Psalm 1

I am struck, in Psalm 1, by the sense of a single enlightened figure who stands apart from a multitude. Ever one man, a figure whose meditations suggest solitude, an inward light. Here is one who listens not to the ungodly counsel of others, but who stands, in the psalm's central metaphor, like a tree--not one tree among many, as in a copse or a vast forest, but a tree unshadowed by neighbors, and indeed one may speak of this righteous figure as the tree, figuring Man and Woman through their initial defining act, The Fall, and the Son of Man, who mounted a tree at Calgary.

There is a basic rhythm in the verses, a pendular swinging back and forth between the ungodly and the godly, until in the final verse the two are united in God's Manichean vision of the World. The Jew, like the early Christian, was a being apart, one who dared stigmatize all who followed other paths. And the God worshipped by the Jew wielded a type of power always accompanied by force: law. Laws can only exist where force exists, as Tolstoy reminds us in that memorable passage late in War and Peace that shows Pierre Bezukhov facing a military tribunal that exists only "to inculpate him."

Judgement seems somehow, for me, far from the vision of a tree on a river's bank, but the same winds that ruffle an elm's heavy plumage disperse the chaff that has no place in an elysium.