Psalms 66

David composed this psalm in the twilight of his career, when God released him from the threat of the many hostile nations which surrounded him. Relieved of his concerns about the present, David was free to dream of the Messianic future (Ibn Yachya).

The psalmist first turns to Israel's glorious past, replete with wonders and miracles. The salvation of days gone by inspires the faith that such events are destined to be repeated on an even grander scale in the future, when God grants Israel its ultimate redemption (Meiri).

Meiri also suggests that the original version of this psalm was composed at the time of the exodus from Egypt. It foretells the splendor of the Temple, which was destined to be built by Solomon. Later, David adapted this work to the circumstances of his and future generations.

Indeed, Sforno observes that this psalm provides an eternal lesson in the art of supplication. David teaches the exiles to exert themselves in prayer to God and to emulate the example of their forefathers, who were granted redemption because of their unparalleled devotion in prayer.

In light of this, we can understand why the Vilna Gaon (Maaseh Rav 194) designates this as the 'Song of the day' for the sixth day of Passover: these verses serve as a most appropriate introduction to the climactic redemption at the sea, which occurred on the seventh of Passover. -Artscroll

Shout out to God. This initial imperative to acclaim God signals the beginning of a thanksgiving psalm. -Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (p. 2882).

Sing the glory of His Name. During the exile, God's Name is desecrated by the mouths of those who subjugate Israel, taunting them (Deuteronomy 32:38): "Where is Your God? Let Him arise and help you!" (Radak) -Tehillim - Book of Psalms with English Translation & Commentary: With Commentary from the Talmud, Midrash, Kabbalah, Classic Commentators and the Chasidic Masters

Because of Your great strength, Your enemies will deny to You their former treachery. They will deny ever having persecuted the Jewish people (Radak).

God's great strength will cause His enemies to reverse their positions and make false their previous assertions. Pharaoh had tauntingly asked (Exodus 5:2), "Who is God?" and had proniised never to release the Jewish people. But after God displayed His strength during the Ten Plagues, Pharaoh was forced to recant. He ended up declaring (Exodus 9:27), "God is the righteous one" and urging the Jewish people to leave Egypt (Shemot Rabbah 20:8).

6. He turned sea to dry land, / the torrent they crossed on foot. As in a number of other psalms, the miraculous crossing of the Sea of Reeds, telescoped with the crossing of the Jordan under Joshua, is evoked as a defining instance of God’s intervention in history on behalf of His people. The association of these early water-crossings with military triumph picks up the quailing of enemies in verse 3 and anticipates God’s powerful domination of nations in verse. -Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (p. 2882).

AQUATIC AUTONOMY

6. He turned the sea into dry land. Kabbalah speaks of two parallel worlds: the "revealed world" that we inhabit and the "concealed world" that transcends the physical.⁶⁵ In the "concealed" world, God's presence is obvious and pervasive. spiritual beings in those worlds are cognizant of how their existence depends entirely on Him, which leads them to surrender any sense of self. Their world is therefore called the "concealed" world, since the existence of its beings as independent is "concealed"—all that is apparent is God. In the "revealed world," however, God's presence is obscured, giving us the illusion that our existence is autonomous, as if independent from God. Our universe is therefore described as "revealed," since we are not eclipsed by the reality of Godliness.

The "sea" and "dry land" are metaphors for these two realties." The inhabitants of the sea are submerged in water and dependent on it. This resembles the concealed world, where the creations recognize their Divine source and surrender to it. Creatures of the land, on the other hand, grow and thrive apart from the earth. Although the land is the source of their life, they remain distant from it. This resembles the revealed world, where creations do not recognize their source of life and assume they are independent.

The splitting of the sea, where God turned the sea into dry land, was a monumental, cosmic event that saw these two worlds unite.⁶⁷ Creatures of "dry land," until now only aware of themselves, became aware of the reality of the "sea," God's pervasiveness.

Union of Opposites

A revelation of this magnitude should have caused the Jewish people to lose their independence, like the creatures of the sea. They should have lost all sense of self in the face of the Divine truth. Instead, they retained their identity throughout this Divine experience—they passed through the river on foot. Even as they absorbed the reality of the river, they still passed through—remained themselves. This represented the ultimate marriage of the two worlds, where separate beings become God-conscious.

How is this union of opposites possible? The verse concludes: we rejoiced in Him there. In referring to God abstractly as "Him," without a name, the Psalmist alludes to God's indefinable essence. This Essence transcends the differences between these two worlds, since He infinitely transcends both worlds equally. Because God Himself brought these two worlds together, the people could miraculously absorb the Divine reality without losing their identity (The Rebbe).⁶⁸ -Tehillim - Book of Psalms with English Translation & Commentary: With Commentary from the Talmud, Midrash, Kabbalah, Classic Commentators and the Chasidic Masters

10. For You tested us, God, / You refined us as silver refined. Some interpreters have taken the imagery of testing through fire in this verse and the language of the next two verses as expressions of the ordeal of exile that began in 586 B.C.E. There is nothing, however, in the formulations here that explicitly refers to exile, and the poet could easily have in mind any moment of impending disaster when powerful enemies threatened to overwhelm the Judahite state. The speaker from verse 13 onward assumes that the Temple exists. So either the whole psalm is pre-exilic or one must assume that an earlier psalm has been tacked on editorially to a later one. The switch to first-person singular beginning in verse 13 might seem to argue for this assumption, though there are many psalms that move from first-person plural to singular or the other way around, taking for granted that the fate of the individual and the fate of the nation are indivisible. -Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (p. 2882). W. W. Norton & Company.

20. Blessed is God. This concluding line, as is evident in the translation, is unbalanced and does not scan. Because there are lines like this one at the end of several other psalms, one suspects that it may have been an editorial practice (if not a poetic practice of the original psalmist) on occasion to add a line of prose summary as a kind of coda to the psalm. -Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (p. 2883). W. W. Norton & Company.

Spiritual Applications

This psalm makes clear that our individual sufferings need to be understood in the context of Israel’s suffering as a whole. This does not minimize our own trials— quite the contrary, it elevates them by reminding us that what we experience is affected by what the Jewish people have experienced, and what our people has experienced illustrates the profundity of our own distress. In that context, the splitting of the Reed Sea is not an event in Israel’s epic past; it is an event in our own lives (vv. 5– 6). All we need to do is ask ourselves when the Sea might have split in our lives, and re-examine that time in the context of that miracle. If we cannot locate such a time, then it may be that that miracle still awaits us, and that we are still in a state of bondage we may not have fully understood. As is asked in Twelve Step programs: To what am I enslaved?

Similarly, when we stand in a synagogue or in the woods or in our homes and pray, this psalm helps us remember where our prayers were born: on the fragrant altar of the Temple, bringing a material offering that fire would transform into a gift in the realm of God. With the Temple gone, prayer is our offering, words are our animals, words we need to shepherd as lovingly as we did the sheep and goats our ancestors would bring to the Temple. Each word of prayer can be offered up—“ Here, God, is my O; here is my three-letter three-letter English word for Your name; here is my Hebrew word baruch; here is the three-letter word with which I come before Y-o-u (or in Hebrew, alef, tav, hei). Let me kindle those words from the fire in my soul, and send them sweetly, humming, singing, speaking, filled with the fragrance of my passion, into the air where You reside.” Let our mouths cry out; let praise of God roll from under our tongue out to the seas and the dry lands, and let us rejoice there in the Holy One whose handiwork has been handed down to every one of us. -Levy, Rabbi Richard N.. Songs Ascending: The Book of Psalms (Vol. 1)

The Holy One, Blessed be He, revealed this extraordinary psalm to Moses and later to David. Both men were granted a holy vision, in which this psalm was engraved on a sheet of the purest gold, which was fashioned in the shape of a seven-branched candelabrum (menorah).

David duplicated this psalm in its menorah design and etched it onto his shield, so that he could study its teachings before entering into battle; this meritorious conduct assured David's victory. Chida notes that he copied this statement from the original manuscript of Rabbi Shlomo Luria, the Maharshal). A diagram of the psalm in its traditional menorah form appears in an appendix at the end of this volume.

Avodas HaKodesh says that whoev&r concentrates daily on this menorah and its message is considered as if he actually kindled the menorah in the Beis HaMikdash; such a person is surely destined to inherit the World to Come. Whoever recites it while concentrating on its menorah design will surely be safeguarded from all evil and enjoy great success.

It is customary to recite this psalm before Sefiras HaOmeron the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuos (Alshich; Akeidas Yitzchak; Kesef Mezukak).

In addition, many congregations chant this psalm with a special tune immediately preceding the evening prayer at the conclusion of the Sabbath. -Artscroll

a psalm, a song. Although this psalm begins (verse 2) with a prayer for God’s favor, the emphasis quickly becomes celebratory (beginning in verse 3), and it is emphatically a thanksgiving psalm. The scholarly conjecture, first proposed in the early twentieth century, that this is the text for a harvest ritual rests on the slender evidence of the reference to crops at the beginning of verse 7, but the invocation of the nations of the earth scarcely accords with harvests. Yet the psalm does have a liturgical character in its prominent repetition of set formulas and in its symmetrical structure. -Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (p. 2884).

shine His face upon us. The preposition used here in the Hebrew actually means “with,” but this could simply be a variation of the idiom not otherwise attested. In any case, “shine upon” seems to be the intended sense. The shining of the face is a sign of favor just as the hiding of the face is its opposite. -Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (p. 2884).

Spiritual Applications

To some extent this psalm serves as a commentary on the Birkat Kohanim, the Priestly Blessing of Numbers 6. To the question “Why do we want God to bless us?” the psalm has a response: so we can discern God’s direction on earth (v. 3). As a result of this revelation, the poet calls on all the peoples to praise God (v. 4). If you bless children at Shabbat dinner on Friday night, you might include that response in your blessing: “May you too discern God’s direction in your life.” The prayer that God might shine the divine countenance upon us, the middle verse of the Birkat Kohanim, lends itself to this Shabbat setting, a prayer in the light of the Shabbat candles— themselves a reminder of God’s creation of light and the mitzvah, the commandment, for us to continue to bring light into the world by kindling these candles. Sometimes perceiving God’s path for our lives feels like seeing a glimmer of light that has no physically recognizable source; sometimes it feels like an insight that comes into our minds in an unexplainable way. How should we respond? By recognizing it and saying simply, “Thank you.” -Levy, Rabbi Richard N.. Songs Ascending: The Book of Psalms (Vol. 1)