David Left Out One Letter and the Rabbis Argued for Centuries

R. Elazar ben Abina made a claim that sounds almost too simple to be significant. He said: anyone who recites Psalm 145 three times a day is guaranteed a share in the world to come. Not a scholar. Not a mystic. Anyone.

The Talmud in Tractate Berakhot, as recorded in the Ein Yaakov of Rabbi Jacob ibn Habib, a collection of all the aggadic passages of the Talmud first published in Salonika in 1516, immediately demands an explanation. Why this psalm and not another? It is an alphabetical acrostic, working through the Hebrew letters from aleph to tav, but so is the enormous Psalm 119, which runs eight verses for every letter of the alphabet. If alphabetical structure is the virtue, Psalm 119 should be superior. If the reason is the verse "You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing" (Psalm 145:16), a verse taken as teaching generosity, then what about the Great Hallel, Psalm 136, which says explicitly "He gives food to all flesh"?

The answer the Talmud gives is that Psalm 145 does both things at once. It has the alphabetical structure and the verse about the open hand. It is the whole package in a single chapter.

But then R. Yochanan raises the harder question. The psalm is an alphabetical acrostic. Run through it carefully and you will find aleph, bet, gimel, all the way through. And then a gap. The letter Nun does not appear. Twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Psalm 145 has twenty-one. David wrote every letter but one.

R. Yochanan says the reason is that Nun is the letter of catastrophe. It is the first letter of the word nefilah, falling. And the verse it would invoke, the verse David apparently could not bring himself to attach to God's praise, comes from the prophet Amos: "She has fallen and will not rise again, the virgin of Israel" (Amos 5:2). That verse, in its plain reading, is a eulogy. Israel has fallen. The sentence is final. David knew the verse was in the tradition. He knew what Nun carried. He left it out of his praise poem.

This is where the story turns. Because the rabbis of Palestine, according to the Ein Yaakov, did not read Amos 5:2 as a eulogy at all. They read it as a promise. The same Hebrew words, in a different grammatical emphasis: "She has fallen and will not fall again. Rise, virgin of Israel." The falling is done. It was the last fall. What comes now is the rising.

R. Nachman bar Isaac takes this reading one step further and suggests that even if Nun carries the weight of nefilah, David did not simply avoid the letter and hope no one noticed. He anticipated it. Immediately after the gap where Nun should appear, the psalm pivots to the letter Samech and writes: "The Lord upholds all who are fallen" (Psalm 145:14). The verb is a variant of nefilah. David did not erase the falling. He addressed it in the very next breath, with God as the one who catches.

The Ashrei, as this psalm is known from its opening word in the liturgical tradition, became one of the most recited texts in Jewish prayer. It appears three times in the daily service. R. Elazar ben Abina's statement about the world to come is connected to this regularity. Reciting it three times a day is not a mechanical guarantee. It is the practice of returning, every day, to a psalm that works through the entire alphabet of praise except for the letter of catastrophe, and then turns immediately to the verse about those who have fallen being upheld.

The Ein Yaakov tradition is full of arguments about which practices merit the world to come. Most of them involve extraordinary acts: heroic scholarship, perfect charity, impossible forgiveness. R. Elazar's claim is different. He points to a poem. A poem that omits one letter on purpose, addresses the omission without naming it, and is recited in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening by people who are, most of them, not scholars and not saints.

The missing Nun is still missing. The tradition did not add it back. The rabbis of Palestine's alternative reading of Amos, the promise hidden inside the lament, is still only one reading. The other reading, the devastating one, is also still there. David held both at once, and arranged his letters around the gap, and wrote "the Lord upholds all who are fallen" in the very next line, and the Talmud decided that a person who recites this three times a day has understood something essential about what it means to praise God honestly.