Shiru LaHashem Shir Chadash

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 88.

Yesterday we closed Psalm 148 with the entire universe standing in one choir - angels, cedars, kings, the old together with the young. Two psalms left in the Hallelukah set. And Psalm 149 opens with an instruction that sounds, if you sit with it for five seconds, impossible.

Shiru laHashem shir chadash. Sing to God a new song.

Here's the problem. These words are roughly three thousand years old. You said them yesterday morning. You will say them again tomorrow morning. They sit at a fixed point in a fixed liturgy that hasn't moved in centuries. By any normal definition, there is nothing in your life less new than this song. So what exactly is the verse asking for?

The Sfas Emes - the Gerrer Rebbe, and one of the great voices on these psalms - returns to one idea over and over throughout his teachings, and it's the key that opens this verse. Creation, he says, is not an event that happened once. It's happening. The world is made again, from nothing, every day. In a few minutes, in the blessings before Shema, we'll say it outright: hamechadesh b'tuvo b'chol yom tamid maaseh v'reishis - He renews, in His goodness, every single day, continuously, the work of creation. That's not poetry about sunrises. It's a claim: the world you woke up in this morning is not yesterday's world held over. It was spoken into being again while you slept.

And if the world is genuinely new, then praise for it cannot be a rerun. The song is new because its subject is new. When the verse says shir chadash, it isn't demanding that you compose fresh lyrics. It's telling you what kind of morning you're standing in.

Which means staleness - that flat feeling of "I've said all this before" - is never a report about the words. It's a report about the singer. The words are describing a world that is an hour old. If they sound old, I'm the one who slept through the renewal.

And this should sound familiar, because it's Day 2 all over again. Chadashim labekarim, rabbah emunasecha - new every morning, great is Your faithfulness. The verse standing behind Modeh Ani. The mornings themselves are new. Day 88 is not Day 87 warmed up.

Now the second layer, and it's a Midrash that changes what this verse is even pointing at.

Hebrew has two words for song: shirah, the feminine form, and shir, the masculine. And the Midrash observes that the great deliverance songs of Tanach - including the Song at the Sea, which we're heading toward in a little over a week - are called shirah. The Midrash explains with an image of birth: every rescue in history was like a birth. Real joy - that delivered us into a world where there would eventually be more pain, another narrow place, another cycle. That's shirah. But the song of the final redemption, says the Midrash, is shir - masculine - the song after which nothing hurts again.

Now look at our verse. Shiru laHashem shir chadash. Not shirah. Shir. David planted the future song in the middle of the morning liturgy. Every day, in Psukei D'Zimrah, we're not only praising for what has already happened. We're rehearsing the one song that hasn't happened yet.

And where does this rehearsal take place? The verse tells you, and it's not where you'd expect. Tehillaso bik'hal chasidim - His praise is in the assembly of the devoted. You'd think a new song would be a solo - one person breaking away from the crowd, improvising. David says the opposite. The new song lives in a kahal. In a congregation. In a minyan full of people saying old words together and finding this morning inside them. Newness in Judaism isn't a private invention. It's something a community discovers, together, in the same ancient sentences.

One more word, because it quietly carries the whole idea. Yismach Yisrael b'osav - let Israel rejoice in its Maker. The word is osav, from oseh - a present participle. We've seen this form before in Psukei D'Zimrah: oseh shamayim va'aretz, who makes heaven and earth. Present tense. Still making. Rejoice in the One who is making you - not who made you, filed you away, and moved on. You are mid-manufacture. The person who davens tomorrow is not obligated to be the person davening today.

So here's the verse in one line: the world is new, you are unfinished, and the song we're practicing hasn't had its premiere yet.

Tomorrow, this gentle psalm does something jarring: the praises of God in our throats - and a double-edged sword in our hands. What is a weapon doing in Psukei D'Zimrah?