Welcome, pilgrim, to the City of God. Be dazzled by the towers, the palaces, the citadels and ramparts. Behold the breathtaking view atop God’s own Mountain!
So suggests Psalm 48, celebrating God as patron, architect and inhabitant of the holy city of Jerusalem. Written with a poet’s hand and an architect’s eye, the psalm brings the reader on a visually striking tour of the city’s spectacular and sacred buildings, pointing out the natural geography of the place, weaving together praise and architecture as if they were alternate languages for the shared pursuit of the Divine. God is fused right into the structures of the city. In verse 4 we learn that through the citadels, God has made God’s self known as a haven. Not through pronouncements or prophecies, but through brick and mortar.
For those who approach with evil intent, like the kings mentioned in verse 5 who came to sack Jerusalem, the glorious vision of the city on the hill seizes them with trembling of body, like a woman in childbirth: “Upon seeing it, they were stunned, dismayed, terrified.” On the other hand, for those who serve God, the architecture affords both exultation and space for quiet contemplation: “Inside your palace, O God, we meditate on Your kindness.” One need only gaze on this city to be filled with jubilation or dread.
The Jerusalem of the psalm seems both revealed and concealed. It contains prominent towers but also deep recesses. The psalm proclaims the city’s qualities in a kind of litany: beautiful to gaze upon, beloved of the entire land, Mount Zion, the city of the great King. And among these epithets, there is one more difficult-to-parse phrase: yarketei tzafon.
On the surface, this phrase means “the far reaches of the north” — a stock phrase used in the Book of Ezekiel to refer to an inconceivably distant location, a place my family might have called otz-in-plotz. But what can it mean as a description of Jerusalem, which was not in any far northern reaches, but rather in the south of David’s united kingdom, smack at the center of Judea?
Yarketei tzafon also appears in the Book of Isaiah in a song that imagines the ultimate defeat of Israel’s Babylonian conquerors, decrying their prideful desire to climb up to the level of the gods by establishing a throne on yarketei tzafon. The meaning is not clear. Could it represent the place where the earthly mountaintop touches the divine realm, like Olympus? Isaiah probably follows the composition of Psalm 48 by several hundred years, although it could be referencing a shared mythology already in play in psalm-writing times. Even so, it seems an odd allusion for a psalmist to make.
We can’t know quite what the phrase meant to its author. But what might it mean to us, who have taken these words and images and made them part of the architecture of our Monday mornings?
Yarketei, far from alluding to mountains, actually means “recesses” or “deep places.” This is the same word used to describe the hold of the ship where Jonah slept on his ill-fated voyage to Tarshish. (Interestingly, the ships of Tarshish make a cameo in this psalm, ruined in a storm not unlike the one that caused Jonah to be tossed overboard into the waiting jaws of a great fish.) Meanwhile, the word tzafon, typically translated as “north”, comes from a root meaning “hidden.” (This is why the hiding of the afikomen at the Passover seder is titled tzafun.)
We might then read the phrase yarketei tzafon as pointing us to the hidden recesses — of the city, of the Divine, of the self. If God is in the architecture, God is equally in the negative spaces, the alcoves and apses, the womb of still uncertain futures. God is in the revealed and the concealed. Our interior landscapes include all of this — the lowly and the lofty, the enduring and the transient, the hidden and the manifest. If we read the psalm this way, then we find it inviting us to make pilgrimage not only to the parts of ourselves that stand prominent and brightly reflect the light, but to the parts that are deeper, darker and veiled — to others and sometimes even to ourselves. These places are also holy and worthy of exploration.
In Psalm 48’s scant 15 verses, we are commanded to tour all of it. To wander the streets and alleys of the soul.
Walk around Zion,
Circle it,
Count its towers.
Note its ramparts.
Pass through its citadels,
That you may tell it to a future age.
With this psalm, we can truly survey the landscape — of the earthly and supernal Jerusalem, of the lonely, glorious city residing in each of us. We can notice every detail so that it may be our legacy — enduring as stone, sublime and soulful as a Temple, protective as a cave, familiar as the street outside our front door. Behold the city, pilgrim! God is the architect and the architecture. God is the deep dark inside of you. God is Hamakom, the place altogether.
