your own soul to do it. The second half tells you why you should bother giving that order: because there's a limited number of mornings on which you can.

One last thing, and then I'll let you go.

Five psalms, each opening and closing with Halleluyah. There's a beautiful tradition that connects those five to the five names of the soul - nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, yechidah, the five levels the mystics describe, from the part of you that runs your body all the way up to the part of you that's simply fused to God and always was. Five Hallelukahs, five layers of a person. As if David is saying: I'm going to go floor by floor through the whole building and turn the lights on in every room.

And notice which one he starts with. Halleli nafshi. Nefesh. The ground floor. The most physical, ordinary, closest-to-the-body layer of the soul. He doesn't start at the top. He starts where you actually are when you wake up.

Tomorrow: David says something in this same psalm that sounds almost cynical - al tivtechu bindivim, don't put your trust in princes. In the middle of a praise psalm. We'll find out why it's there.