Psalm 63: The Soul Of Life, The Life Of The Soul
On memory, hope, and lived experience
In a desert, a mirage isn’t a hallucination. Even though you think you see water, it is an optical phenomenon based on how light rays bend. But does it matter? If you begin to start making decisions based on the body of water you see in the distance, does it matter how you precisely categorize it?
Similarly, in popular culture, we always read about someone’s life flashing before their eyes in the moments before they die. We also read about people who experience close encounters with death and make drastic life changes.
Again, even though the vision may be your neurons firing in a certain way, a purely physiological phenomenon, what happens next makes all the difference.
Psalm 63 can be read as the story of someone dying in the desert from terminal dehydration, suffering from a bout of delirium. He is cognizant of the hallucination, using a phrase in 63:3 that is usually associated with prophecy.
But most interestingly, we see a dichotomy between “soul” (nefesh) and “life” (hayyim). While these are admittedly a more medieval or modern translation of the two words, we still see that the psalmist intends different meanings when he chooses to employ one word or the other.
In Jonah 4:9, as Jonah awakes in the desert under the plant that God had killed overnight, his soul (nefesh) begged to die, and he says “better is my death than life” (hayyim). In our psalm, though, “God’s kindness is better than life” (63:4).
Our psalmist remembers the good things in his life, but he doesn’t ask God to save him.
He doesn’t cry like Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis 21. He doesn’t beg, like Jonah, for death. In his delirium, he is reminded of the good times in his life: the delectable foods (63:6), the creature comforts of his home, specifically his bed (63:7), and perhaps even the festivals where he prayed in the Temple (63:3).
Even the phrase “I lift my hands” (63:5) is also used in Psalm 119:48, in which the psalmist there is writing about the delight and love he feels for the commandments and laws. And that feeling, he continues there, gives him hope and is a source of comfort during the difficult times (119:49-50).
Maybe the difference between the “soul” and the “life”, as he describes it, is the distinction between our experiences and the physiological act of living. While dying of dehydration in the desert, Jonah looked back on his experiences with regret, and our psalmist re-experienced his with delight.
In this reading, our “life” is born and ultimately ends with death, but our “soul” is the thing we create with every one of our experiences. It’s our sense memory that is the realm of the “soul.” Food and music, mentioned in 63:6, helps remind our “soul” of those times, and allows us to re-experience them.