In those places where people face darkness, God goes as well, linked in sacred relationship to the vulnerability and fear human life often includes. The classic King James translation of 1611, quoted above, capitalizes the “Y” in You, meaning that the one doing the walking is human and God is the companion. Copyright © 2002-2020 My Jewish Learning. After years of taking every second semester off to teach at Bar-Ilan University, he decided he needed to move to Israel full time— not surprising to me, since on a visit to Jerusalem, my wife and I had gone for Sabbath services to a small Sephardic congregation that turned out to be his congregation. Consider this teaching from the Talmud: Rav Yitzḥak said: What is the meaning of “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me”? Deep faith does not ignore reality. There, rumor has it, his classes—even on such chaste topics as medieval rabbinic exegesis—were so over subscribed that he had to conduct weekly sessions for his numerous teaching assistants just to keep them up to speed. 5. "In the Shadow of the Valley" is a song broadcast on Mojave Music Radio and Black Mountain Radio in Fallout: New Vegas. After a decade of treatment, he is confident that he has licked his illness, and shares with us the insights inspired by the contemplation of his own mortality. Tisha B'Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, is testament to the failure of prayer to avert national catastrophe. Question: "What does it mean to walk through the valley of the shadow of death?" These translations are informed in equal parts by medieval Rabbinic exegesis and modern critical analysis, the latter already illustrated in the title of the book. These insights can be summed up, however inadequately, under two headings: one, a scientific proof for the existence of God; the other, a new theory of the origin of religion. (Psalm 23:4).’” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah on SoS 2:1). It goes without saying that both insights are heavily indebted to Jewish sources in general and to the Hebrew Bible in particular. Kugel reads ṣaLMaWeT in Psalm 23:4 not as the familiar “valley of the shadow of death” but as “deep shadow” (ṣaLMuT). Its mystical words echo in our ears: Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me. We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and bring you ads that might interest you. And maybe God falls into you too. sort form. Even God trembles when we suffer.

William W. Hallo (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. Diagnosed with a kind of cancer usually fatal, he decided to abandon work on a book in process and instead to chronicle the trajectory of his disease and his reactions to it. James Kugel is not your average, garden-variety scholar. Kugel reads ṣaLMaWeT in Psalm 23:4 not as the familiar “valley of the shadow of death” but as “deep shadow” (ṣaLMuT). He first made his mark with The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History, 1 which revolutionized the study of Hebrew poetics. The original subtitle of the book was in fact announced as On the Foundations of Jewish Belief. 46f. And we can be comforted by the knowledge that when we fall, we fall into God’s waiting Presence. How might we understand this imaginative reinterpretation? Kugel is at home in the literature of all the world, ancient, medieval and modern; western and eastern; Jewish and Christian, although most of his citations do come from the Hebrew Bible. The prayer Eilu Devarim reflects the seeming paradox that focusing on others more than ourselves makes us happier. No one mortal can expect to succeed to this pantheon of savants, but with this book, his 12th as sole author, Kugel bids fair to fill that role. The simple words of this traditional morning blessing draw us back to the dawn of our mythic creation. Press, 2006).   William W. Hallo is professor emeritus of the department of near eastern languages and civilizations at Yale University and former curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection.