11] Because the Lord has ordered his angels over you to protect you on all
your paths,
12] that they will carry you on their hands so that you will not strike your
foot on a stone.
13] On lions and vipers you will walk and tread on young lions and serpents.
14] ‘He who longs for me, I will help; he who knows my name, for that
reason I will protect.
15] He who calls me, I will listen to him; I am with him in distress; I will
deliver him and bring him to honor.
16] I will satisfy him with long life and will show him my salvation.’I have not been asked to determine precisely the historical-philological mean-
ing of individual passages, idioms, and words of Psalm 91, of which I want
to speak. The translations of Jews, Christians, and of theologians and other
scientists differ. I quote from the text, which seems appropriate to me. The
first verse is engraved on the grave of my parents: “Who lives in the shelter
of the Most High is in the safety of the shadow of the Almighty.” My mother
loved that Psalm; I am not able even today to separate it from my remem-
brance of the gleam in her eyes whenever she spoke it. It was the expression
of her certainty of a divine homeland in the face of the misery and the hor-
ror in reality. “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust” states
the second verse. Such confidence prevailed throughout her life in spite of a
full consciousness of the disaster on the European horizon.
Fear lurks in everyone. The one who always asserts to not know fear is
mentally damaged or a fool. As other negative emotions can be overcome,
such struggle is indebted to the Psalm. The distinction of anxiety and fear,
in Ontology’s grandly presented teaching on Being, may lead to the definition
of empirical research in which a confidence in godly help is irrelevant. Jewish
thinking, as it is my tradition, neither confronted the accidental with an exist-
ing fear, nor luck and misfortune in this life with a future in the world to
come. Longing for safety in the midst of daily dangers, in the presence of
shame and ruin and chaos, is the thought of an immanent God. “You do not
need to be afraid of the terror of the night, or of the arrow that flies by day,
or of the plague that moves in the darkness, or of the epidemic that devas-
tates at Noon. Because your confidence is the Lord, the Highest One you
have made your refuge.”
Progressive youths know the psychological-sociological mechanisms from
which this confidence can be explained. Furthermore, it is well-known why
116 • Max Horkheimer