1. A song of
ascents. When the Lord returns the returnees to Zion, we shall be like
dreamers.
א. שיר המעלות בשוב ה' את שיבת ציון היינו
כחלמים
2. Then our mouths
will be filled with laughter and our tongues with songs of praise; then they
will say among the nations, "The Lord has done great things with
these."
ב. אז ימלא שחוק פינו ולשוננו רנה אז יאמרו
בגוים הגדיל ה' לעשות עם אלה
3. "The Lord
has done great things with us; we were happy."
ג. הגדיל
ה' לעשות עמנו היינו שמחים
4. Return, O Lord,
our captivity like springs in a desert.
ד. שובה
ה' את שבותנו [שביתנו] כאפיקים בנגב
5. Those who sow
with tears will reap with song.
ה. הזרעים
בדמעה ברנה יקצרו
6. He will go
along weeping, carrying the valuable seeds; he will come back with song,
carrying his sheaves.
ו. הלוך ילך ובכה נשא משך הזרע בא יבוא
ברנה נשא אלמתיו
Psalm 126 may be the most
jubilant of the shir hamaalos and perhaps the most jubilant of all the psalms.
It has two parts. The first is basically a description of the exhilaration that
will be felt when the people of Israel return from the exile to the Holy Land.
It is a dreamy prophecy that will occur someday in the future.
Regarding the Jewish people, many
of the commentaries are like the Metsudas David, which understands this as the
end of a bad dream. “In the future when Hashem will bring from them from exile,
the prisoners of Zion will say, that all of the troubles that have passed, are
as if we dreamed a dream. This is to say that all the good, which they will
have then, will cause them to imagine that all of the grief was not in fact
true, rather it was just a dream in which they were troubled”.
The Malbim tends to be more
upbeat and sees the dream in the psalm as a good dream. “It emphasizes the hope
of Israel and how they hoped that G-d would fulfill our trust in Him through
[fulfillment of] the prophecies, and that He would release them from captivity.
The dream is the dream of the prophet, who saw the future, as if it is right
now. It was as if the joy, which we are experiencing now, was happening back then.
This is as it is written in Jeremiah (31:25), “Thereupon, I awoke and I had
seen, and my sleep was pleasant to me”. There is no difference between what a
prophet sees in a vision and what he sees, physically, when it actually
happens. Except that the prophet is happy in his heart alone and he is not able
to bring out the joy in action through the laughter and song of the mouth and
the tongue”.
The Or HaChaim comments on the
verse, “It will be that when you come to the land” (Deuteronomy 26:1), saying
“it will be” is the language of joy. This is to state that there is no joy like
the settling of the land as it says ‘then our mouths will be filled with
laughter’”, etc. (Psalm 126:2). The Zohar is even more effusive: Says Rabbi
Yehuda, come and see that it is written “the king is wrapped around [her]
tresses” (Song of Songs 7:6) and after that is the verse, “how beautiful and
how pleasant” (ibid 7). . . In the future the Holy One, blessed be He, will
delight his world and take delight from His creation. . . as it says ‘then our
mouths will be filled with laughter’ . . . Rabbi Aba says that the day the Holy
One blessed be He will be happy with his creation, there will not have been joy
like it, since the day he created the universe. The righteous will remain in
Jerusalem and will not return to their soil, as it says “And it shall come to
pass concerning every survivor who will be in Zion, and everyone who is left,
in Jerusalem, ‘holy’ shall be said of them” (Isaiah 4:3). This means that they
[the righteous] will indeed remain in Zion and Jerusalem”.
The idea is of the great joy
that will exist when the Jewish people are righteous and permanently settled in
the land of Israel. The joy will spread to the nations who will say, “Hashem
has done great things for them”, after which the nation of Israel will express
the same sentiment.
Further on, the psalm switches
to the present time for a prayer for the redemption. In it the Jewish people
ask to be returned like springs in the Negev. The Negev is the southern desert
in the land of Israel. The word literally means dry or parched. It continues with
a vision of sowing with tears and reaping with joy as well as carrying out a
heavy sack of seeds and carrying in a bundle of sheaves.
The idea of “springs in the
desert” is that the Jewish people will be like powerful springs that bring life
and vitality to a dried and parched land. One can view the dried and parched
land as the abandoned land of Israel or the neglected world of Torah. The idea
of sowing with tears and carrying a heavy sack is acceptance of the fact that
much hard work will need to be done. However it will pay off and there will be
a large and joyous harvest.
An underlying meaning of this psalm
was expressed by King Solomon in the Song of Songs (1:6) when he writes symbolically
of the Jewish people, “my mother's sons were incensed against me; they made me
a keeper of the vineyards; my own vineyard I did not keep.” The vineyard of
Israel is the land of Israel and the study of religion. The vineyard of the
nations is their lands and the physical professions. One of the evil
inclinations of the Jews in xenophilia, they love every country and every
profession except their own.
In the beginning there is a
strong attraction to foreign cultures and lands. In addition the working in the
physical can be interesting, prestigious, and lucrative. In addition eretz Yisrael
and Torah can evoke feelings of contempt, albeit with some sentimental
affection. Even so thoughts of Torah and Israel continue to nag the Jews. As a
result they build up a huge rationale about how great their current place and
occupation are and how little is the greatness of Torah and the land of Israel.
In the process they violate their heritage by both neglect and bad acts.
At some point they get sick of
foreign lands and foreign jobs, sometimes for no other reason except that it is
inconsistent with their personality. After that they come to the conclusion the
things that were rejected and abused are the
things really wanted and, the things chased after and glorified turned out to
be things not really wanted. However, they’re trapped by their words and
actions as well as by feelings of guilt and intimidation. That’s when the exile
really starts.
Finally HaKadosh Baruch Hu has
mercy on them and sweeps away the barriers and breaks the bonds. Things like money
and possessions are no longer problems. Socially their best friends wish them a
successful aliya. That is when the Jews say I’m going to Israel, it’s a dream.
There’s work to be done, but it’s the work that I wish to do with the return
that I want.
לע"נ
הסבתא טויבע בת יואל לייב ז"ל נלב"ע כה בשבט תשכ"ג
העלון ניתן לקבל בדואר אלקטרוני וגם באתר
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