How to Write Your Own Psalm: Learning from the Form of Tehillim

By Aaron Mandel

When Your Own Words Feel Too Small

There is a moment, usually late, when you want to pray and the ready-made words will not fit. The prayer book is open, but your mouth is dry. What you are carrying is too specific, too raw, or too tangled to hand over in someone else’s phrasing. You want to say it yourself, in your own voice, but you do not know where to begin. The psalmists knew that feeling. The Book of Tehillim is not polished serenity set to music; it is a record of people who learned to turn their actual lives into prayer. You can learn from how they did it.

Start Where the Psalmist Starts: by Turning Toward God

Almost every psalm begins by orienting itself. Before the complaint, before the request, before the praise, the writer turns and faces the One being addressed. “For the Leader. A Psalm of David. O God of my praise, keep not silence;” (Psalms 109:1). Notice how little is required: a naming of God, and a plea simply that He not stay silent. That is enough to begin.

This first move matters more than it seems. When you write your own psalm, the opening line is not decoration. It decides who you are speaking to. You are not journaling into the air, and you are not arguing with yourself. You are addressing the Eternal directly. The old teachers were emphatic that prayer is not the recitation of syllables but the lifting of the inner self. Bachya ibn Pakuda warns against settling too quickly, against assuming the first thing that comes to mind is the whole of it: “Therefore do not be content with what has been formed in your mind in the beginning of your learning of the difficult matters, and the deep reasons.” (Duties of the Heart, Eighth Treatise on Examining the Soul 3:186). Your opening line is the difficult matter. Turn, name the One you are turning to, and let the rest follow from there.

Borrow the Bones of the Lament

The most common shape in Tehillim is the lament, and its structure is something you can lean on when feeling threatens to scatter your words. The pattern moves in steady stages: you address God, you say what is wrong, you ask for something, you remember that you trust Him, and you end with a vow to praise. You do not have to invent that arc. You can pour your own trouble into it.

Watch how David holds two things at once inside a single line: fear and trust, named in the same breath. “In the day that I am afraid, I will put my trust in Thee. In God—I will praise His word— In God do I trust, I will not be afraid; What can flesh do unto me?” (Psalms 56:4–6). The fear is not denied or hidden; it is spoken plainly, and then set beside trust rather than erased by it. When you write, you are allowed to do the same. You may say “I am afraid” and “I trust You” in adjacent sentences without resolving the tension. The psalm is large enough to hold both.

Let the Same Truth Land Twice

The engine of psalmic poetry is parallelism: the writer says a thing, then says it again in different words, so the truth lands twice and deepens. You hear it in the repeated phrase that carries Psalm 56 forward: “In God—I will praise His word— In the LORD—I will praise His word— In God do I trust, I will not be afraid; What can man do unto me?” (Psalms 56:11–12). The line doubles back on itself, “In God” and then “In the LORD,” and the repetition is not clumsy; it is the rhythm of someone steadying himself by saying the important thing more than once.

You can use this. When you have written a line that feels true, try saying it a second way. “You held me when I could not stand; You kept my feet from sliding.” The second clause is not filler. It lets you press a little harder on the same place, the way you might return to a sore spot to be sure of it. This is also a discipline of honesty: the second line forces you to examine whether the first was really true, or only loud.

Be as Honest as Trust Allows

People often assume a psalm must be reverent in the sense of restrained. It must not. The psalmists protest, they accuse, they cry out from the floor. What anchors all of it is that they keep speaking to God rather than turning away from Him. The honesty and the trust are not opposites; the trust is what makes the honesty safe.

The Orchot Tzaddikim names trust as the foundation that holds the whole structure up: “And what is the fence? It is complete trust — to always trust in God, may He be Blessed, as it is said : \”Cast your burden upon the Lord and He will sustain you\” (Ps. 55:23). And what is the fence of trust?” (Orchot Tzadikim 9:25–26). And it answers its own question plainly: “And what is the fence of trust? What is it that causes a man to trust in God? It is the quality of Faith.” (Orchot Tzadikim 9:26–26). This is why you can write your hardest sentence. You are not casting your burden into emptiness; you are casting it upon One who sustains. The faith underneath your words is what lets them be as raw as they need to be.

So write the line you are afraid to write. Name the thing that is actually wrong, not the tidy version. The psalm of David did not flinch from “what can flesh do unto me?” and then, a few breaths later, “For thou hast delivered my soul from death; Hast Thou not delivered my feet from stumbling? That I may walk before God in the light of the living?” (Psalms 56:11–14). The terror and the rescue belong in the same poem.

Use What Your Eyes and Body Already Know

You do not need elevated vocabulary to write a psalm. The psalmists reached for what was in front of them: hills, water, hands, feet, breath, the soul itself. “Hallelujah. Praise the LORD, O my soul. I will praise the LORD while I live; I will sing praises unto my God while I have my being. Put not your trust in princes, Nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” (Psalms 146:1–3). The praise is concrete: while I live, while I have my being. It is tied to the body and to time.

When you write, look for the image that is already true for you. Not a borrowed metaphor, but the thing you can see from where you sit. The tradition understands that what we shape outwardly is meant to carry an inner form. As the Tzava’at HaRivash teaches, “Because, \”I am sated by Your image when I am awake.\” The word, \”Your image,\” refers to the inner form (Tzurah).” (Tzava'at HaRivash 90:13). Your concrete image is the shell; the meaning you press into it is the inner form. A psalm about a sleepless night does not need the word “anguish.” It needs the ceiling you have been staring at, named honestly, and then handed upward.

Bring It Home to Praise

The lament does not stay in the depths. Almost always it turns, and the turn is the heart of the form. Sometimes the praise arrives because the trouble lifted; often it arrives before any rescue is visible, as a deliberate choice to bless God in the dark. Your psalm can end with a vow rather than a resolution: I will praise You. I will not be afraid. I will walk before You in the light of the living. You are not lying about how you feel. You are pointing your feet in a direction.

This is how a private psalm becomes a practice rather than a single outpouring. Write one when the words will not fit the prayer book. Date it. Come back to it in a month and see whether the trust you vowed has grown into trust you feel. The psalmists left us not finished serenity but a method: turn toward God, tell the truth, say it twice, ground it in what is real, and bend the whole thing toward praise. Your own words, shaped this way, are not too small. They are exactly the offering the tradition has always invited.

Published by Higgayon Press. For questions of halacha, consult a qualified rabbi.