From the Depths — A Shiur for Anyone Who Has Ever Called Out
A teaching folded into the song · AsherEster and the Shabots
Not Scripture. A shir (שיר) that carries a shiur (שיעור).
Public full shiur (this document). Closest-passage bookshelf links are below.
YouTube cuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv-kmy3pn6s · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwKxeoIgqw8 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF9kYugr-cY
From the Depths — A Shiur for Anyone Who Has Ever Called Out
A teaching folded into the song · AsherEster and the Shabots
Not Scripture. A shir that carries a shiur. Walk it as you listen.
There are songs that decorate a feeling, and there are songs that try to tell the truth about a life.
From the Depths is the second kind.
It begins where a lot of us actually live — not on the mountain of certainty, but in the place where something has broken open again, and we are not sure who will answer. It borrows old Jewish sparks and sets them in a vessel you can hold without a seminary degree. What follows is a map of those sparks: what is quotation, what is inheritance, and what is our own weave — the synthesis we mean when we say the spaces between what was, what is, and what will be are where we leave our mark.
If not for me — if not now
The first words you hear are not original to us. They are Hillel’s, from Pirkei Avot — Ethics of the Fathers — 1:14.
The full teaching usually runs like this:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?
We sing the urgency and the self that must stand up. We leave the middle line humming underneath, because Hillel never meant raw selfishness. He meant: no one else can live your portion for you — and if your portion never turns toward anyone else, it shrivels into something less than a human life.
Jewish ethics does not begin with waiting to be rescued from your own responsibility. It begins with a clock that is already ticking. If not now, when? is not a motivational poster. It is a refusal to postpone becoming who you are called to be until the conditions feel perfect.
When the song opens there, it is saying: this is not background music for despair. This is a wake-up in the key of love.
Broken open — missing the mark
Then the confession comes in plain clothes.
I’ve been broken open again.
I didn’t realize how much I still had till I lost it.
That is not theology yet. That is honesty. And honesty is already a kind of prayer.
When the lyric says a sin is just missin’ the mark, it is leaning on something older than English. One of the main Hebrew words for sin — חֵטְא, chet — carries the image of missing a target. Archery. You aimed. You were not aimless. You still missed — through a veil, through a bad start, through a story you told yourself that wasn’t quite true.
Judaism’s path of return is called teshuvah — turning, coming back. It assumes the archer is still alive. Missing the mark matters. It is not the last word about you.
If you have ever felt that religion only knew how to condemn, hear this differently: the tradition that gave us chet also gave us the possibility of aiming again. The song refuses to romanticize the miss. It also refuses to freeze you inside it.
From the depths
The chorus is almost a translation of a psalm that has kept people company in every century of Jewish night:
Psalm 130:1 — Mima’amakim keraticha Adonai — Out of the depths I call You, LORD.
Jonah knew that geography too — prayer from the belly of the deep.
We sing it the way life actually sounds: sometimes from anger, sometimes in pain. Not only from the pretty rooms of faith.
Too many people were taught that God only accepts polished speech. The psalm disagrees. The depths are a legal address for calling the Name. You do not have to climb out before you are allowed to cry out. Sometimes crying out is how the climbing begins.
What was, what is, and what will be
Here we touch the Name.
Jews have long treated the four-letter Name — the one we often write YHVH and do not casually pronounce — as bound up with the verb “to be.” Across time. Across tense.
A clear medieval teacher, Rabbi Yosef Bekhor Shor, reading the burning-bush revelation in Exodus 3:14 (Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh — I will be what I will be), hears in the unique Name the meaning of hoveh, hayah, and yihyeh: He is, He was, He will be.
And every week, in synagogues that still sing it, Adon Olam says the same thing in the voice of prayer:
Hu hayah, Hu hoveh, v’Hu yihyeh — He was, He is, and He will be.
That is inheritance. We did not invent it.
A careful word about Maimonides
An earlier draft of the lyric nodded to Maimonides for the three-tense “mashup.” The synthesis notes correct that — and we intend to revisit the wording.
What Rambam does teach, in the Guide of the Perplexed (I:61–63), is that this unique Name points toward God’s necessary, singular existence — not a deity trapped inside the clocks that govern creatures. Eternal being. Essence. Not a slogan that past + present + future were glued into an acronym.
So: keep Maimonides in the wider room of “the Name and existence.” Do not make him the author of Bekhor Shor’s and Adon Olam’s three-beat teaching. Truthfulness is part of how we share light.
The step that is ours
Then the song asks the question the old teaching makes possible:
Why those fragments? Separate parts?
Why not one frozen Eternity — endless, everything?
Because between what was, what is, and what will be there are spaces.
And in those spaces — this is our synthesis — there are choices.
We take what was.
With our best tools and understanding, we shape what is.
With what we know now, and the strengths we have gained, we help shape what will be.
That is where the song stops being a medley of quotations and becomes a teaching. It joins the Name-that-holds-time to Judaism’s stubborn insistence on free will — bechirah — and on return. You are not only a passenger on a sealed timeline. You are answerable in the interval.
Between the lines is where we leave our mark.
Will we shed light, or be shadows in the dark?
That is not abstract metaphysics. That is the moral fork inside the music.
Avatar, cells, measure
We say the body is an avatar for an eternal soul. We say we are cells in the body of God — bone, blood, nerve, muscle, heart — and that too much of even a good organ can become a cancer. How much? is a question we can answer.
Some of that language is modern on purpose.
Underneath it sit older Jewish intuitions: that the soul is clothed in a body for work in this world; that God fills and surrounds the worlds; that we are limbs of a larger life; that holiness without measure curdles.
“Avatar” and “cells” and “cancer” are artistic license — contemporary clothes on an ancient demand: middot, character, proportion. Will we give more than we take? Will we sleep through our post, or wake?
The song is not asking you to become a mystic overnight. It is asking you to notice that what you amplify in the shared body of the world either nourishes or metastasizes.
Hallelujah is all we ever have to say
We do not end in the pit.
We end seeking the light, calling the Name again — this time with gratitude for what has already been gained, for blessings that have rained whether or not we noticed them.
Hallelujah comes from Hebrew hallelu-Yah — praise God. It is not a denial that anger was real or that pain still echoes. It is a claim about last words.
After honesty.
After missing the mark.
After calling from the depths.
After choosing in the spaces —
the durable speech of the soul is praise.
Not because nothing hurt.
Because happiness, in the teaching we keep returning to, is not only the hunt for what is missing. It is also gratitude for what was already there.
That is how abundance stops being a rumor and becomes a practice.
How to walk this song
Listen once for feeling.
Listen again for map.
1. Let Hillel’s urgency land: now is not later.
2. Let the miss be a miss — not a life sentence.
3. Let anger and pain have a legal address in prayer.
4. When you hear was / is / will be, remember: the Name holds time; you answer in the gaps.
5. Ask one concrete question before the outro fades: in the space I am standing in this week, am I adding light or shadow?
6. Speak one gratitude that is true — not performed. That is your hallelujah.
If you are new to Judaism, you do not need to master every citation to receive the gift. The citations are a bookshelf, not a gate meant to keep you out. If you already know the sources, receive the weave as a shir shiur — a song carrying a lesson — and hold our synthesis as midrash in motion, not as a closed dogma.
Shelf for those who want to go further
| What you heard | Where it lives (closest shelf) |
|---|---|
| If not for me / if not now | Hillel, Pirkei Avot (פרקי אבות) 1:14 — https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.1.14 |
| From the depths | Psalm 130:1 — https://www.sefaria.org/Psalms.130.1 · Jonah 2 — https://www.sefaria.org/Jonah.2 |
| Was / is / will be | Exodus 3:14 (Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh / אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה) — https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.3.14 · Bekhor Shor — https://www.sefaria.org/Bekhor_Shor_on_Exodus.3.14 · Adon Olam (אדון עולם) — https://www.sefaria.org/Siddur_Ashkenaz%2C_Weekday%2C_Shacharit%2C_Preparatory_Prayers%2C_Adon_Olam |
| Necessary existence (not the mashup slogan) | Rambam, Guide / מורה נבוכים I:61 — https://www.sefaria.org/Guide_for_the_Perplexed%2C_Part_1.61 |
| Missing the mark / return | chet (חֵטְא) — https://www.sefaria.org/Klein_Dictionary,_%D7%97%D7%98%D7%90_%E1%B4%B5.1 · teshuvah / Hilchot Teshuvah (הלכות תשובה) — https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.1 |
| Measure, giving, waking | middot (מידות): Tomer Devorah (תומר דבורה) — https://www.sefaria.org/Tomer_Devorah.1 · Mesillat Yesharim (מסילת ישרים) — https://www.sefaria.org/Mesillat_Yesharim.1 |
| Choice in the spaces | bechirah (בחירה) — Hilchot Teshuvah 5 — https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.5?lang=bi |
| Hallelujah | הַלְלוּ־יָהּ — https://www.sefaria.org/Psalms.150.6 |
| The spaces between — our mark | AsherEster synthesis |
Last word
From the Depths is not Tanakh. It does not dress up as Tanakh.
It is what happens when old fire is carried carefully into a new lamp — so that people who never sat in a beit midrash can still feel the heat: that you may call from the pit, that time is not a cage if you answer in its openings, that missing the mark is not the end of aiming, and that after all of that, the honest mouth can still say hallelujah.
Between what was, what is, and what will be —
that is where we live.
That is where we choose.
That is where, if we are brave and grateful, we shed a little light.
AsherEster and the Shabots