Translating Forward

Dear friends,

I wake up from an intense dream. I go over its details in my mind. I’m full of the ramifications of this dream: psychological, emotional, spiritual. I turn to a loved one or friend and begin describing it. Their attention fades quickly. They humor me by listening to the end and summarize it in a word: “Anxiety.” Or “Fear.” Or “Weird.” I am left alone with the emotions I was entirely unable to translate.  

Writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri writes in her most recent book about “the supremely disorienting act of translating myself.” She means writing something in one language and then translating it into another. But the act of translating ourselves is one that we engage in daily. With each person we speak differently, so that they will be able to hear us. So that we will feel understood. Or sometimes we give up and keep our inner world to ourselves. 

King David, the 10th century BCE Hebrew poet was good at translating his inner world into song. His poems, which we call Psalms are expressions of his most intimate and vulnerable thoughts. He speaks them to his God, and through his relationship to that God, human beings ever since have deepened their relationships to their own God. It didn’t matter that the vast majority of them did not speak the same language as David. Nor did it matter that they practiced a different religion altogether. This might tell us something about the place where different faiths, cultures and philosophies meet. His poems have been read consistently by a large portion of humanity ever since they were written. 

Many of us, however, have trouble connecting to these poems nowadays. Something isn’t coming through. The fact that the poems are addressed to God makes it difficult for many of us who don’t believe in God, or don’t relate to the way the bible describes God to connect to them. The world is so different now than it was then, we think to ourselves, what does any of this have to do with me?  

And then there’s the killer: the translations. 

Have mercy upon me, O God, 
as befits Your faithfulness; 
in keeping with Your abundant compassion, 
blot out my transgressions. 

We look at the words and feel nothing, or maybe we feel tired. We see nothing alive. We remember the boredom of our religious school education. We rebel against the patriarchy, against punitive authority and disempowering institutions, against the death of spirit, and stop reading. David’s relationship with what he called “El Khai,” “a living God” is not even a memory. It’s forgotten, or worse, mocked. 

I am lucky on that front. First of all, I speak Hebrew, and can read him in the original. I also was given tools from an early age that help study a biblical text, such as where to find commentary, how to mine biblical Hebrew and how to imagine my way into a biblical poem. Armed with those tools I spent seven years studying the entire Book of Psalms. What I found was the open heart of an extraordinarily communicative poetic giant, that expressed my fears, discontents, ideas and dreams in ways I could never do myself. Through the act of study, I managed to translate antiquated Hebrew into something valuable to me. 

I still, however, felt alone with the poetry. I couldn’t communicate what I experienced in them to anyone but my study partners, with whom I was mining the texts. I felt a strong to desire to try to communicate them to others. And so I began working on translating a number of Psalms into an English I hoped would manage to cut through both the linguistic and the philosophical barriers between 21st century New Yorkers and the Psalms.

You remember that line up above? Have mercy on me etc.? Read it one more time and then see what I did with it in my translation of Psalm 51: 

Treat me kindly, Lover

Lay my head on your breast

Melt my guilt like ice.

Believe it or not, I think that this version – for us today - is much closer to what David meant when three thousand years ago he wrote:  

חׇנֵּ֣נִי אֱלֹהִ֣ים כְּחַסְדֶּ֑ךָ כְּרֹ֥ב רַ֝חֲמֶ֗יךָ מְחֵ֣ה פְשָׁעָֽי׃ 

Of course, it’s different than the original in many ways. But, as Jhumpa Lahiri writes: 

“What one writes in any given language typically remains as is, but translation pushes it to become otherwise.” This is what it means when we say we are receiving the Torah. We are translating it forward, taking it on and playing with it in our mouths, hearts and minds. 

Tomorrow evening, when we gather to mark what happened at the foot of that mountain all those thousands of years ago, I am excited to have the opportunity to share with you some of these rather interpretive translations. I’m even more excited that the poems will be read by two wonderful actors, Maria Silverman and Martin Rekhaus, and accompanied musically by Frank London and Yonatan Gutfeld. After the poetry you’re invited to stay for part or all of our Tikkun Leil Shavuot, the traditional all night study session on the night of Shavuot (our version is far less traditional though...). We will be joined by several wonderful teachers, who will deepen our understanding of what it means to listen, to speak and to translate. These include Dr. Lizzie Berne DeGear, Rabbi Jim Ponet, Michael Posnick and Elana Ponet. And if you stay long enough into the night I’m hoping we might even work on studying and translating a psalm together. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha