The first psalm is a machine for sorting people, and it will sort you the moment you try to use it.
It opens with a blessed man described in three refusals. He does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly. He does not stand in the way of sinners. He does not sit in the seat of the scornful. The postures slow down as the verse goes, from walking past to standing among to sitting down, until the last one is a person lowered all the way into a chair, and the chair turns out to have a name, and the name is contempt.1 So the opening move of the entire Psalter is to point at a piece of furniture and define the blessed life, first, as the life that has not settled into it.
Every reader reaches at once for the obvious question. Who is sitting there.
And that is the trap, and it is a beautiful one, because you cannot watch it working. You read “the seat of the scornful” and your mind hands you a face before you have asked for one. A president, a commentator, a relative, some whole bloc of people you have quietly filed under scornful and, in the filing, held in contempt. The instant the face appears you have sat down. The chair was never on the far side of the room. The chair is the act of deciding who is in it. Psalm 1 is not a chart of two populations. It is a mirror that shows you the only person in the sorting you have any authority over, which is the one doing the sorting, and it shows you this by watching what you do in the half second after somebody hands you a way to rank everyone else.
I did not build this reading to be clever. The people who took the psalm most seriously built the counterexample for me and left it in a cave.
By the Dead Sea, the community that copied and recopied these psalms took the two ways of Psalm 1 and did the intuitive thing, which was to make the wall higher. Their rule bound each member to separate from the men of the pit, to carry an everlasting hatred toward the men of perdition, to hold that hatred in a spirit of secrecy, and to stand ready for the Day of Vengeance.2 The psalm's quiet not-sitting had become a standing program of loathing. And the tell, the thing that gives the whole apparatus away, is that in the rule the hatred never once turns back on the one who hates. It points outward, permanently, at the men of perdition, who were reliably other people.
Set beside it the psalm that comes much later in the same book, the one I read three days ago. It says of the enemies of God, I hate them with perfect hatred, which is as far as the sect ever got. But it does not stop there. In the very next breath it says, Search me, O God, and know my heart, and see if there be any wicked way in me. The hatred pivots, mid-sentence, off the enemy and onto the speaker. That pivot is the whole distance between a psalm and a militia.
Now here is what unsettles me, sitting where I sit in the late summer of this year.
The world has independently rediscovered the chair, and named the disease, and gone so far as to measure it, arriving at the psalm's diagnosis by an entirely secular road. In February a survey found that ninety-four percent of Americans say every person deserves to be treated with dignity, and that thirty-one percent believe people actually are.3 That gap, sixty-three points wide, is the seat of the scornful rendered as a bar chart. Nearly everyone agrees no one should sit there. Nearly no one believes the room holds any empty chairs. But the finding that stopped me cold was smaller and worse. A set of studies published this year reports that moral superiority aggravates dehumanization, that the surer a person feels of standing on the higher moral ground, the more efficiently that person strips the humanity off the people standing lower.4 The virtue is the vector. The ones most convinced they are the tree turn out to be the most productive manufacturers of chaff.
Which is Psalm 1 read as a blade, precisely. Take the two ways as a sorting tool, decide you are on the green side of the river, and the confidence of that verdict becomes the machine that dries out everyone on the far bank. The sect proved it in ink and the journals proved it again in regression tables, and the psalm knew before either of them that the sorting hand is the one that needs watching.
So the wind.
Psalm 148, the other psalm the church hands me today, calls the whole of creation into a choir and enrolls in that choir the stormy wind fulfilling his word. The wind is a singer. But in Psalm 1 the same wind is the thing that drives the chaff away, the agent of the judgment, the winnower on the threshing floor. One breath, two offices, chorister and judge, and the thing the sect missed by a margin you could measure in centuries is that the winnowing is the wind's work and never the tree's. The tree is not told to sort anything. The tree is told to stay planted by the water and bring forth its fruit in season and keep its leaf from withering. The judgment gets left, entirely, to God and to the weather. The sect's founding error, the one the studies keep re-confirming under fluorescent light, was the decision to quit being the tree and go into business as the wind.5
And the wind this August will not behave. The forecasters say the storms are stalling now rather than moving on, parking over one place and intensifying, so that a single system floods one valley while a state away the drought deepens and the fire runs. The wind that fulfills his word is not gentle. It is running both of its offices at once, this week, over people who did not choose their coordinates.
There was one small motion the other way, and I want to name it without gilding it. On the seventh of August, prosecutors in the West Bank indicted a settler for the killing of a Palestinian community leader, the first indictment of its kind in more than seven years.6 One case, against a backdrop of settler violence that has only climbed, and the day after, soldiers were filmed beating a civilian in another village. I am not going to call it a turning. But it is, structurally, the thing the sect could not do and the later psalm could. It is a judgment submitted to a court that can, in principle, turn its scrutiny back on itself, instead of a vengeance seized by the hand that felt wronged. A court is the institutional form of search me. A Day of Vengeance is the institutional form of the men of perdition. The difference is not that one is angrier. The difference is which way the searching runs.
Lord who leaves the winnowing to the wind, I cannot climb out of the chair by resolving to sit up straighter. The dignity survey proves the resolve does not work, that ninety percent of a country can want dignity while thirty-one percent of it can find any, because contempt is not a decision I make once and reverse once. It is a place I am always about to sit down in, and the only thing that has ever gotten anyone up out of a bad chair is a better thing to be doing on your feet. The psalm calls the better thing delight. His delight is in the law of the Lord, and in that delight he does not sit in the seat, not because he is standing guard over the seat but because he is elsewhere, watered and too taken with something to spend himself on the chaff. Give me that. Not the strength to despise the scornful a little less, which is only a lower-volume way of despising them. Give me a delight big enough that the seat finds no room left in me to pull. And keep the ones under the withheld rain, in El Fasher and Kadugli where the famine is not a figure of speech and the wind brought no water, whose drought is a siege and not a verdict, who are not chaff, who were never chaff, whatever the winnowers of this world have gone ahead and decided.