Panel essay · Psalms · August 31 – September 6, 2026 · Rabbi
Written by an AI persona giving a Jewish reading in the voice of a rabbi — not a real rabbi.
You have nineteen chapters to read this week. For a Jew, most of this block is not a reading assignment. It is a schedule. Psalms 146–150 are recited every morning of a Jewish life — not when the mood strikes, but every morning, in order, out loud, before the Shema. Psalms 116, 117 and 118 are sung on festivals, standing, at volume, with a congregation shouting half the lines back at the leader. Psalm 136 is sung at the Seder table after midnight. Psalm 137 is muttered before grace after meals on an ordinary Tuesday. Psalm 119 is what you recite in a funeral home.
So when your manual says Tehillim means "praises," that is right, and it is only the beginning. The book is not primarily poetry we study. It is the script.
The Talmud already treats these as a fixed unit. In Shabbat 118b, Rabbi Yosei says, "May my portion be among those who complete Hallel every day" — and the Gemara immediately clarifies that he cannot mean the festival Hallel, since reciting that daily would be a kind of contempt. He means the morning psalms: Psalm 145 plus 146–150, the oldest core of what is now Pesukei d'Zimra, framed by two blessings — Baruch She'amar and Yishtabach — for which Ashkenazim stand.
Notice that your block begins at 146. Jewish practice begins one psalm earlier — and not quite with Psalm 145 either. What we call Ashrei is Psalm 145 with two verses prefixed (84:5 and 144:15, both beginning ashrei) and one appended (115:18). It is said three times a day, on the strength of Berachot 4b: whoever recites Tehillah l'David three times daily is assured a place in the World to Come — and the Gemara's stated reason is that the psalm combines an alphabetical acrostic with the line "You open Your hand and satisfy every living thing." Structure plus lunch. Hold that thought.
And Psalm 150's last line, kol ha-neshamah tehallel Yah, is read in the midrash as a pun. Rabbi Levi: "For each and every breath a person takes he must praise the Creator — read not neshamah, soul, but neshimah, breath" (Bereshit Rabbah 14:9). Your lesson is titled "Let Every Thing That Hath Breath Praise the Lord." The midrash pushes it further: not every creature that breathes, but every breath.
Psalms 113–118 are the Hallel — sometimes called the Egyptian Hallel — recited on Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret and Hanukkah, and in abbreviated form on Rosh Chodesh and the last six days of Pesach. The abbreviation matters for your week: half-Hallel omits the first eleven verses of Psalm 116. On those days a Jew does not say "I love the LORD, because he hath heard my voice." He starts at verse 12: "What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward me?"
You will hear it taught that Hallel is shortened on Pesach because the Egyptians drowned — drawing on Sanhedrin 39b, where God rebukes the angels at the sea: "My handiwork is drowning in the sea, and you are reciting a song before Me?" But that is not the Talmud's stated reason. Arachin 10b answers with bookkeeping: the days of Sukkot are distinguished by their additional offerings, so each gets a full Hallel; the days of Pesach are not. Both are ours — worth knowing when a lovely homily is handed to you as a plain fact.
Hallel is not read. It is performed antiphonally: the leader says a line, the congregation answers Halleluyah, and if you want to repeat a verse twice, you may (Sukkah 38b). Psalm 118:21–29 is still said line by line, each verse doubled, and the room gets loud.
Which brings me to verse 25. Ana Adonai hoshia na — "Save now, we beseech thee." That phrase is the origin of the word hosanna. It is not a title, not an acclamation of a person, not originally a greeting. It is an imperative addressed to God with the particle of entreaty attached: save, please.
And the Mishnah tells you what your hands were doing while you said it. Mishnah Sukkah 3:9 legislates where in Hallel you wave the lulav: at Hodu (118:1, 29) and at Ana Adonai hoshia na (118:25) — Rabbi Akiva reports watching Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua wave only at hoshia na. Mishnah Sukkah 4:5 describes the willow ceremony in the Temple: branches stood against the altar, the shofar sounded, the people circling the altar once a day saying "Lord, please save us, Lord, please grant us success" — seven times on the seventh day, which is still called Hoshana Rabbah, the Great Hosanna.
So when the Gospels describe a crowd waving branches and shouting Hosanna and "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the LORD" (Psalm 118:26), they are describing people doing Hallel with a lulav. Whatever you conclude about the scene, its raw material is a festival liturgy already old, already choreographed, still performed every autumn.
Verse 22 is the psalm's other famous line. Rashi glosses "the stone which the builders refused" without ceremony: "a people that was humble among the peoples" (Rashi on Psalms 118:22). The rejected stone is Israel — which is what a psalm sung by the whole congregation at the Temple gates most naturally means.
Two smaller notes. Psalm 116:13's "cup of salvation" is plural in Hebrew — kos yeshu'ot — and both the Jerusalem Talmud (Pesachim 10:1) and Bereshit Rabbah 88:5 build on that plural in discussing the Seder's four cups. And Psalm 117, the Bible's shortest chapter, is addressed not to Israel but to the nations.
Twenty-six verses, each answered by ki le'olam chasdo. You cannot recite this alone and get it right, because half of it belongs to somebody else.
Pesachim 118a asks why twenty-six. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi: because of the twenty-six generations God created before giving the Torah — who lived on nothing but chesed. (That 26 is also the numerical value of the four-letter Name is a later observation, widely repeated; the Talmud's own answer is the generations.) Then the Gemara asks why it is the Great Hallel at all, and Rabbi Yochanan answers: because the Holy One sits in the heights of the universe and dispenses food to every creature — Psalm 136:25, "who gives food to all flesh" (Pesachim 118a).
Read that again. The psalm walks through creation, the plagues, the splitting of the sea, the conquest of Sihon and Og — and the sages say it is called great because of verse 25: God feeds everybody. Not the sea. Lunch. The same instinct that singled out "You open Your hand" in Ashrei. That is how Jewish tradition ranks God's acts.
Psalm 136 closes the Seder's Hallel — Psalms 113–118 first, then the Great Hallel, then Nishmat kol chai, "the breath of every living thing shall bless Your name," which is Psalm 150:6 turned into a prayer. With Psalm 135 it is also added to Pesukei d'Zimra on Shabbat and festivals. Your manual groups "Psalms 134–36"; the Talmud records opinions that the Great Hallel is 135–136 or even 134–136. Someone was reading well.
I will be direct here, because you would rather I were.
The Hebrew of verse 1 is ne'um YHWH la-adoni — two different words. The first is the Tetragrammaton. The second, adoni, is ordinary Hebrew for "my master," used of human beings throughout the Bible; Rashi's proof text is Genesis 23:6, where the Hittites address Abraham as adoni. Hebrew has no capital letters. The distinction your KJV prints as "The LORD said unto my Lord" is a decision made by translators, not a feature of the text. In the Greek of the Septuagint both words become kyrios, and that flattening is where the Christological reading finds its purchase. In Hebrew there is nothing to flatten.
Rashi refers the psalm to Abraham, following Midrash Tehillim: God's word to Abraham, "whom the world called adoni." He reads shev li-mini not as "be enthroned at my right hand" but as "wait for My salvation" — yeshivah, he says, here means waiting, as in Deuteronomy 1:46 — and the enemies of verse 1 are "Amraphel and his allies," the kings of Genesis 14 (Rashi on Psalms 110:1). On verse 4, al divrati Malki-Tzedek means "because of the word of Malchizedek": the priesthood and kingship descending from Shem through Malchizedek to Abraham's children. Rashi adds that kohen can denote rulership (2 Samuel 8:18) (Rashi on Psalms 110:4). Ibn Ezra and Radak read the psalm of David instead; Radak says outright that though the rabbis understood it of Abraham and Malchizedek, the plain sense is David (Radak on Psalms 110).
None of this is neutral, and I will not pretend it is. Prof. Rabbi Mordechai Z. Cohen of Yeshiva University summarizes the scholarly consensus: "It is becoming increasingly accepted that Rashi reacted polemically to Christian beliefs and Bible interpretation, and that throughout his commentaries, he was implicitly refuting the Christian claim that God had rejected Israel" ("Psalms for Our Times: Rashi Counters Christological Readings," TheTorah.com). Rashi lived through the Rhineland massacres of 1096. He was arguing with neighbors who used this psalm against him, and he knew it.
So, honestly: the Christian reading of Psalm 110 is ancient, coherent, and hangs on a genuinely striking text — a figure at God's right hand holding a priesthood that is not Aaron's. It is not a foolish reading. But it is an application of the psalm, not a translation of it. And notice that your own chapter heading — "A messianic psalm of David — Christ will sit on the Lord's right hand" — is editorial. The ancient superscription says only "A Psalm of David." The heading answers the question before you have read it.
On weekdays, many Jews recite Psalm 137 before Birkat Hamazon, grace after meals. On Shabbat and festivals — and at the meal after a wedding, a brit milah, or a pidyon haben — Psalm 126 is substituted, because you do not bring Babylon to a celebration. It is also read around Tisha B'Av. And verses 5 and 6, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem," are recited at the wedding itself, just before the glass breaks. That is the tradition's answer to "How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?" — you sing, and you interrupt yourself.
Now verse 9, since you will want to know what we do with it. We keep it. Catholic and Anglican liturgical revisions in the twentieth century removed the psalm's final verses; Jewish liturgy did not. Excision is one way to handle a text you find unbearable. Keeping it in front of you and arguing with it is another.
Two things about the verse. First, it quotes a judgment rather than proposing one. Isaiah 13 — "the Babylon Pronouncement" (13:1) — already says of Babylon, "their babes shall be dashed to pieces in their sight" (13:16). The psalmist asks God to do what God has already announced; he does not pick up a child. Second, the argument is live. Rabbi Daniel Landes has argued in print that the custom of reciting this psalm before Birkat Hamazon should be dropped — not because the text should be censored, but because a people that now has power should not rehearse the psalm of the powerless daily ("Psalm 137:9: A Galus Tehilah — Time to Cancel a Minhag," TheTorah.com). He wants it in the Bible and out of the bentcher. Not everyone agrees. That is what a living tradition looks like.
Psalm 119 is twenty-two stanzas of eight verses, each stanza's verses beginning with the same letter, and nearly every verse carrying one of eight nouns for Torah: torah, edot, pikkudim, mitzvot, imrah, davar, chukkim, mishpatim. Your manual reads it as a psalm about the journey, and that is genuinely in the text (verses 1, 32, 35, 105, 133, 176). But note what the lamp in verse 105 is lighting. All eight of those nouns are legal terms; the path is made of commandments — plural, particular, doable. "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet" is not, in its own idiom, about scripture in general. It is about obligations you can name.
The acrostic also gives the psalm a life your reading won't show you. Because it is an alphabet, you can carve a person out of it: it is a widespread custom to recite the stanzas matching the letters of a deceased person's name, plus the letters of neshamah, soul (Shulchan Aruch HaRav, "Chapter 119 in Tehillim"). In practice it is a memorial psalm.
On Psalm 127: Rashi says David composed it about his son Solomon, "for he saw through the holy spirit that he was destined to build the Temple" (Rashi on Psalms 127:1). Ha-bayit — the house — is the House. "Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain" is not, at the plain level, about a marriage or a mortgage. The domestic reading is an application, and a good one; just know it is one.
And a correction I owe you, having nearly made the mistake myself: Psalm 128 is not the Jewish wedding psalm. In Jewish practice it belongs to Motzei Shabbat and to the bedtime Shema; its second verse, "thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands," is the proof text for Ben Zoma's "Who is rich? He who rejoices in his portion" (Pirkei Avot 4:1). Psalm 128 at weddings is a Catholic nuptial usage.
If you meet Psalm 102 called one of the "seven penitential psalms," know that this is a Christian classification, not a Jewish one, and the psalm does not support it. Read verses 1–11 again: illness, isolation, ashes, a pelican and an owl, and in verse 10 an accusation — "because of thine indignation and thy wrath" — but no confession of sin anywhere. Its superscription says what it is: a prayer of the afflicted. In Jewish use it is a psalm for communal crisis, and it appears among the Sephardi Yom Kippur hymns.
Psalm 103 is where I would send you to hear what Jewish repentance sounds like. Verse 8 — "merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy" — quotes Exodus 34:6, the Thirteen Attributes, the spine of Selichot and of Yom Kippur. Then verse 14: "he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust." The argument is not that we have grovelled sufficiently. It is that God knows what He made. That is the argument the High Holidays make too, for ten days, in the plural.
Read these out loud this week. Especially 136 — find someone to answer you.