Canter Bridge

One should spare a merciful thought for the writer of an acrostic.

Whether required to bend his pen to the task or the victim of his own enthusiastic but self-incarcerating ambition, the man or woman who sits down to write a poem wherein each sequence of lines begins with the same letter of the alphabet does not merit our scorn. If his result sounds wooden or inauthentic he deserves, at worst, our pity and, more charitably, the benefit of our aesthetic doubts.

Take the writer of the exceedingly long one hundred and nineteenth psalm, for example. Some ninety-seven verses into his long, parallelistic slog, he wrestles with the glories of YHWH’s revelation, on the one hand, and the letter mem (the Hebrew equivalent of our English letter m) on the other.

His unenviably squeezed state bears comparison with few other rocks and hardly any similar hard places. It is a dilemma all his own.

Now as it happens the letter mem stands in as an abbreviation of classical Hebrew’s most common expression for contrast. The perspiring poet glimpses a way out of his detention:

Oh, how I love your law!
I meditate on it all day long.
Your commands make me wiser than my enemies,
for they are ever with me. (Psalm 119: 97-98 NRSV)

One might concede the writer a certain skirmish-level victory. At the cost of the malicious other, he has used up one of his mems and underscored the sapiential potency of meditation upon YHWH’s instruction.

Yet, flush with victory, he senses daylight. Now he cannot stop himself:

I have more insight than all my teachers,
for I meditate on your statutes.
I have more understanding than the elders,
for I obey your precepts.

Under the influence of a menacing line-up of middle-of-the-alphabet consonants, a truth has been converted into an absolute. Enraptured by Torah’s glory and the meniality of the acrostic task, the poet flirts with becoming a fool. His private encounter with YHWH’s instruction, we are apparently meant to understood, has lifted him above the wisdom of his community’s sages and mentors. He has exalted himself, under these influences, to a most precarious pinnacle.

Yet if we read sympathetically—in some cases a greater exertion than in others—we may surmise that his encounter with the sweet, persistent orientation of YHWH’s instruction has for this writer been so transforming an experience that he has been moved close enough to take the epistemological risk that has now become his lot. By this reading, he is hardly a fool, even if a noble enthusiasm has momentarily made him sound like one.

If what he says next is true, he may the kind of person with whom we can do business, the sort of man we’d like to see a little more of around here, the type of character to whom we might trustingly commend the minds and hearts of our children.

How sweet are your words to my taste,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
I gain understanding from your precepts;
therefore I hate every wrong path.

For 364 of the calendar’s pages, those who are becoming wise do best not to say so. On the 365th, under the influence of a pile of mems, one can be forgiven for blurting out a different truth.