"Serve Hashem with joy." What if I'm just not feeling it?
The psalm says to serve Hashem with joy and to come before Him with glad song. That sounds like an order to feel something, and feelings do not switch on by order. The commentators asked what the word is doing there.
Ibn Ezra (a Spanish commentator on Tanach who died in the 1160s) starts from what serving someone usually feels like: a servant is normally sad. That is why the psalm adds "with joy." Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, Provence, around 1200) puts it in one line: His service should not be a burden to you.
The Malbim (a commentator on Tanach in the 1800s) explains why this service could be different. Someone working for another person is not happy during the work. He is not sure he will be paid, and even if he is, the pay comes later. Serving God, he says, is itself the pay and the goal.
Midrash Tehillim (a collection of rabbinic teachings on Tehillim) does not let the verse off that easily. It sets it against another one: "Serve Hashem with fear" (Tehillim 2:11). Which is it? Rabbi Aivu answers about the exact moment you are in: when you stand to pray, let your heart be glad that you are serving the Most High God. Then the Midrash asks: could that mean without fear? No. The other verse still stands. In this reading joy is not a light mood. It comes from knowing who you are standing in front of.
The Rambam (Maimonides, the great codifier of Jewish law, 1100s) counts the joy as part of the work: the joy a person has in doing a mitzvah, he writes, is a great service.
None of these sources says how to produce a feeling on the spot, and none says to fake one. What the siddur does is practical. Shulchan Aruch HaRav (the code of law by the first Chabad Rebbe) gives this as one reason the morning psalms come before the Amidah: so that a person stands up to pray out of the joy of a mitzvah. The psalms are the tool.
Ibn Ezra, Radak and Malbim on Tehillim 100:2,Midrash Tehillim 100,Tehillim 2:11,Rambam, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 8:15,Shulchan Aruch HaRav, Orach Chaim 51:1,Berakhot 31aThe scroll spells it "not." We read it "His." Which one is right?
Open a Tanach to Tehillim 100:3 and you will find something the siddur does not show. One word is written with an alef: velo, "and not." It is read with a vav: velo, "and His." The two sound the same. Ibn Ezra (a Spanish commentator on Tanach who died in the 1160s) notes that this is like the other places in Tanach where a word is written one way and read another.
Read aloud, the line says: "He made us, and we are His." Metzudat David (a commentary from the 1700s) explains: we are set apart for Him, to be called His people and His flock.
As written, it says: "He made us, and not we ourselves." Rashi (the classic commentator, France, 1000s) explains in a few words: He made us when we were not yet in the world. Nobody was there to make themselves. Bereishit Rabbah (the classic Midrash on the book of Bereishit) names someone who claimed otherwise. In the book of Yechezkel, Pharaoh says: "The Nile is mine, and I made myself." We did not create ourselves, the Midrash says. We are not like Pharaoh.
Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, Provence, around 1200) hears a warning in the written form. It means we cannot say the line the Torah warns a successful person against: "My own power and the strength of my hand got me all this."
So which is right? None of these commentators picks one and throws out the other. Radak explains both, one after the other. Ibn Ezra quotes an earlier scholar he calls "the Gaon," who tied the read version to that same line of Pharaoh's: "we are His" is the opposite of "I made myself."
The Malbim (a commentator on Tanach in the 1800s) explains how "we are His" follows from "He made us." Someone who makes a thing usually has no claim on it afterward. Here, he says, the Maker still does: we are His the way a thing belongs to its owner.
Tehillim 100:3, with Rashi, Radak, Ibn Ezra, Metzudat David and Malbim,Bereishit Rabbah 100:1,Yechezkel 29:3,Devarim 8:17Todah means "thank you." So why does the Midrash hear a confession?
Open Midrash Tehillim (a collection of rabbinic teachings on Tehillim) to this psalm and you might expect a lesson about gratitude. Instead, one of its first comments on the title quotes a verse from Mishlei: "One who covers up his wrongs will not succeed. One who admits them and lets them go will be shown mercy." The word for "admits" is modeh. It is the same word as "thanks." In Hebrew, thanking and admitting share one root, and the Midrash reads the title todah both ways.
Then it gives examples. Adam covered up. Asked what he had done, he answered, "The woman You gave me." Kayin, in this telling, admitted. He walked away from his trial glad, and Adam met him and asked how it had gone. Kayin said: I turned back from what I did, and I was shown leniency. Adam answered with a line from Tehillim: "It is good lehodot to Hashem." Lehodot normally means "to thank." Here the Midrash hears "to admit." The same split shows up with kings. Shaul said the people had brought the animals. David said, "I have sinned."
The Talmud Yerushalmi (the Gemara of the Land of Israel) has a second tradition, in the name of Reish Lakish, a third-century sage of the Land of Israel. When God taught Moshe that on Yom Kippur the high priest confesses over the goat, in Hebrew vehitvadah, Moshe began to say Mizmor LeTodah. He said it, the Yerushalmi says, because of that word.
Why would a rule about confessing make someone sing a thank-you psalm? The Torah Temimah (a Torah commentary by Rabbi Baruch Epstein, printed in the early 1900s) explains: Moshe was thanking God for showing that wrongs can be cleared, and that the way is to admit them.
This is a midrashic reading. The plain meaning of the title is thanks, and the offering that went with it. What the Midrash and the Yerushalmi add is that the Hebrew word can carry both: to thank and to admit.
Midrash Tehillim 100,Mishlei 28:13,Talmud Yerushalmi, Shevuot 1:5,Vayikra 16:21,Torah Temimah on Vayikra 16:21