Hallelu Es Hashem Min Ha'aretz

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 86.

Yesterday David commanded the heavens. Angels, sun, moon, stars - the whole upper order, in formation.

Now he turns around and commands the earth. And I want you to see who he calls on first, because he had the entire planet to choose from and the choice is deliberate.

Hallelu es Hashem min ha'aretz - praise God from the earth - taninim v'chol tehomos. Sea-monsters, and all the depths.

Not the sunrise. Not a flowering field. Not a newborn lamb. He opens the earth's praise with the taninim - the great sea creatures, the leviathans, the things in the deep - and with tehomos, the abyss. The word tehom is the same word from the second verse of the Torah: v'choshech al p'nei tehom, darkness over the face of the deep. The primordial dark water. The chaos before order.

That's his opening act.

And you have to understand how radical that is in the ancient world. Every civilization around Israel told a version of the same story: in the beginning there was a sea monster, a dragon of the deep, the embodiment of chaos - and the god of order had to fight it, kill it, and build the world out of its corpse. The monster is the enemy. That's the standard religious cosmology of the entire ancient Near East.

David takes that monster and puts it in the choir. And not in the back row - he gives it the opening line of the earth's praise.

He's making a claim, and it's one of the foundational claims of Judaism: there is no rival. Nothing in creation is outside the system. The deep is not God's opponent that He subdued; the deep is God's creature, and it praises Him like everything else. In our psalm the monster doesn't need to be defeated. It needs to be invited.

Now watch what he does next, because the second half of the verse is a masterpiece of pairing.

Hehorim v'chol g'va'os - the mountains and all hills. Eitz p'ri v'chol arazim - fruit trees and all cedars.

Four items, in two pairs, and each pair puts the impressive one next to the ordinary one. Mountains - and hills. A hill is a mountain that didn't make it. And then: fruit trees - and cedars.

Look at that second pair carefully. The cedar of Lebanon was the status tree of the ancient world. It's what the Beis HaMikdash was paneled in. Enormous, straight, aromatic, magnificent - and it produces nothing you can eat. The fruit tree is short, unglamorous, often gnarled, and it feeds people.

David lists them together. Neither one outranks the other in the chorus. The tree that feeds you and the tree that impresses you get the same instruction.

And that's when this psalm stops being about scenery and starts being about you - because you already know which of those you are on any given day, and it changes.

Now let me give you Rebbe Nachman, because nobody heard this psalm more literally than he did.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught that every single blade of grass has its own song. Not as a metaphor - as a description of reality. And he taught that when a person goes out into a field and prays, all the grasses of the field enter into his prayer and strengthen it. His student writes that this is why hisbodedus, personal prayer, is best done outdoors: because you are not praying alone out there. You are joining something already in progress.

Which is exactly our psalm. The mountains, the hills, the fruit trees, the cedars, the depths - all of it already singing, and a person's own prayer being one more voice folding into a chorus that started long before he woke up.

And here's the connection I want to leave you with, because it closes a circle we opened nine days ago.

Rebbe Nachman's single most famous teaching is called Azamra. And azamra is a word we learned on Day 78 - it's from the opening of Psalm 146: azamra l'Elokai b'odi, I will sing to my God while I still am.

What he teaches there is this. You must search for the nekudah tovah - the good point. In another person: even if he seems to you to be entirely bad, you must find the one place where he isn't, because that single point is where you should look and where he actually lives. And then Rebbe Nachman turns it inward and says you must do exactly the same thing for yourself. When you look at yourself and find nothing but failure, you must dig until you find one good point - and Rebbe Nachman says that by finding those points, one after another, you make music. That's why the teaching is called Azamra. The finding of the good points is literally how the notes get made. You are not praising despite the mess. You're assembling a melody out of whatever points you can locate.

And now hold that next to today's verse.

The earth's praise begins with the tehom. The depths. The chaos. The part of creation that every other ancient religion called the enemy.

You have a tehom. Everyone does - the part of yourself you'd rather not look at, the part that feels like it's disqualifying. And this verse says something startling about it: it doesn't have to be defeated before you can praise. It doesn't even have to go last.

Taninim v'chol tehomos. The depths go first.

Tomorrow: the last group David calls on. After the monsters, the mountains, and the trees - human beings. And the way he lists us gives away everything.