{"id":88374,"date":"2021-02-06T07:55:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-06T05:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=88374"},"modified":"2021-02-06T07:55:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-06T05:55:00","slug":"lyrical-labor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/lyrical-labor\/","title":{"rendered":"Lyrical Labor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"88374","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":36423,"related_cahpter":"671","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"What are the works of our hands that might make us whole, and the labors of love that will endure if not forever, then for at least just long enough?\r\n","content":"

This is a psalm about many things, but most of all it is about <\/span>work<\/span><\/i>. It is chock full of verbs, of action and doing and an industrious Almighty who is busy setting the world right. He stretches the heavens and wraps Himself in garments of light, and that\u2019s just the beginning of founding the earth and covering it, deputizing the wind and the flames, sustaining life and extinguishing it. He grows the Leviathan and grapes in equal measure, opening His hand and hiding His face in a choreography of revealment and concealment that sets the beat for a wild spin of flora and fauna.<\/span><\/p>\n

Human beings work too, and their labor is set alongside this effusion of Divine productivity, which occasions praise and awe. There is something breathless about this psalm, an urgent reach for metaphor and bold and baroque language to match the scale of the achievements the words are straining to comprehend and convey. In the doing, the psalmist\u2019s efforts become their own kind of art, their own manner of making that continues to astonish.<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea of work is very much in the news these days. We live at a moment of enormous technological change, which is reordering who works, who doesn\u2019t, and what working looks like. Covid-19 has shined the harshest of spotlights on what kind of work is essential and what isn\u2019t. Where work happens is fluid in a way that it hasn\u2019t been in living memory. I live in Midtown Manhattan, and I can testify firsthand that the old grooves of commutes and coffee breaks have been shattered. What comes next is no doubt a hybrid whose shape remains to be seen.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rereading this Psalm made me think of a very different piece of writing: a longish short story by Ernest Hemingway called Big Two Hearted River. The protagonist, Nick Adams, is a survivor of war\u2019s trials, just like Hemingway. Not much happens, but Adams pitches a tent and does some fishing. The tasks restore him: the work is the healing. So much is virtual now, and algorithms do the lion\u2019s share of our doing on our behalf. We cannot unfurl a galaxy in the 9-5 workday. But what are the works of our hands that might make us whole, and the labors of love that will endure if not forever, then for at least just long enough?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","image":false,"embedded_video":"","video_duration":"","show_fb_comments":true,"credit_media":""},"tile":{"top_caption":"Lyrical Labor","main_caption":"What are the works of our hands that might make us whole, and the labors of love that will endure if not forever, then for at least just long enough?","main_caption_size":"1","sub_caption":"","preview_embedded":"","preview_image":false,"preview_video":"","external_link":"","link_for_pay":false,"tile_gallery_items":false,"credits":""},"alternate_tile":{"top_caption":"","main_caption":"","main_caption_size":"1","sub_caption":"","hide_media":false},"tile_group":{"preview_image_url":false,"main_caption":"","sub_caption":"","":null,"popup_package_extra_content":"","read_time":""},"home_color":"","home_gallery_top":"","home_gallery_middle":"","home_gallery_book":"","home_gallery_bottom":"","seo":{"seo_title":"","seo_description":"","seo_default_title":"","seo_default_description":""},"links":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88375,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88374\/revisions\/88375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}