#750: Tachanun (Part 20)

The first of it, Malach, is asking Hashem to transform, to return, Shuvah, to return the loving, affectionate relationship rather than the one that's filled with rebuke and with his suffering and his punishment, either from his own ailments and illness or from the enemies.

And then it pivots where he directs his wrath, so to say, against the source of that pain.

And he describes, after davening to Hashem, he can't serve Him, he can't express gratitude properly when he's not in this world.

But he describes the pain that he's been in.

Every night I make my bed swim.

I melt my couch with tears.

And the passage we're up to now, he continues.

My eye is dimmed because of grief.

it has become old because of all of my adversaries depart from me all you workers of iniquity who is he talking to who are these problem who are these workers and then he says as if punked in the middle of asking whatever the source of his pain and anguish to end or go away, he already says, Shema, and past tense, Shema, Hashem, kol b'ch'i.

Hashem has heard the kol of my b'ch'i.

Kol means the voice of the sound.

B'ch'i is...

The cries.

So what's going on over here? So Rashi explains, what is this word? And again, as I've been saying through Tim, I'm not going to ask anyone to offer a translation, even though we say these words all the time, we should be familiar with what they mean.

What's the root of the word? Out of anger, my eyes.

Zerashi explains, eye disease, a person whose eyes have been damaged, eyes have been dimmed, eyes have decayed or rotted.

rot or decay, either crying from the pain, the loneliness being pursued by enemies, crying from the suffering, the pain, the anguish of the illness.

So it's a description of the pain or anguish, a condition of the eyes.

He's old and tired.

So the older a person gets, everyone here of course is incredibly young, so you wouldn't know, but the older a person gets, they get cataracts and macular degeneration, they can't see far, they can't see close, they need readers, they need progressives, eyes begin to go.

So David HaMalch is saying that my enemies and my illness have accelerated my aging and my eyes are going my bed is filled with tears i've cried them out and the result is the malbim explains a little bit differently the malbim explains the crying it began because of the is But even though the beginning of the tears came because of the pain of illness, physical and emotional and spiritual, those pale in comparison to the pain, the loneliness, the anguish of enemies who are pursuing him.

And that's why the anger is directed at the enemies who are at the source of compromising his very eyesight and his very eyes.

And then he describes So means depart from me.

Good riddance.

What are the workers? Oven with an aleph is sin, mistakes, indiscretion, iniquity.