The Old Testament: The Book of Psalms IV – Shout-Outs to the Poor, Needy, and Hints of Jesus

Posted on June 10, 2013 by virgowriter

In the summer of 1995, I visited my friend Denise in San Francisco.  She was living in Berkeley, attending UC Berkeley, and I was in town for a Pearl Jam concert.  I’d been to San Francisco twice before—once with my family, as we passed through on a road trip to Seattle; the other time was with two high school friends and one of their two older sisters.  But never as an adult, which I was feeling more and more like as I approached my 21st birthday (just two short months away).

She was showing me the city and, down by the wharf, there were a lot of homeless people.  They seemed to be everywhere, and I was stunned.  Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, I’d really only seen the occasional bum pushing a shopping cart or in a movie.  I’d seen them from afar during a field trip to a museum or play in downtown L.A., but never really up close.

One of the first who approached us asked me for money, and without thinking, I took out my wallet and handed the guy a dollar.  This is what you did, right?  Denise was shocked. “You just don’t do that,” she said, and not in a snobbish way, more out of concern, like you-were-lucky-that-firecracker-didn’t-go-off-in-your-hand way.  I was confused, as if I’d done something wrong.  During that afternoon, the more I acclimated to the city and its seemingly immense homeless population, I understood—you just couldn’t.  Now I couldn’t stop seeing homeless people everywhere I looked. This was poverty like I had never seen it.

I was amazed that I’d never really encountered homeless people before, but then I realized I probably had—they’d been there all along, I just never noticed, or chose not to notice.  Come to think of it, I hadn’t really notice any of the poor before either.

In the Book of Psalms, the poor finally get noticed.

Interestingly, this seems to be the first chunk of the Bible where pleas for the poor and needy surface.  Given how much of what I have thought of Christianity is linked to looking after the poor, I was shocked to see how long it took for mention of this idea to surface (41:1; 70:5).

Sure, you could say that God has looked after the Israelites for hundreds of years—they’ve been needy, right?  Traveling through desert, needing bread? God delivered—but this spoke to an entire people, not to a set of people within the Israelite (or general) population.  At this point, a lot of people are prosperous.  So the idea that everyone needed to look out for those in need is interesting. Another interesting thing is how out of tone this idea sounds with the rest of the Old Testament thus far (amidst all the war, vengeance, disrespect for women, etc.).

Given this first mention of the need to look after the poor, perhaps it’s also interesting that Psalms seems to be the Book that contains the first hints of Jesus (2:2).  (When I think of Christianity, I think of Jesus caring for the poor.)  In Psalms, his resurrection is also alluded to (16:9-11). I would have liked to see this idea in the context of a story, for it wouldn’t feel so forced in here—as if, like a George Lucas script, a plot line had been intended all along, rather than thought of after the fact.  There’s no sense that Jesus is offered as a prophecy up until this point; otherwise, you’d feel the natural progression of his arrival.  But the psalmists probably had Jesus on the brain, which explains why they thought of the poor.

I live in Philly, and here we have a lot of homeless people.  Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t pretend otherwise.  I wish I could say that my heart breaks every time I breeze past one of them, but I don’t.  Perhaps I’m too overwhelmed by how many I see to be moved (which, I get, sounds backwards). I wish I could get over the reflex that no matter what money (or food) I gave, I’d be making little (if any) difference.  The one guy taking donations in exchange for a copy of the One Step Away newspaper (outside Whole Foods on South Street) is always appreciative when I give him a dollar, though (check them out: http://www.osaphilly.com/). I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel like I was making some difference every time I did. I do it because it feels like the right thing to do, as a human being, not as a person with any religious leanings.

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The Old Testament: The Book of Psalms III – Ask Not What We Can Do for You, Ask First What You Can Do for Me

Posted on June 8, 2013 by virgowriter

Like most kids who got an allowance, I got mine on the weekend.  Saturdays could not come soon enough.  Among the uses for my allowance (with which I could be occasionally quite tight): 45s or cassettes, rocks pins, candy/pretzels/nachos from the little league snack stand, and, of course, Star Wars figures.  I knew how to make five bucks stretch.  Mom taught me well.

For some reason I would occasionally get wind of a new wave of figures hitting stores (strange, given the pre-Internet era, so I don’t remember how I heard—ads maybe?) and I knew, if I asked nicely, I could convince Dad to take me.  The major hurdle was my allowance.  If I’d spent it or had designs on something that would require a few weeks’ worth, I needed a little advance.  In those cases, I’d have to turn on the charm as I stuck my hand out.

And when I asked, Dad—who was always up for a little negotiation—would ask if I’d done my chores for the week (such as picking up the dog poop in the yard and emptying the bathroom trash baskets).  Sometimes I’d lie—sure, of course I did—but usually I would just say no, perhaps confused about what this had to do with my request.

“You see, if you don’t do your chores, you don’t get your allowance.  That’s how it works.  You can’t ask to be paid for something you haven’t yet done.  That’s NOT how it works.”

Now, I’m no Bible expert, but I’ve read enough of the Old Testament by this point to realize that when the Psalmists—in some case speaking for David, in some cases anonymously—write that God should do something for the speaker and then the speaker will sing his praises, spread the word, etc., , he has things a bit backwards.  You don’t have to be a Bible scholar to realize that you probably shouldn’t ask God to hook you up with the promise that you’ll do him a solid in return.  Apparently, the Psalmists are bargaining with God: do this for us and will spread the word.

Seems that the first part has to happen before the second part kicks in.

They also seem to have no qualms about demanding the speed with which their requests should be delivered: quickly. You can find this sentiment all over the Book of psalms: 5:10, 31:2, 71:12, just to name a few. I can see this coming across as wishful thinking on the part of the speaker, but it seems like a please would help.  I can see God responding the way a restaurant server does when a customer snaps a finger or waves in his or her direction—this usually pushes you to the back of the line, where rude people belong.  Did the authors here really think God would be impressed by being told (as from David’s perspective) to fight David’s enemies… and then his soul would rejoice in the lord (35:9)?

Thankfully I eventually learned that you have to meet your obligations before you get what was promised you.  Still, I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for my Dad.  He probably lost track of the times he had to tell me that I actually had to do my chores.

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The Old Testament: The Book of Psalms II – The Book Was Better Than the Movie

Posted on June 5, 2013 by virgowriter

Nowadays, you’d be hard pressed to see a movie (at least a mainstream film) that’s not based on some other source, like a comic book or a novel. This drives a number of people crazy; They believe that Hollywood has run out of their own ideas!  Furthermore, say others, Hollywood desecrates beloved books, stripping them of what’s good about them.  Although desecrate is a bit harsh, I’m in the latter group.  Even though I understand that something has to give when you condense a story, I wish they’d do a better job of representing certain stories.  Part of the problem, of course, is that the story has been shaved to meet someone else’s impression of what’s important, not mine.

Free of space and time constraints, books have a freedom that film producers (and other mediums, like a TV show) don’t.

David Fincher’s Fight Club is one of the few examples that proves me wrong. Together with a deft script and good acting, Fincher took a really good book and made it into a brilliant movie, in part because he was able to build on the story’s solid foundation with his technical wizardry.  It helped that the nimble narration in the book lent itself to movies in ways that a lot of books just don’t.

Often, a book’s nuisances (like descriptions), the language (that’s not dialogue), and sometimes secondary characters (that wacky neighbor that appears only twice) get lost in translation to another medium.  Books include all of these, and the sum of these parts make the book a pleasure to read.  Yet some people only think of the main story as the important part.  And when you have to focus on what’s important, you have to make choices as to what to cut.  This is why some stories usually can’t be condensed and still convey all that is important—in part because you have to rely on a handful of people’s ideas on what the important part IS that’s worth conveying.

The Book of Psalms runs into similar issues when trying to turn various tales of the Bible into a tight little poem or in some cases a song to sing.  Used to convey the spirit of certain Bible stories as songs in the Temple or spreading the word in public, these mostly short psalms put a different spin on the way history or (most often) love for God is conveyed.  Imagine someone walking through town and singing these, trying to entice someone to hear a little about God. In this way, these truncated little poems (and sometimes songs) can be about as effective as the movie version of the Bible book they represent.

Most of the stories that get represented have to do with King David.

The psalms that represent David tend to focus on a sliver of a moment, wherein David, in a moment of weakness, begs God to wipe out all of his enemies (17:14, for example).  Out of context, the reader (or listener), doesn’t get the context of the moment.  They won’t know what drove him from Jerusalem or what he felt like losing his son Absalom or even his history standing up to Goliath (and then Saul).

But if you wanted to yank his moments out to show how he leaned on God, these work. That is, if you need to be force-fed a lesson like a fortune cookie fortune.

Distilling these stories down to these moments rob them of the details that make them well-rounded stories.  But, of course, the full books are always there to read. The issue of course is what happens to the people who don’t have the time (or don’t care to take the time) to read the whole story but think they get the gist here.  And then base their understanding of the Bible on this gist.

One of the painful things to listen to as a teacher, a writer, a reader, and a film viewer is how people flock to films in place of reading the actual book.  When I see a film that is based on book, I expect that I’m not getting the full story—sometimes, for me, that’s enough.  If I’m interested in the message in the story, I’ll read the book.  I wish more people would, although I know most won’t.

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