1. Why another translation of the psalms?

I didn’t set out to translate the psalms because I thought other translations were lacking in some specific way. I set out to translate the psalms, as, well, as a kind of prayer. I had a spiritual hunger, desperation even, and I had an intuition that the psalms manifested the kind of relation to God that I was craving. And the more I turned to them, the more I found this was true. My practice was to turn to the psalm that spoke to me on a given day and enter into its prayer through the act of translation. Over time, I found that I had translated so many of the psalms that I decided to translate all of them.

In approaching these prayer songs, my central aim was to illumine the light behind their language. Although I approached the psalms etymologically and intellectually, I approached them first with heart, trying to listen to and hear the longing behind their words. I questioned the meaning of old phrases and concepts, shaking off dust from language that while once resonant, had clearly lost its luster. Throughout I brought to the act of translation as much honesty as I could, wrestling with the actual words and emotions on the page, trying not to be constrained by any doctrine or overly pious way of thinking about God. For just as certainly as the psalms are about love of God, they are also about anger toward God along with bewilderment at witnessed injustice in the world. They are about how we live, with all our human frailties and fears and wounds, and joy.

2. What led you to the psalms and a desire to do your own translation?

This is actually a deceptively complex question. I came to religion as an adult, having had a tumultuous childhood. I was raised in northern California by a secular Jewish mother. My parents were divorced, and my father, who was  manic-depressive, returned periodically, bringing real havoc into our lives. My outer and inner life were crying out for something to believe in, and looking back, I think a religious life would have helped me tremendously. Living in northern California, I witnessed plenty of natural beauty, and I think some of that landscape formed part of my later feeling for God, but I knew little about lived religion or faith. Later, during my early twenties, while in graduate school, I went through a difficult period and was diagnosed with depression. It became hard to believe that I would survive and hard to believe in much at all.

I struggled for years. I moved to Boston and taught writing at area colleges. I knew I was in bad, if not desperate shape, and concluded that religion was my only hope. And so I began experimenting with Jewish prayer. I went to one Friday night service during which I understood virtually nothing (it was all in Hebrew, which I could not read) and everyone seemed to be mumbling the words or singing in unison songs that I did not know. This left me feeling even more lonely than before. I finally went to another synagogue at which, despite the fact that the services were in Hebrew, I somehow and mysteriously felt at home. Though I didn’t understand the language, I had the intuition that something very genuine was taking place, that some real spiritual longing was being expressed.

I had a dog at the time, Dudley—the sweetest dog in the world-- who I had found abandoned as a puppy. He was one of the best things that ever happened to me. During my morning or late afternoon dog walks, I took to bringing along a prayer book or the psalms and reading them as we meandered along. Mostly, though, I turned to the psalms. Unlike the prayers, which—at least in the best understanding of them-- were about cultivating the ideal spiritual life, the psalms were about speaking to God from the circumstances in which one finds oneself, speaking honestly and directly about one’s joy and pain. They appealed to me on an immediate and existential level. Throughout my life from that point forward—marriage, a miscarriage, the birth of my son—the psalms were my companions, reminding me in their richness that it was possible to speak to God from the midst of whatever joy, fear or danger one confronts. Whenever I forget about God or want to feel the divine presence more intensely, I still come back to the psalms. I suppose you could say I fell in love with them.

3.  What is an example of a central difference in this translation?

One of the factors that make this translation distinct came fairly late in the process. Knowing that for many people a gendered reference to God is an obstacle to prayer, I agreed with the wisdom of my editor’s suggestion to make references to God neither masculine nor feminine. This meant approaching the psalms with creativity, sometimes through changing a third person address into the second person, sometimes through referring to God through one of the divine attributes. I was hesitant to embark on this path, since at the outset it seemed impossibly difficult and poetically clumsy, but ultimately I found that it opened up new possibilities and allowed for new ways of thinking about God. Now I am quite happy about the decision and couldn’t imagine it otherwise.

I also occasionally translate the “everyman” of the psalms as a woman. My hope in making decisions of this kind is to rekindle the psalms’ beauty and relevance to the lives of all people.

4. What are some of the other ways this translation differs from that of others?

In my attempt to make the translation more alive and resonant, I wrestled with various words and phrases, even (and perhaps especially) common ones. For example, the phrase Lamnatzeach, commonly translated as “to the Conductor” or “to the Director,” is used to introduce many of the psalms. I approached it through a new reading of the complex root, which holds within it references both to eternality and musical direction. And so I arrived at the phrase “to the Conductor of the Eternal Symphony.”  I wanted, among other things, to express the awe at God evoked in the psalms.         

I asked questions about other words and phrases, too. How should one translate the word mitzvot? The literal translation is “commandments,” but that word sounded dry and legalistic to my ears, a poor way to express the beauty of a relation with God based on love. Much of the time, I found other ways to express this concept, focused on fulfilling God’s will with joyful allegiance. In a similar way, I approached other phrases, looking at them in context, while trying to coax from them their existential and spiritual value.    

I also wrestled with the concept of the “enemy” embedded in so many of the psalms. Given our current political dynamics in which hatred of the “enemy” is all too common, I strived to render these phrases in ways that allowed for readings in which the “other” could be read as an internal obstacle or difficult situation, not necessarily a person or a group. Whenever possible, I focused on the concept of fear rather than the concept of revenge. I could not avoid reference to enemies entirely without rewriting the psalms, but I tried to leave open the possibility of other interpretations. In all of this, I approached the psalms as prayer, trying to craft them into instruments for approaching God.

5. Why do you call them prayer songs?

The psalms comprise the greatest biblical example of religious speech. Other poets have written wonderful religious poetry—John Donne, George Herbert, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Smart, William Blake... the list goes on. But the psalms are a shared part of our shared religious heritage and are different in tone from these more individual outcries. They are keenly aware of standing as emblematic, as an example of how to talk to God intimately and directly about our deepest fears and desires. Unlike traditional prayers, which are often about affirming belief, the psalms are about speaking from the exact place where we find ourselves.

The psalms are also different in that many of them were clearly written as songs to be chanted for liturgical purposes, for ascending the Temple Mount, to accompany the sacrificial service—in short to transform the singer or chanter’s consciousness from the ordinary to the sacred.

As with any prayer from a fixed text, the psalms require an attentive presence to kindle their light and flames, to prevent them from cooling down into lifeless coals. Through approaching their poetry, asking questions about old concepts and engaging with the text as living liturgy, this is what I have attempted to do.

6. What was your intellectual journey like? What resources did you consult in your translation?

As I mention in the introduction to the book, I learned Hebrew as an adult. I started at the beginning, with the alphabet, or as it is called in Hebrew, the alef-bet. Eventually I began to painstakingly teach myself the language of the prayers with a book designed for that purpose. Then I turned to Biblical Hebrew, again using a textbook. Later, I began to translate the psalms with a dictionary, mostly using Brown, Driver, Briggs, a scholarly dictionary for biblical Hebrew. Over time, my Hebrew improved. I wound up receiving a Shoolman Fellowship to study at Hebrew College and received a Masters in Jewish Studies. I wrote a thesis looking at the history of psalm translation, different approaches to the psalms, and different ways of rendering them.

Afterwards, I considered becoming a rabbi and spent a year in rabbinical school. During that time, I engaged in intensive study of biblical texts, but also worked on an independent study with one of the wonderful faculty members there, Judith Kates. I had been working all along on the translation and had compiled extensive notes, but as part of my independent study I read over a number of commentaries on the psalms, mostly medieval commentaries from the Golden Age of Jewish interpretation: thinkers like Rashi, Ramban, and Ebn Ezra. All of this helped give a context and gave me new ways to think about the translation.

Finally, once the manuscript was accepted for publication, I looked at several modern translations, along with some older ones, both to see how others had understood particular lines and to note how my own translation was different. I consulted a number of versions, from King James to Artscroll to Mitchell Dahood to Robert Alter. I talked to my friend Joel Rosenberg, a scholar, poet and translator. Ultimately, though, I had to feel myself into these lines, beginning with a deepening understanding of the Hebrew.

7. What were your other influences?

A huge influence for me was the year I spent working as a chaplain at Beth Israel Hospital, easily the most meaningful work I have engaged in. While there I sat with people suffering and dying—from the young woman with breast cancer in her last weeks, to the earnest and frightened woman with leukemia, to the man facing an amputation—these faces have stayed with me, breaking my heart and reminding me what it truly means to engage with the most fundamental questions of life.

I brought the psalms to this work, most of the time using translations that I thought a given person might be familiar with, but occasionally talking about my own understanding of the words. I was reminded once again that the Psalms speak to real people in their real moments of anguish, mortal terror and doubt. In translating I kept this experience in mind. Whenever translation of a given phrase felt abstract or dry, I thought of the faces of the wonderful and courageous people I had met, and tried to bring those passages closer to the ground. There is a passage in Deuteronomy (30:12-14) that reads: “It is not in heaven so that you could say: “Who shall go up for us to bring it to us and make us hear it so that we may carry it out?… For the word is very near to you, to carry it out with your own mouth and heart.” This is especially true of the psalms. These are words from the earth reaching up toward the sky, not from the heavens reaching down toward earth.

8. What are some of the difficulties you faced in this translation?

The main difficulty I faced was arriving at a single understanding for a given word or phrase. As I mention in my introduction, the Hebrew of the psalms is often difficult and obscure. The words thirst for interpretation, and over the course of translating there are lines that I have approached in a variety of ways. Ultimately I had to make peace with the fact that though I grappled long and hard with the psalms, trying to extract as much as I could of their meaning and beauty, the translation represented my best understanding at a given moment. I was lucky to see Leonard Cohen in concert last summer, and a line from his “Anthem” stayed in my head: “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s where the light comes in.” I can only hope to have been the vehicle for such light. Beyond that, I am consoled to think that if I do find renderings that trouble me too deeply, there will with any luck be future editions in which I can change things.

My approach to translation also reflected my own struggle of self-definition. I went though a period during which I translated with an eye toward the poets and a period during which I translated with an eye toward the scholars. Eventually I felt that I wanted to bring the entirety of myself to the translation, which meant bringing both aspects to bear, scholarship and poetry. Still, there is a lingering voice that says, “What gives you the right to translate these holy words?” Ultimately, of course, these words are the right and province of everyone, and I hope, by example, to convey this truth to my readers—that anyone can engage with the text, that in fact the words of the psalms long for our honest and intimate relationship with them.

9. What was it like to translate the psalms as a woman?

I didn’t think about this question much until fairly recently. The overwhelming majority of biblical translators have been men, and I know of only one woman who published a translation of a biblical text. That was Chanah Bloch, who published a beautiful translation of the Song of Songs in collaboration with her husband Ariel Bloch. 

I will say that as a woman, I became increasingly persuaded of the necessity of making these lines more accessible to women. During the last year or so in particular I became aware of how often the male pronoun came up, both in relation to God and in relation to humankind. This led to my decision to render pronouns in my translation in such a way that the words are addressed to both women and men.

10. How do the psalms speak to us today?

We live, more than ever, in a time of great fear—surrounded by natural calamities, threatened by terrorism, fearing a weakening economy, struggling for adequate health care—on top of the personal struggles around sickness, heartache, and death. In face of these fears many of us frantically try to escape—through drugs, alcohol, consumerism, obsessive eating, gambling, sex, the internet—the ways we scramble to avoid our anxieties is endless. Ultimately, though, in the dark night we return to the real fears that surround us. We cannot escape. The psalms are there to address us at that moment of confrontation.

They also address our joys, contextualizing them in relation to the permanence of God. This may seem like a semantic issue, but it is actually much more significant. When our joys are made dependent upon the vagaries of fate, they become fleeting, accompanied by fear at their eventual loss. It is only when we situate ourselves in relation to the divine and transcendent that our happinesses become true joy.

In a world where the distractions are endless and it becomes more and more difficult to find one’s spiritual center, the psalms call us back, reminding us what it means to live genuinely and honestly.

And so, I think they speak to us today more than ever. We need them. I know I do.