Day Ten

It’s been a whole week since I last published anything about the retreat, and the temptation to simply ditch the attempt to record it is strong. During that week I decided to make the blog password protected, too, and to take my notice about it off Facebook, so now it feels like I am just writing for myself, which may be a good thing, because there is nothing like writing just for oneself to help one know what is going on.

And yet… is what we say in our hearts about the truth actually the truth? It seems to me that the heart is deceitfully wicked, and I cannot know what it is to be righteous. One minute my effort to be objective about something tells me that ‘this’ is the truth, the next it is ‘that’. Sometimes I even begin to think that this pendulum exists because there must be a sense in which both are true, all at once!

So when I read נַפְשִׁי יְשׁוֹבֵב in verse 3 of Psalm 23 and found myself rolling the meaning of יְשׁוֹבֵב around in my head I was intrigued, and then alarmed, because on examination that word seems to imply quite a lot more than simply ‘he restores [my soul]’. One commentary suggests translating יְשׁוֹבֵב as ‘he repents’ (in the sense of ‘he causes [my soul] to repent’). I even discovered the same letters, used as an adjective, meaning ‘apostate’ or ‘backslider’.

Being restored to something benign and being caused to repent sounded quite different until, after further detective work in the thick books littering my desk, I traced the whole thing back to a primitive root שׁוֹבֵ that simply conveys the concept of ‘turning back’, or ‘retreating’.

So that’s settled… what this is about for me today is really quite easy: ‘He causes my soul to [be on a] retreat’.