Is the foe the speaker asks to be saved from necessarily an external enemy, or can part of the piyut be read as though the great enemy is also inside the person himself?

Performed by Yaniv Madar. From the Darbuka channel.

Yes. It is entirely possible to read “the foe” on two levels at once, as a real external enemy and also as an inner enemy. And it is precisely this double reading that makes the piyut far deeper.

On the plain level, the piyut has clear language of external distress: “Redeem a servant who cries out to You from the hand of his pursuers and those who rise against him”, “crying out from the strife of the foe”. That is, the speaker describes pursuers, those who rise against him, and a foe threatening him from outside. There is no reason to erase that meaning.

But if you look at the piyut as a whole, it turns out that the first threat that appears in it is not an external enemy at all.

The piyut opens with “When I remember upon my bed the wilfulness of my heart and its guilt”.

That is, before any pursuers or adversaries appear, an enemy has already appeared that is inside: the heart itself.

And here the possibility of a deeper reading begins.

The speaker is not only saying: someone is chasing me.

He is also saying: inside me there is wilfulness, guilt, desire, transgressions, deeds I am ashamed of, and things I may be trying to justify.

So one can read the piyut as though it contains two “foes”:

• The external foe: the pursuer, the enemy, the exile, harsh reality
• The inner foe: the impulse, the guilt, the desire, self justification and sin

And the fascinating thing is that the poet does not separate them sharply.

When he says “from the straits”, one can understand a real strait. But within the context of the piyut, the man is also in a strait of the soul: he is trapped between what he did and what he would want to be.

There is here, as a literary reading, a kind of movement:

At first he fears what is inside him.

Then he asks to be saved from what is outside him.

And then he returns to himself again and admits his transgressions.

That is, every time it seems that the danger is “out there”, the piyut turns the gaze back inward.

And this becomes especially sharp in the stanza:

“What shall he complain and say, what shall he speak and justify himself”

Here there is no longer an external pursuer. The man stands facing himself and facing the Holy One, and discovers that one of his greatest obstacles is the very wish to justify himself.

And this is a very strong point.

Sometimes the inner enemy is not only the sin itself.

Sometimes the enemy is the story a person tells himself in order not to change.

“It wasn’t really my fault.”

“I had no choice.”

“Everyone does it.”

“I’m actually fine.”

The piyut breaks that mechanism. It says, in effect: what could a man possibly speak and justify?

And then something beautiful happens: the moment a person stops fighting to prove that he is right, he can begin to ask for mercy.

And this also explains why the refrain is so significant.

“Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great”

If the foe is only an external enemy, the refrain says: save me from him.

But if the foe is also inside me, the refrain takes on a far deeper meaning:

Save me from myself too.

Not in the sense of self erasure, but in the sense of being pulled out of the patterns, the desires and the sins that a person himself has become captive to.

And this connects beautifully to the phrase “my refuge in my distress”.

On the ordinary reading: God is the place I flee to when the enemy is chasing me.

On the inner reading: where do you flee when the enemy is inside you?

You cannot simply run somewhere else.

And therefore the flight is not geographical. It is spiritual.

A person “flees” to the Holy One precisely because he cannot flee from himself.

This is, in my view, one of the strongest readings in the piyut: the speaker does not only ask that the Holy One change the reality around him. He asks that the encounter with the Holy One change him too.

And this can also explain the shift at the end to “midnight”. At the beginning of the piyut he is lying in bed remembering his sins. By its end he is already rising together with “Your servants”.

One can see in this a symbolic route:

Lying down -> memory of sin -> supplication -> confession -> submission -> rising.

That is, the man who begins imprisoned inside his own thoughts, ends as a man who rises.

So who is the “foe”?

On the plain level, an external enemy.

But on the homiletic and literary level one can certainly say that the piyut hints that the hardest enemy may also be the one a person carries with him everywhere: the wilfulness of his heart, his desires, his sins and his need to justify himself.

And perhaps this is why the poet is not content with asking for “rescue”.

He asks for redemption.

Because rescue is getting out of danger.

Redemption is getting out of bondage.

And the deepest bondage in the piyut may be not only to another person, but to a version of ourselves that we cannot manage to break free from.

More articles in the series on the piyut “Bezochri al Mishkavi”:

• Why did Rabbi Yehuda ibn Bal’am choose to return again and again precisely to “Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great”?
• How many allusions to the language of the Bible are hidden inside the piyut, and what changes in their meaning when the poet weaves them into a single prayer?
• What is special about the moment when the speaker stops talking about himself and mentions “Your servants”, “the merit of the fathers” and “Your congregation”?