NOTES for Psa 136

How should we conduct ourselves in a hostile environment, among those to whom the sacred things we cherish are alien and, at best, arouse curiosity as something strangely exotic? In the refusal to sing sacred hymns for enslavers, we should see not only an unwillingness to demean oneself before oppressors, but also a refusal to cast pearls before those capable of trampling them underfoot. Many sacred things have already been lost and desecrated by enemies; preventing the desecration of the little that remains is a way of remaining faithful to what was once so thoughtlessly undervalued.

The resolve to resist a hostile environment spiritually is absolutely necessary. But we also see that the anger of enslaved captives can take extreme forms. The cruel words about Babylonian infants have troubled readers and hearers of the psalm many times over the centuries. These words have often been interpreted allegorically, with the infants understood as sins. Yet in any case the question is unavoidable: why is the allegory expressed in this particular form?

Yes, the oppressed often dream of cruel retribution, and more than once their fury has proved blind, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. But can we deny that cruel retribution has repeatedly fallen upon enslavers, provoked by their own atrocities? In our own day, many Germans, recalling with pain their country's sufferings at its military defeat, acknowledge that it was not the victors who began the cruelties...

If we want to understand fully the thought of the psalm, expressed in a way unfamiliar to us and perhaps even repellent, we must not tear it out of the Bible, but relate it to the rest of its pages.

Vengefulness, of course, has never been counted among the virtues. True, sometimes the Torah allows revenge, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," but still more as a concession to fallen human nature than as a norm. It is no accident that Jesus unequivocally forbids His followers to take revenge. As for our psalm, it is of course permeated with vengeance; it literally breathes it. And it is hardly worth taking the curses contained in it as allegories. Rather, they can be considered a tribute to history, a truthful and realistic description of the feelings that overwhelmed the inhabitants deported from Jerusalem in the first years after the catastrophe that befell their country and city. But there is also something else here, something the pre-exilic prophets spoke of more than once, beginning with Amos. The matter concerns what in everyday speech is sometimes called "a just impact," with the addition: "after all, there is justice in the world!" In reality, of course, there is no question of justice here. Precisely the words of the prophets, and also of the hymnographers, allow us to conclude that there is no justice in the fallen world and there cannot be. But peculiar historical "swings" really do exist in it, and they swing continuously, so that today's victor tomorrow will be defeated by his recent enemies, who in turn will take full revenge on their recent victors. And it is not so easy to say exactly what the author of the psalm has in mind: simple vengeance or this peculiar "justice." In any case, one is not very far from the other, because neither vengeance nor that peculiar "law of historical retribution," on whose action the hymnographer may have hoped, has anything to do with God's providence. Such is the first, very natural reaction of fallen man to the misfortune that has happened to him, whether personal or national: if he remembers God at all, he does not do so immediately, but instinctively begins looking for a way to find the guilty party and take revenge on him, using all the possibilities at his disposal. And the people of God, in this respect, as we can see, proved no exception: in the first years after the catastrophe they were overwhelmed by the same feelings that would have overwhelmed any other people in such a situation. They show their qualities as the people of God not at the moment of this first reaction, but later, when it is replaced by reflection on what happened, repentance for committed sins, and a new turning. The very turning that decades later opened for the people the possibility of returning to the land of their fathers, once promised to them by God.