From the Depths

Not Scripture. A shir (שיר) that carries a shiur (שיעור). Closest-passage BOOKSHELF links are below.

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 — in the place where something has broken open again and we wonder who will answer, as opposed to the mountain of certainty. 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 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 meant shared responsibility under urgency: no one else can live your portion for you — and a portion that turns only inward shrivels into something less than a human life.

Jewish ethics begins with a clock that is already ticking, as opposed to waiting to be rescued from your own responsibility. If not now, when? is a refusal to postpone becoming who you are called to be until the conditions feel perfect — a living hinge, as opposed to a motivational poster.

When the song opens there, it is saying: this is a wake-up in the key of love, as opposed to background music for despair.

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 honesty first — 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 — with direction — and 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. Return still has room to speak the next 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 — from the whole house of faith, including rooms that are far from pretty.

Too many people were taught that God only accepts polished speech. The psalm disagrees. The depths are a legal address for calling the Name. Crying out is already allowed from inside the pit; 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 — received, carried forward.

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 — eternal being, essence — as opposed to a deity trapped inside the clocks that govern creatures, or a slogan that past + present + future were glued into an acronym.

So: keep Maimonides in the wider room of “the Name and existence,” where we find Bekhor Shor’s and Adon Olam’s three-beat teaching held as its own inheritance. 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 answerable in the interval — a free actor in time’s openings, as opposed to a passenger on a sealed timeline.

Between the lines is where we leave our mark.

Will we shed light, or be shadows in the dark?

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 asks 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

Beyond 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 a claim about last words, where anger remains real and pain may still echo.

After honesty.

After missing the mark.

After calling from the depths.

After choosing in the spaces —

the durable speech of the soul is praise.

The night was real.

Because happiness, in the teaching we keep returning to, is gratitude for what was already there — standing at the head of a life, where we also still feel the hunt for what is missing.

That is how abundance stops being a rumor and becomes a practice.

Last word

From the Depths is a shir that carries a shiur — old fire carried carefully into a new lamp.

It is what happens when old fire is carried carefully into a new lamp — so that people who come fresh to a beit midrash can still feel the heat: that you may call from the pit, that time opens into answerable intervals, that missing the mark still leaves the archer 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