If God is that big, why would He care about me?
The first six lines of Adon Olam are about as big as words can go. God ruled before anything existed. He will rule after everything ends. No beginning, no end, nothing to compare Him to. If the poem stopped there, the honest reaction would be: then I am too small to matter.
That reaction is already in Tehillim. David looks up at the moon and the stars and asks: "What is a human being, that You remember him?"
Then comes line seven: "And He is my God." It is the same One. From here on the poem is about one person. My Redeemer, my place to run to, my spirit, my body.
The Gemara says this is how Tanach always talks. Rabbi Yochanan taught: wherever you find God's might, right there you find His humility. His example from the Torah is the verse "Hashem your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords." The next verse says that He does justice for the orphan and the widow.
You say the same thing every morning a little later in the siddur, in two lines that sit side by side in Tehillim: "He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds. He counts the number of the stars and calls each of them by name."
Notice what Adon Olam does not do. It does not argue, and it does not bring proof. It puts the two claims next to each other, the way Tanach does, and has one person say both. David's question stays a real question. The poem's claim is that being great and being close are not opposites. The One with no beginning and no end is the One you can call "mine."
Tehillim 8:4-5,Megillah 31a,Tehillim 147:3-4The last line says "I will not fear." What if I am afraid?
Read quickly, the ending sounds like a claim that people who believe do not get scared. Look at where the words come from.
"Hashem is with me, I will not fear" is a verse from Hallel. The verse right before it says: "From a tight place I called to God." The speaker is in trouble. The poem's other borrowed lines are like that too. "My Redeemer lives" is Iyov (Job) in the middle of his suffering. "A place to run to" echoes a psalm David wrote when Shaul sent men to watch his house and kill him.
The poem itself says "in a time of trouble" and calls God "a place to run to." Nobody needs a place to run to unless something is chasing them.
A book called Divrei Kehillot, quoted in Ta'amei HaMinhagim (a collection of reasons for Jewish customs), reads the last two lines as one thought. I hand over my spirit when I go to sleep. I wake in the morning and find my body and my spirit together again. "Hashem was with me until now, and I will not fear what is still to come." The confidence rests on something that already happened: last night.
David makes the same move in a psalm he wrote while running from his son Avshalom: "I lay down and slept. I woke up, because Hashem holds me up. I will not fear the many thousands of people who have lined up against me on every side."
That may be why these lines are said at the edges. They are the last words of the bedtime Shema. And Ma'avar Yabbok (a book about caring for the sick and the dying, printed in Italy in 1626) records that many people would have someone who was gravely ill say Adon Olam from beginning to end.
So the line does not describe a person who feels nothing. It was built out of verses said by frightened people, and frightened people have been saying it ever since. It is what they say about who is with them.
Tehillim 118:5-6,Iyov 19:25,Tehillim 59:1, 59:17,Ta'amei HaMinhagim 29, Kuntres Acharon, quoting Divrei Kehillot,Tehillim 3:1, 3:6-7,Ma'avar Yabbok, Siftei Tzedek, chapter 7Adon Olam never asks God for anything. So why say it?
Look at the ten lines again. There is no "please," no "help me," no "forgive us." The poem never even says "You." It talks about God, not to Him. Six lines say who He is. Four lines say who He is to me. That is all.
The Kaf HaChaim (a major work of Jewish law by Rabbi Yaakov Chaim Sofer, who died in Jerusalem in 1939) explains what that is for. Before you pray, you are supposed to think about how great God is, because that is what brings a person to awe. So some have the custom to say Adon Olam before the prayers, because it tells of His greatness. First you know who you are talking to. Then you talk.
Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (the Rebbe of Piaseczno in Poland, killed in the Holocaust in 1943) wrote a book of guidance for students. In it he says that your first job, from the moment you open your eyes, is to announce God's greatness and to crown Him over the world. Then he adds: "When you say Adon Olam, be exact, and be moved by every word in it."
The same rabbi has advice for the days when that does not work. Sometimes, he writes, a person feels he has fallen, and the thinking and the praying will not come. Then he should let himself down to simplicity. He should say, "Right now I am a simple servant of Hashem," and say Adon Olam like a villager, with the plain meaning of the words. Simplicity, he says, is a place where there is no sadness.
So Adon Olam fits both kinds of mornings. On a good day it is the warm-up before you ask for anything. On a day when you have nothing to say, it gives you ten lines that ask for nothing and only say who God is.
Kaf HaChaim, Orach Chaim 98:12,Chovat HaTalmidim, Instructions and Admonitions 5,Derekh HaMelekh, Parashat Chayei Sara