Introduction: Praise Transmitted from Generation to Generation
Psalm 145 is the great psalm of praise of King David, and we focus here on a central verse within it - the verse opening with the letter Dalet. This verse addresses a fundamental question: from where do we derive the ability to praise the Creator at all? The answer is: from tradition. From what we received from the previous generation, our forefathers who saw and recounted to us, and we in turn transmit it onward to future generations.
דּוֹר לְדוֹר יְשַׁבַּח מַעֲשֶׂיךָ וּגְבוּרֹתֶיךָ יַגִּידוּ׃ - One generation shall laud Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts.
The Torah states: "Or has God ever attempted to go and take for Himself a nation from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by an outstretched arm... according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt?" The Holy One, blessed be He, says: investigate and examine - not even a single nation would ever dare to fabricate such a story. This story is entirely unique, unparalleled. And this is the meaning of "One generation shall laud Your works to another" - our praise rests upon an unbroken chain of testimony from generations who saw with their own eyes and passed it down.
The Hatred of the Nations: Who Is the Son?
Why is Mount Sinai called by that name? Rashi explains that hatred (sin'ah) descended from there upon the nations of the world. While the simple meaning is that the Holy One, blessed be He, rejected the idolatrous nations, that alone is enough to make the nations hate us. Why? Because "You are children to the Lord your God," and who likes being a stepchild? Who likes being "And Esau I hated"? Therefore, everyone tries to prove that he is the true son.
From here stems the Ishmaelite narrative, inventing the "binding of Ishmael"; and from here stems the Christian narrative, claiming that the Holy One, blessed be He, grew tired of us, cast us away entirely, and chose them instead. Each had to fabricate a story to claim: it is not them, it is us. But as long as we exist, our very survival deeply troubles them. Therefore, their goal became to destroy us, so that everyone would believe they are the chosen ones. As long as we exist, our presence is a slap in the face to Christianity.
At the time, there was an archbishop who asserted that the clear proof that Hashem had entirely abandoned the Jewish people and chosen them instead was that the Jewish people would never return to their land. Fewer than five hundred years passed, and the Jewish people returned to their land. This just shows how difficult it is to make a prophecy. Christianity has no genuine prophecies other than this one - and it was shattered. Muhammad is also called a prophet, yet he did not make a single real prophecy. He was no fool: to offer a prophecy about what would happen tomorrow would risk it crashing against the rock of reality.
No other nation in the world ever proclaimed prophecies of this kind. The only faith that possesses an abundance of prophecies that were fulfilled - and for those not yet fulfilled, we await their fulfillment - is Judaism. The Torah speaks of how the Jewish people would go into exile, what the condition of the land would be while they were in exile, and what would happen when we return. There are detailed prophecies about the exile of the Second Temple, where the nation that would exile us would come from, and everything the Jewish people would endure up through the Holocaust. Everything is explicitly laid out. If a person reflects, he sees that "generation to generation" the story was told to us in advance. The very existence of the Jewish people is what disturbs the nations, and they cannot bear it.
Therefore, they make every effort to prove that we are immoral, that we are not the chosen people, and they seek to destroy us. What are all these well-funded foundations and organizations? They say: Germany did not succeed with gas chambers and mass annihilation - we will do it through other means: through money, by generating hatred against Israel worldwide, by inciting academia and universities against the Jewish people, and by tying their hands in anything they seek to do. The goal is one: if we were destroyed, it would validate their worldview - claiming that a new covenant was formed, that Hashem abandoned them. But as long as we thrive and exist, it remains a resounding slap in the face to their entire theology.
Concerning this, the Ya'avetz (Rav Yaakov Emden) remarks that an even greater wonder in his eyes than all the miracles of the Exodus from Egypt and all the miracles in history is the survival of the Jewish people. How, despite all their enemies and despite all those who made it their mission to annihilate them, the people of Israel are still alive and well, vibrant and influential in the world. After all, they do not even make up two-tenths of a percent of the world's population, yet nearly every news broadcast opens with Israel - and not only during wartime. Jews exert influence in every field: in academia, in the arts, in governance. In the most prestigious universities, twenty to twenty-five percent of researchers and professors are Jewish. The Jewish reality is an undeniable force that cannot be ignored, and this is something the nations cannot endure, which is why they wage war against it in every way possible.
The Malbim: His Deeds Are Evident, Yet His Essence Is Hidden
The Malbim explains "Generation to generation shall praise Your works": Since I cannot comprehend His greatness, blessed be He, in and of Himself, but can only perceive the actions that the Holy One, blessed be He, performs, and through them grasp His power - though not His essence - it says specifically "shall praise Your works," the deeds through which You become known. Through them, we have the means to praise You.
The Malbim then asks: What is the difference between shevach (praise/enhancement) and tehillah (praise/acclaim)? After all, we say "and I will praise Your name," "My mouth shall speak the praise of Hashem," yet here it says, "Generation to generation shall praise (yeshabach) Your works." The Malbim explains: shevach denotes something that improves (mashbi'ach), rising above what came before. With each generation, the more people contemplate the works of Hashem and the secrets of nature, the more wisdom and wonders they discover that were hidden from previous generations, and they praise His works - adding to their perceived goodness and wisdom beyond what was recognized until then.
Wisdom Granted in Its Due Time
Consider the discoveries of the past two to three hundred years, and how completely they transformed our lives. Prior to that, human reality was almost unchanged from what it was two thousand years ago. In these recent centuries, humanity discovered the atom, DNA, ultrasound, photography, steam power, and the combustion engine - discoveries that turned the world upside down.
The holy Zohar foresaw this: in the six-hundredth year of the sixth millennium, tremendous wisdom would descend to the world, and the wellsprings of wisdom would open. We are now in the year 5784; if we look back 180 to 200 years, that coincides precisely with the surge of discoveries in recent generations.
Radio waves - who could have imagined standing here, transmitting invisible waves, and being heard on the other side of the globe? We belong to a generation that grew up on the fax machine, yet look at what exists today: a person can sit at home and watch a live feed of his factory in Australia. Or vice versa - he is in a hotel in Australia and sees that his home is currently being broken into. Anyone describing such things two or three hundred years ago would have been dismissed as telling tales of demons and spirits. We have reached the moon, photography is already over a century old - there is even video footage of the Chofetz Chaim.
And whoever reflects upon it will see that the primary invention that transformed the world was the steam engine - and that is the simplest thing. Anyone who has ever placed a lid on a boiling pot and watched it rattle understands that there is pressure here, and that it can be harnessed. Why did no one think of it earlier? Was King Solomon not wise enough? Rather, as the Kuzari explains, and as the Ben Ish Chai also mentions, they invested their wisdom in higher intellectual concepts (muskalot). Even Aristotle and his peers did not occupy themselves with physical comfort; the natural philosophers of the nations engaged in the study of nature and reality - in our terminology, pure intellect. King Solomon did not concern himself with making life more convenient. Today, virtually everything revolves around convenience: making the touch screen more responsive, turning the house into a "smart home" where you sneeze and the light turns on, or telling your phone, "Call Moshe," and it dials. All these developments center on convenience. But fundamentally, there was a designated time when the Holy One, blessed be He, willed to lower this wisdom into the world, and it arrived precisely when it was meant to descend.
A Dwarf on the Shoulders of a Giant
And one must understand: every modern invention is essentially a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant. The inventor of the engine would have accomplished nothing had someone before him not invented the wheel. Only after the wheel was already invented, and then an engine was created, was there a way to combine the two. But an engine without a wheel - what could one do with it? All inventions build upon earlier discoveries, with each step adding further development and progress, and only through this cumulative process can reality-altering inventions emerge.
And of course, no one imagines these things were invented purely out of humanitarian or altruistic motives. Clearly, the driving force was profit. Why did almost all the great inventions arise in capitalist countries rather than communist ones? After all, in communist countries everyone went to school, everyone was educated, and everyone could enter university. But there was no incentive: What will I gain by inventing something? By contrast, here a pharmaceutical company can invest thirty years in research and then profit for the next two hundred years because it found a cure for a disease. When a person profits, it is worth his while.
A great Torah authority was once asked about communism and the kibbutz ideal, and he answered: If this were the proper way of life, it is inconceivable that the Torah would not have commanded us to live this way. Seeing that the Torah did not prescribe this model of existence is proof that it is not the path. This was stated by Torah sages at a time when much of the world was still captivated by the communist illusion of "everyone is equal" and the like. Seventy years passed, and that dream collapsed. Today, only totalitarian regimes maintain it as a means to subjugate the masses, and no one seriously views it as a sound way of life. Someone related that he was once at a medical clinic there and saw them reusing a syringe from one patient to another, merely wiping it down before giving an injection to the next person. That is not advanced medicine; it is the most primitive care, and they lagged far behind. Capitalist countries, on the other hand - although trampling upon others is certainly not what we aspire to - demonstrate that unless a person is given the freedom to advance, he will not develop, invent, or truly propel the world forward.
Each Generation Discovers What Its Predecessor Did Not Fully See
The Malbim continues: Shevach (praise) denotes something that enhances and improves upon what came before. As generation after generation continues to examine Hashem's deeds and contemplate the secrets of nature, understanding progressively increases and improves, and each generation recognizes far more than the preceding ones - until each subsequent generation realizes that what the previous generation saw was not yet perceived fully or adequately. What remains today of the medical knowledge from the era of the Rambam? Anyone who looks there will find discussions of black bile, red bile, and green bile - but who speaks of all this today? Why? Because they could not penetrate deep inside the body. Today, with advanced imaging, a camera can be inserted that travels through the entire digestive tract to see precisely what is happening inside, alongside many other ways to investigate the inner workings of the human body. This is "Generation to generation shall praise (yeshabach) Your deeds" - understanding steadily grows richer, bringing ever-deepening awe and wonder at Hashem's handiwork.
"And declare Your mighty acts" - Overriding the Natural Order
"And declare Your mighty acts" - the Malbim explains that gevurah (might) refers to something that runs contrary to the natural course of events, such as triumphing over enemies; in other words, instances where the Holy One, blessed be He, overturns the laws of nature. Future generations will witness the deeds that You perform outside the bounds of nature, and for this they will praise and laud Him.
In his analysis of the words, the Malbim notes: the root of haggadah (declaration) always implies conveying something novel, whereas asicha ("I will speak") is like speech that slips out spontaneously, as in the phrase mesi'ach lefi tummo (speaking casually and candidly). Thus, they will declare, praise, and converse about the wonders of the Holy One, blessed be He - both through the deliberate declaration of novel insights, and through spontaneous speech that bursts forth from overwhelming wonder.
Tehillot Maharitz: Songs of Praise That Sweeten Harsh Judgments
In Tehillot Maharitz, the verse "Generation to generation shall praise Your deeds, and declare Your mighty acts" is explained homiletically through the esoteric tradition: The counsel for sweetening harsh judgments, as the holy books write, is through joy, songs of praise (zemirot), and thanksgiving. "For in joy shall you go forth" - through joy, a person emerges from all troubles and sweetens all judgments. This is the meaning of "Generation to generation shall praise Your deeds" - by offering praise to the Creator of the universe, "and declare Your mighty acts (ugvurotecha yagidu)" - they nullify the attribute of Gevurah, which is the attribute of strict judgment.
And what is the meaning of yagidu? It is related to "Hew down (godu) the tree" in the Book of Daniel - godu means to cut down, to sever the tree. Just as zemirot (songs) are called such from the expression lezamer aritzim ("to prune the tyrants"): in the Pesukei Dezimra (verses of song) recited before prayer, we prune and cut away the forces of impurity, lopping off the oppressive forces so they do not cling to us during prayer - so too with "and declare Your mighty acts" (ugvurotecha yagidu): by praising, singing, and rejoicing in Hashem, may He be blessed, we chop down the strict judgments, excise the prosecuting accusations, and transform them into mercy and loving-kindness.
In summary: "Generation to generation shall praise Your deeds, and declare Your mighty acts" - we cannot grasp His Essence, blessed be He, and therefore our praise stems from His deeds. This praise is transmitted from generation to generation, from the testimony of our forefathers who witnessed the unprecedented events of the Exodus from Egypt, through prophecies fulfilled throughout history, to our very miraculous existence - which, in the words of the Ya'avetz, is a greater wonder than all the miracles of Egypt. Yeshabach implies progressive enhancement: each generation discovers within nature depths of wisdom concealed from its predecessors, and this wisdom was revealed to the world at its precisely appointed time, as the Zohar states. "And declare Your mighty acts" - the overturning of nature's order that we recount, and on an esoteric level: through praise, joy, and songs, we sever harsh judgments and accusations, transforming them into mercy and loving-kindness.