Out of the Depths I Call
The five are Psalm 13, Psalm 22, Psalm 73, Psalm 88, and Psalm 130. They are not chosen for their comfort. Three of them are among the most desolate texts in the Bible; one (Psalm 88) is famous precisely because it offers no resolution at all, ending in darkness. They are chosen because they map, with uncanny accuracy, the three theaters of a physician’s faith: faith in himself, faith in his patients, and faith in the system within which the two of them meet. And they are chosen because the tradition of their interpretation—from the Anchor Bible commentaries of Mitchell Dahood, through the literary readings of Robert Alter, the inner-biblical exegesis of Michael Fishbane, the philological labors of David Noel Freedman and Umberto Cassuto, and the luminous theology of Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook—offers a way of holding desolation that neither denies it nor drowns in it.
The method here is the one I have called hermeneutic medicine: the conviction that the patient is a sacred text requiring interpretive wisdom, that the clinical encounter is structured by a tzimtzum—a self-contraction of the physician that makes room for the patient’s agency—and that healing is a phenomenology of presence rather than a transaction of repair. But the physician who would practice this must himself be read. He too is a text, and in the hour of doubt he is a text that has gone dark, a hester panim, a hiding of the face. The Psalms are the literature of the hidden face that still speaks. That is why they are the right companions.