Periodically I post resources for incest and abuse survivors. This is part of that series. If such content is triggering to you, please just click on by.
כִּי־אָבִ֣י וְאִמִּ֣י עֲזָב֑וּנִי וַֽיהוָ֣ה יַֽאַסְפֵֽנִי׃
When my father and mother abandoned me, YHVH gathered me in.
— Psalm 27: 10
If there is a single verse of the Jewish Bible that speaks most directly and compassionately towards survivors of incest and domestic violence, it is this verse in Psalm 27. I remember the first time I read it, I read one of the conventional English translations, which softens the first clause into a conditional: “Though my father and mother abandon me, YHVH will take me in.” (JPS translation) Even in that weakened state, the verse jumped out at me: I felt seen by the psalmist.
When I learned how to translate Hebrew for myself, I learned that the translator had chickened out, softening the verse. As the scholar Robert Alter has written in his commentary on Psalms, this is perhaps the most shocking line in Psalms, and maybe in Tanakh. Parents abandon a child? Unthinkable!
The hard truth is that sometimes parents fail their children in disastrous ways. The infant-parent bond fails, or a parent is deeply troubled by abuse in their past, and acts it out upon their own child. These things do happen, and apparently the psalmist knew of such families. Maybe he or she had been such a child – we will never know.
I find this verse comforting to say aloud. I can say it in English or in Hebrew. If you would like to say it in Hebrew, here is a transliteration:
Ki avEE v’eeMEE azaVOOni va’AdoNAI ya’as-FAH-nee.
When my father and mother abandoned me, the Holy One took me in.
To me, there is no more comforting line in all of Scripture. Is there another verse that speaks particularly to you?
