Hallelu Es Hashem Min HaShamayim

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 85.

Psalm 148 begins, and David changes what he's doing. Completely. And almost nobody notices, because the words feel like more of the same.

For the last two psalms he's been describing. God builds Jerusalem. God heals the broken-hearted. God counts the stars. Statements. Reports about God.

Now, starting here, every single line is a command. Hallelu - praise! Halleluhu - praise Him! Over and over. Count them later; the imperative form appears roughly a dozen times in thirteen verses. David has stopped praising and started conducting.

And who is he giving orders to?

Hallelu es Hashem min hashamayim - praise God from the heavens. Halleluhu chol malachav - praise Him, all His angels. And as the psalm continues: sun, moon, stars, water above the sky. Then tomorrow: sea creatures, fire, hail, snow, wind, mountains, trees, animals, birds.

David is issuing commands to the sun. To hail. To trees.

Which should strike you as absurd, and I think we skip past it only because it's dressed in poetry. If I stood here and ordered the parking lot to praise God, you'd be concerned. So what does he think he's doing?

There are two classical answers, and the second one is the one I want to leave you with.

The first answer: they're already doing it.

The Rambam writes - in Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah, in his most sober, philosophical mode - that the heavenly bodies are not inert matter. They possess awareness, he says, and they know their Creator, and they praise Him. That's not a poet talking; that's the Rambam, in a work of law.

And there's an ancient text called Perek Shirah that takes this to its full conclusion. It's a short, strange, beautiful composition that lists creation - heavens, earth, sun, moon, clouds, wind, sea, rivers, trees, dogs, ravens, roosters, frogs - and assigns each one a verse. Its own verse. Its own line of Tehillim. What the sea is "saying." What the wheat field is "saying."

The idea underneath it is this: a thing praises God by being fully what it was made to be. A star's praise is its shining. It has no other liturgy and it needs none. It burns exactly as designed, and the burning is the praise. The mountain praises by standing. The rain praises by falling.

Which means the universe is not silent. It's saturated. Everything is already at it, all the time, and the praise consists precisely of the thing doing its job.

Now the second answer, and this is the one that makes the verse land.

If every one of them is already praising automatically - then why does David need to tell them to?

He doesn't. The commands aren't for them. They're for him.

Think about what's actually happening when you stand in shul and instruct the sun to praise God. You are not adding anything to the sun's day. The sun is fine. What you're doing is noticing it. You're going through creation item by item - heavens, angels, hosts, sun, moon, stars - and saying, out loud, this one too, and this one, and this one. You're taking an inventory of a chorus that was already singing and that you had been walking around not hearing.

And there's a reason it has to be a human being who does this, and it's the thing that makes our praise different in kind from everything else in the psalm.

The sun cannot fail to praise. Neither can the mountain, or the hail, or the tree. Their praise is automatic, guaranteed, and - this is the key word - involuntary. They cannot withhold it. A star has never once considered not shining.

You can. You are the only item on David's entire list that gets a vote. Which means you're the only one whose praise costs anything, and therefore the only one whose praise can be a gift rather than a mechanism.

So the psalm is structured as this: David walks through all of creation, calls the roll of everything that praises God without choosing to - and then, at the end of the psalm tomorrow, he arrives at human beings. Kings, nations, young men, old men. The ones who have to decide.

The whole cosmic list is a runway. It exists to get you to the one voice in the universe that has to be asked.

And notice the last word of our verse: tz'va'av - His hosts. It's a military word. Armies. Ranks. Which tells you the character of what's above us: not a crowd, an order. Everything in formation, everything doing precisely its assigned thing.

And then there's you, this morning, out of formation, with a choice - and your line, unlike every other line in the psalm, only gets said if you say it.

Tomorrow: David turns the same commands on the earth, and starts with the strangest possible opening act - sea monsters and the depths.