Psalm 23: A Psalm of Presence

“The Lord is my shepherd, what more do I need?” The issue of whether I desire things beyond that is beside the point. To want, in Elizabethan English, means not to desire but to lack, to be without something, as in the phrase “to be found wanting” or the poetic line “for want of a nail, a shoe was lost.”

Kushner, Harold S.. The Lord Is My Shepherd (p. 29). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall often want. I shall yearn, I shall long, I shall aspire. I shall continue to miss the people and the abilities that are taken from my life as loved ones die and skills diminish. I shall probe the empty spaces in my life like a tongue probing a missing tooth. But I will never feel deprived or diminished if I don’t get what I yearn for, because I know how blessed I am by what I have.

Kushner, Harold S.. The Lord Is My Shepherd (p. 36). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

God has colored His world in predominantly calming colors, blue sky, green leaves, blue-green water, brown trees, colors that calm rather than excite. That may explain a phenomenon that has long puzzled me: Why are we so drawn to the mountains and the seashore when we go on vacation? Why can we sit by the side of a lake for an hour or more, just looking at the water, and feel relaxed? The answer, I think, is that God’s world, decorated in blue and green, calms us, gently bathing our eyes with quiet, low-intensity colors. We spend so much of our lives in a man-made environment, with its artificial lighting and artificial heating and cooling, bright neon signs and color television programs, that when we get a day off, a long weekend, a vacation, we instinctively feel the need to find our way to God’s world with its more restful palette.

Kushner, Harold S.. The Lord Is My Shepherd (p. 39). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

4. in the vale of death’s shadow. The intent of the translation here is not to avoid the virtually proverbial “in the shadow of the valley of death” but rather to cut through the proliferation of syllables in the King James Version, however eloquent, and better approximate the compactness of the Hebrew—begey tsalmawet. Though philologists assume that the Masoretic tsalmawet is actually a misleading vocalization of tsalmut—probably a poetic word for “darkness” with the ut ending simply a suffix of abstraction—the traditional vocalization reflects something like an orthographic pun or a folk etymology (tsel means “shadow,” mawet means “death”), so there is justification in retaining the death component.

Alter, Robert. The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

The winding way/the מעגלים

My cup overflows:

When your cup is overflowing, do you go get a rag to clean up the mess on your table, or do you go get a bigger cup to be able to receive more blessing? —Josh Franklin

You set a able before me in the presence of my enemies:

This is often interpreted as vincictive: I'm going ot have a good dinner, and you're not. Instead, I hold imaginary testimonial dinners for the people who did me wrong: because you did this nasty thing to me, you turned me away from a routine life to an extraordinary life. You didn't know you did it for my good, but you did it anyway. Today I honor you for having been a difficult teacher, and I let you go free. ––Rabbi Zalman Schacthter-Shalomi

Goodness and love shall pursue me:

“There is a story of the rabbi who stops a prominent member of his congregation in the street and says to him, “Whenever I see you, you’re always in a hurry. You’re always rushing somewhere. Tell me, what are you running after all the time?” The man answers, “I’m running after success, I’m running after prosperity, I’m running to make a good living.” The rabbi responds, “That’s a good answer, if you assume that all of those rewards are out there ahead of you, trying to elude you, and you have to run hard to catch up to them. But what if the rewards are behind you, looking for you, but they can never find you because you’re running away from them? What if God has all sorts of wonderful gifts He wants to give you, but you’re never home when He comes looking for you so He can’t deliver them?””

— The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-third Psalm by Harold S. Kushner
https://a.co/dLW8fYt

“We can read the Twenty-third Psalm as a drama in three acts. Act one is serene, pastoral. The psalmist feels safe and secure, and he thanks God, his faithful shepherd, for providing him with that security. Act two turns dark and stormy. The psalmist’s life is interrupted by trauma, tragedy, and bereavement. Instead of dwelling in green pastures by still waters, he finds himself alone in a dark valley. Then he learns that he is not really alone. He comes to see God not only as the source of the good things in his life, but as the source of comfort and consolation in hard times. He comes to understand that only because God was with him was he able to find his way out of the darkness. He learns, as all of us who have gone through hard times learn, that the sunshine we step into when we have found our way through the valley of the shadow is infinitely sweeter than the sunshine we had basked in during our carefree, cloudless days. In act three, he realizes that his understanding of God, his relationship to God, has matured as well. God is no longer just the one who follows him through his travails. God now offers him something more permanent, an invitation to dwell in His house.”

— The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-third Psalm by Harold S. Kushner
https://a.co/cfkw7Tq

Where is the "House of God?"

As we walk along the winding paths through the green pastures and along the still waters, we come to realize that we need not a Temple to be in the house of God. We need only dwell amidst the beauties of creation to realize that God's house is all around us and accessible to anyone. -- Josh Franklin