“I lift my eyes to the mountains—from where will my help come?” The opening verse of Psalm 121 has long resonated as a poetic expression of faith. But read in the aftermath of collective trauma—after October 7, amidst war, antisemitism, and a pervasive sense of moral abandonment—it carries a different, more haunting tone. What once sounded like rhetorical flourish now reads as an honest, anguished question. In a world so visibly fractured, where precisely is help supposed to come from?
The psalmist’s follow-up—“My help comes from the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth”—was once easy to interpret as a confident declaration. But today, many readers hesitate. The spiritual impulse to proclaim faith remains, but it is now accompanied by unease. We are no longer convinced that help is guaranteed, or even that it arrives on time. The Jewish people, in this current moment, are grieving. We are mourning lives lost and lives held hostage. We are defending our right to exist while watching friends, neighbors, and institutions either equivocate or turn away. All this occurs against the backdrop of daily life, which does not pause for our pain. The ordinary wounds—illness, divorce, depression, loneliness—persist alongside the extraordinary. It is into this fragile reality that we reencounter Psalm 121.
While traditionally understood as a Song of Ascents—a psalm recited by pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem—Psalm 121 now reads more like a lament of spiritual disorientation. It is not simply a travel psalm. It is a trauma psalm. The Hebrew word for help, ezer, used here to describe divine assistance, is the same word used in Genesis to describe the human partnership between Adam and Eve. In this context, help is not merely deliverance but presence. Psalm 121 does not promise safety; it promises accompaniment. “The Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.” God is not inattentive, even if the world is. This is not a small comfort—it is, for many, the only one that remains.
Trauma, by its nature, isolates. It severs the individual from the flow of time, from a sense of meaning, and from community. It casts a shadow of abandonment even in moments of faith. Psalm 121 does not seek to erase that shadow but to acknowledge it while offering an alternative story. It affirms that presence—divine or human—can pierce even the most isolating experiences. The assurance that “God will guard your going out and your coming in” is not a metaphysical claim about immunity from suffering, but a theological claim about the reliability of presence across thresholds of vulnerability.
Still, the dissonance remains. How are we to read this psalm’s confident language about protection—“Your foot will not slip,” “The sun will not strike you by day”—when our feet have slipped, when violence has struck? We do not live in a world where divine intervention shields us from all harm. To read the psalm as literal promise is to demand a theology that cannot withstand history. Instead, we might read it aspirationally—as the spiritual voice of a people who refuse to surrender to chaos. Psalm 121 is not a denial of danger but a declaration that danger will not have the final word.
To say “I lift my eyes” is not to affirm that help has arrived. It is to affirm the act of lifting. In the face of grief, betrayal, and confusion, the psalmist chooses not despair, but attentiveness. The upward gaze itself becomes sacred. It is a form of spiritual resistance, an insistence on remaining open to the possibility of help, even when its arrival seems uncertain. In that sense, the psalm is not about outcomes but about posture. It invites a posture of longing, of hope, and of defiant vulnerability.
This is why Psalm 121 remains so deeply embedded in Jewish liturgy and ritual. It is recited at funerals, at bedsides, and in moments of transition—not because it offers comfort through easy answers, but because it affirms that in moments of rupture, one can still choose to reach toward something larger. The final verse, “God will guard your going out and your coming in from now until forever,” speaks to that motion—going out into the world after trauma, and coming back into relationship, into life, into hope.
In a traumatized world, Psalm 121 does not resolve the tension between faith and suffering. It holds that tension gently, honestly. It reminds us that help may not always take the form we desire, but presence—divine, communal, emotional—is still possible. Perhaps that is what it means to be a Jew in this moment: to be the ezer for one another, to stand guard over each other’s comings and goings, and to lift our eyes together, even when the view is obscured. We do not deny the pain. We do not avoid the questions. But we refuse to stop looking up.
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