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Psalm 83: A lament

In future posts, I will try to describe other Jewish cemeteries I saw in Poland. These are unlike the Lodz cemetery, and they are painful to recall and describe. Psalm 83, a cry from the heart that captures better than anything I could write about what I bore witness to, seems an appropriate preface:

The Psalm first describes what various nations wanted to do to the Jews:

A song, a psalm of Assaf.

God do not hold your silence,
be not silent and be not still O God.
For behold, your enemies are in an uproar,
and those who hate you have lifted up their head.
Against your people they plot deceitfully,
and they conspire against those sheltered by You.
they say, “Come let us cut them off from nationhood,
let Israel’s name be remembered no more.”
Next the Psalm emphasises that it wasn’t just one nation, but many:

For they conspire together with a unanimous heart,

and against you they make a covenant.
The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites,
Moav and the Hagarites.
Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek,
Philistinia with the inhabitants of Tyre.
Even Assyria joins them,
they become a supporting arm to the children of Lot, Selah.

Then the wish for revenge and justice:

Do unto them as with Midian,
as to Sisera, as to Jaabin at the river bed of Kishon.
They were destroyed at Ein Dor,
they became dung for the soil.
. . .
My God, make them like whirling chaff,
like the straw before the wind.
Like fire that burns the forest,
and like a flame that ignites the mountains.
So pursue them with Your tempest,
and terrify them with Your storm.

And finally the wish that the nations recognize the wrongs they committed:

Fill their faces with shame,
then they will seek your Name, God.
Let them be ashamed and terrified, forever,
and let them be humiliated and perish
Then they will know that You,
whose Name is God, are alone,
the Most High over all the earth.

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