The poet who wrote the short, anguished Psalm 82 may well have been an insider to the biblical system of adjudication, maybe one of the shoftim, the sitting judges, who, having seen through the curtain of official rhetoric that protected the court from internal and external scrutiny, courageously — prophetically — called foul. “I thought you were divines, large-souled aristocrats of the spirit,” the psalmist seems to be saying in verses 6-7. “But you’re just mere mortals, pretending to be gods.”
A truth-telling rebel whose heart was aligned with the poor, the hungry and the spurned, she might not have birthed a clear vision of a just society or of a way to bring about systemic change, but from her position of power and influence she saw the way her fellow judges accepted bribes from the rich and turned their eyes away from the suffering of social outcasts. And like the prophets, she spoke her truth directly to power.
As Paul Simon wrote in 1965, “The words of the prophets are written on subway walls.” They also still turn up in dissenting judicial opinions, in investigative journalism and even, on occasion, spoken from a synagogue pulpit. The words of the prophets and the poets, though impassioned and eloquent, have not yet made “justice roll down like waters and righteousness roar like a mighty stream” (Amos 5: 24), but they still stand as witness that even now may awaken a spark of recognition, say, in the heart of one who, after praying the morning service on a Tuesday, reads these words that struggle to shake one awake: “They just don’t get it,” the poet laments in verse 5. “They bumble in darkness while the world collapses into chaos.”
Maybe on a dark storm-tossed night, or in a fevered illness, or in a moment of exhilaration brought on by an unimagined success, you or I might briefly recognize that we live like fish snagged in a net of day-to-day problems and habits, blinded to the cosmic struggle for light and love, peace and compassion, freedom and forgiveness on which the future — if there is one — depends.
Now, let us imagine that the One Who Spoke and the World Came into Being, who is also the One who came to regret having created Adam and Eve and once sought to wipe them and their seed from the face of the Earth, that this torn One is as near to us as our own breath and still teeters between nihilism and generosity, hatred and love, condemnation and acceptance. This sleepless One depends upon us — limited, distracted players, still learning our lines and trying out our moves.
The poet who penned Psalm 82 concludes by urging God: “Rise up and judge the earth; for the world is Yours.” But she, this poet-prophet, knows the world has been given her to repair, a task she likely will never complete but which she may nonetheless not abandon.
“A poem,” the French poet Paul Valery once observed, “is never finished; it is only abandoned.” A prophecy, on the other hand, is never abandoned, it is rather handed over to another. Psalm 82 does just that.
