Sami Bsoul | Psalm 1 and the Psychology of Wickedness
Sami Bsoul, PhD
This essay sits at the intersection of my two fields: psychology and Biblical Hebrew. (You can listen to Psalm 1 in Hebrew here 
Music)
There is something unsettling about Psalm 1.
It does not begin with the great sins.
It does not begin with the murder, the theft, the cruelty, the corruption…
It begins much earlier.
Before the act.
Before the damage.
Before the person has become recognizable as the person they will eventually become.
It begins with counsel.
Then a way.
Then a seat.
That movement is easy to read as poetry.
Psychologically, it is much more disturbing.
Because a person rarely becomes what they are in one dramatic morning.
They become it gradually.
A thought is
entertained.
Then repeated.
Then explained.
Then permitted.
Then acted upon.
Then repeated again.
And eventually something that once required an explanation no longer requires one.
That is where I think Psalm 1 becomes more than an ancient description of the righteous and the wicked.
It becomes a question about how a human being is formed.
Not what a person claims to believe.
What they repeatedly allow into themselves.
THE COUNSEL
Psalm 1 begins with the person who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.
Notice what comes first.
Counsel.
Not action.
Someone has to think something before they do something.
Someone has to make an act imaginable before it becomes possible.
A person who eventually takes what does not belong to them may not have woken up one morning and suddenly become capable of it.
The thought may have been there for months.
Sometimes years.
It may have begun as resentment.
They have more than enough.
I deserve something too.
They treated me unfairly.
Why should I be the one who loses?
At first, the thought may have been uncomfortable.
Then it becomes familiar.
Then the person finds reasons for it.
Then the reasons begin to sound convincing.
The act has not happened yet.
But something has already happened.
The mind has begun making room for it.
This is one of the least comfortable truths about human behaviour:
The behaviour we eventually see is often the end of a process that nobody else could see beginning.
And this is why I am suspicious of the sentence:
“I don't know what happened to that person.”
Sometimes we do know.
We simply weren't watching closely enough.
Not because the person was secretly plotting every morning.
Human beings are rarely that simple.
The process can be almost invisible even to the person going through it.
A thought becomes an explanation.
The explanation becomes a permission.
The permission becomes a possibility.
And once something becomes psychologically possible, the distance between imagining it and doing it can become much smaller.
This is where self-deception enters.
Not as some elaborate lie a person tells themselves.
Something quieter.
A person does something they know is wrong.
Then the mind begins searching for a version of the story in which the person can still think of themselves as good.
I had no choice.
Anyone would have done the same.
They deserved it.
It wasn't really hurting anyone.
I was protecting myself.
I was only doing what was necessary.
The facts have not changed.
The meaning has.
And sometimes that is enough.
A person does not always need to convince themselves that they did nothing wrong. They only need to make what they did understandable enough to live with.
That distinction matters.
Because once you understand it, you stop imagining that wrongdoing always begins with a person deciding:
I am going to become a bad person.
It usually does not feel like that.
People have to continue living with themselves.
So the mind becomes remarkably inventive.
THE WAY
Then Psalm 1 moves.
The person does not merely hear counsel.
They walk in it.
This is different.
A thought that remains a thought is one thing.
A thought that becomes a pattern is something else.
This is where repetition starts doing its quiet work.
The first lie may require courage.
The second requires less.
The first betrayal may keep someone awake.
Later, they may sleep perfectly well.
The first time a person crosses a line, they may spend hours explaining it to themselves.
Eventually, the explanation can become automatic.
That does not necessarily mean the conscience disappeared.
Sometimes it means the conscience learned how to negotiate.
And this is where I think we misunderstand character.
We often imagine character as something a person possesses.
As though somewhere inside every human being there is a fixed moral substance called character, and one day we discover whether it is good or bad.
I don't think human beings are that static.
Character is also what repetition does to us.
What we repeatedly practice becomes easier.
What we repeatedly permit becomes less shocking.
What we repeatedly excuse becomes harder to recognize as an exception.
You can train yourself in honesty.
You can also train yourself in dishonesty.
You can train yourself to keep promises.
You can train yourself to break them whenever keeping them becomes inconvenient.
You can train yourself to notice another person's pain.
You can train yourself not to notice.
And none of this requires a dramatic decision.
That is what makes it frightening.
We like dramatic explanations because they make morality easier.
There was a moment.
There was a decision.
There was a villain.
There was a fall.
But human beings often change through accumulation.
A little less honesty.
A little more entitlement.
One more excuse.
One more secret.
One more time deciding that the rules apply differently here.
One more time telling yourself that this situation is special.
Until one day the person is doing something that an earlier version of themselves would have found unthinkable.
And they still feel like themselves.
That may be one of the most dangerous things about human psychology.
You can change profoundly without experiencing yourself as having changed at all.
THE SEAT
Then the Psalm becomes even more uncomfortable.
The person does not only walk.
They sit.
There is something psychologically important about sitting.
Walking suggests movement.
Passing through.
Being influenced.
Sitting suggests something more settled.
You are no longer merely hearing an idea.
You are no longer merely moving in its direction.
You have become comfortable there.
And perhaps this is why the final stage is more frightening than the first.
A person who is still struggling with their own behavior may be capable of change.
A person who has built an identity around defending it has a much harder problem.
Because now changing the behavior may require changing the story.
And changing the story may require admitting something about the past.
I knew.
I knew and continued.
I knew and found reasons.
I knew and became comfortable.
That is a much harder thing for the mind to tolerate.
So sometimes the person does not change.
They become better at explaining.
And eventually the explanation becomes part of their identity.
This is how a human being can arrive at a strange psychological place:
They are no longer pretending that they did something.
They are simply no longer willing to see what it means.
AND THEN THE PSALM TURNS ON US
It would be very easy to read Psalm 1 and imagine that the wicked are other people.
The dishonest person.
The cruel person.
The corrupt person.
The person who takes what is not theirs.
The person who harms others.
The person who laughs at morality.
That reading gives us an uncomfortable amount of safety.
I know who the wicked are.
I am not one of them.
But Psalm 1 begins with a question more dangerous than that.
What counsel are you listening to?
Not who is your enemy.
Not who is the worst person you know.
What ideas have you allowed to become reasonable?
What explanations have you started using that an earlier version of yourself would have rejected?
What behaviour have you stopped questioning?
What do you call necessary because calling it wrong would require you to change something?
What have you repeatedly defended until defending it became easier than examining it?
And perhaps the most difficult question:
What are you becoming accustomed to?
Because that is where the Psalm stops being about wicked people.
It becomes about formation.
And formation is happening whether we pay attention to it or not.
WHEN SOMEONE ELSE'S COUNSEL BECOMES YOUR ENVIRONMENT
There is another question the Psalm does not answer directly, but its concern with counsel and association makes difficult to avoid:
What happens when someone you love becomes part of that counsel?
Not everyone who loves a person who has done something terrible is responsible for what that person did.
A partner is not automatically responsible for a partner's wrongdoing.
A child is not responsible for a parent's actions.
A friend does not inherit another person's wrongdoing simply by knowing about it.
That distinction matters.
But knowing changes something.
Once you know, you are no longer relating only to the person you thought you knew.
You are also relating to something you now know about them.
And that creates a choice.
You can reject what happened.
You can confront it.
You can create distance.
You can refuse to participate in anything that protects it.
You can decide that whatever you feel for the person, there is a line you will not cross with them.
Or you can begin adapting.
You stop asking.
You stop wanting to know.
You learn which subjects are dangerous.
You learn what not to mention around other people.
You accept explanations you once would have questioned.
You tell yourself:
It has nothing to do with me.
And perhaps, in one very important sense, it doesn't.
But psychologically, something has still happened.
You have begun learning how to live beside something you know is wrong.
That is not the same as committing the wrong.
But it is not nothing.
Because human beings adapt to what surrounds them.
What was once shocking can become familiar.
What was once intolerable can become something you simply know how to manage.
And that is where the danger lies.
Not that another person's wrongdoing magically becomes yours.
It doesn't.
The danger is that your relationship to what you know can slowly change.
You may begin by saying:
I cannot believe this.
Later:
I don't want to talk about it.
Later:
It was a long time ago.
Later:
You don't know the whole story.
And eventually:
This is just who they are.
That final sentence deserves attention.
Because sometimes acceptance is wisdom.
Sometimes it is exhaustion.
Sometimes it is loyalty.
Sometimes it is fear.
And sometimes it is the moment a person has become so accustomed to what they once found unacceptable that they no longer experience the need to resist it.
That is not guilt by association.
It is something more subtle.
It is moral acclimatization.
The person did not commit the act.
They did not suddenly become the person who did.
But they may have entered a new circle of counsel.
They hear the explanations.
They learn the reasons.
They discover which details are never discussed.
They begin to understand how the person thinks.
And without deciding to, they may become familiar with a world in which something they once found unthinkable now makes sense.
The first time you hear the explanation, it may sound absurd.
The tenth time, you understand it.
The hundredth time, you may find yourself defending it.
Not because you became the person who did the thing.
Because you became familiar with the world in which the thing makes sense.
What surrounds you does not automatically make you guilty. But it can change what feels thinkable, tolerable, and normal.
That is a risk worth taking seriously.
THE TREE
Then suddenly the Psalm gives us another image.
A tree planted beside water.
Its roots are somewhere.
It is receiving something.
It produces fruit in its season.
Its leaves do not simply disappear because the weather changes.
The image is beautiful.
But psychologically, I think there is another question inside it.
What are you rooted in?
Because human beings need roots.
We need beliefs.
Relationships.
Practices.
Values.
Stories about who we are.
Something has to organize our lives.
The question is not whether you are being shaped.
You are.
The question is by what.
A person who continually surrounds themselves with resentment should not be surprised when resentment begins to feel like realism.
A person who repeatedly feeds entitlement should not be surprised when consideration begins to feel like weakness.
A person who repeatedly practices honesty may eventually find dishonesty harder to tolerate.
The roots are not visible.
But eventually something grows from them.
That is the point of the tree.
The visible life is connected to invisible nourishment.
And perhaps the same is true of the person.
What people eventually see in us may have been growing underground for years.
THE CHAFF
Then the Psalm gives us the opposite image.
Chaff.
Something without roots.
Something the wind can move.
It is tempting to read this simply as a picture of a bad person.
I don't think we need to.
Psychologically, chaff can also suggest a person who has become too easily moved by whatever is strongest around them.
Whatever voice is loudest today becomes the voice they follow.
Whatever desire is strongest becomes the decision.
Whatever fear is strongest becomes the boundary.
Whatever group they are standing among becomes the truth.
They may not be wicked.
They may simply be unrooted.
And that matters.
Because sometimes what looks like moral failure is also a failure of inner formation.
Not because the person has no values at all.
Because those values have never become strong enough to guide them when following them becomes costly.
A person can spend years being moved by whatever is loudest and eventually lose the ability to tell what they actually believe when the noise stops.
They can be intelligent.
Successful.
Kind.
Loved.
And still have very little idea what is holding them together.
That does not make them harmless.
It makes them vulnerable to movement.
And that is precisely why the tree and the chaff belong beside each other.
One has roots.
The other is carried.
THE MOST UNCOMFORTABLE PART
There is something else in Psalm 1 that I do not want to soften.
It separates two ways.
Not two opinions.
Not two personalities.
Two directions.
And that matters because we live in a culture that likes to believe that every choice can be explained indefinitely.
Everything has a reason.
Everything has a wound.
Everything has a history.
Everything has a context.
Much of that is true.
Understanding why someone became who they became can make us more compassionate.
But understanding is not the same as absolution.
A childhood wound can help explain cruelty.
It does not make cruelty harmless.
Fear can help explain dishonesty.
It does not make dishonesty truthful.
Resentment can help explain betrayal.
It does not make betrayal disappear.
Psychology becomes dangerous when explanation quietly replaces responsibility.
We can understand the road someone walked without pretending they never chose a direction.
That is where ancient wisdom and psychology can meet without either one becoming decoration for the other.
BEFORE THE SEAT
Perhaps this is what interests me most about the Psalm.
It does not begin by asking:
What kind of person are you?
That question is too easy.
It begins much earlier.
What are you listening to?
What are you walking toward?
Where are you becoming comfortable sitting?
Because by the time everyone else can see the result, the formation may already be complete.
The person who eventually becomes cruel may have spent years rehearsing the belief that other people matter less.
The person who eventually becomes dishonest may have spent years learning that truth is negotiable when truth becomes inconvenient.
The person who eventually betrays someone may have spent years practicing the belief that their own pain excuses whatever they do with it.
The final behaviour is visible.
The formation was not.
And perhaps that is why the Psalm does not merely tell us what the wicked do.
It tells us where they sit.
Because where you repeatedly sit eventually affects what feels normal.
SO WHAT DO WE DO WITH THAT?
I don't think the answer is to become terrified of every thought.
Human beings have ugly thoughts.
Angry thoughts.
Jealous thoughts.
Selfish thoughts.
Thoughts we would never act upon.
Having a thought is not the same as becoming it.
The question is what happens next.
Do you examine it?
Do you challenge it?
Do you feed it?
Do you build an explanation around it?
Do you invite other people to confirm it?
Do you eventually act according to it?
That is the territory where freedom still exists.
Before the way becomes a habit.
Before the habit becomes an identity.
Before the identity becomes a seat.
And perhaps this is why the Psalm's first word is not fear.
It is ashrei.
Fortunate.
Blessed.
Not because the righteous person is flawless.
Not because they have never been tempted.
Not because they have never had dark thoughts.
But because they have not surrendered the direction of their inner life to every voice that offers them an easier explanation.
That is a different kind of strength.
Not the strength of someone who never struggles.
The strength of someone who pays attention to what is shaping them.
There is a final question I cannot get away from.
Not:
Are you a good person?
Most of us can produce evidence for the answer we want.
The harder question is:
What are you becoming comfortable with?
What once bothered you that no longer does?
What once required an explanation that now requires none?
What voice did you once reject that you now call wisdom?
What behavior did you once condemn that you now call understandable?
And what have you been sitting with long enough that standing up would require you to admit how long you have been there?
Psalm 1 begins before the act.
Before the identity.
Before the seat.
That may be its psychological warning.
Pay attention to what you repeatedly allow to speak to you.
Because eventually, you may stop hearing it as counsel.
You may start walking in it.
And one day, without noticing exactly when it happened, you may find yourself sitting there.
© Sami Bsoul, 2020
You can listen to Psalm 1 in Hebrew here Music
Amazon.com: WHO AM I?: Psychology and Jewish Wisdom of the Self eBook : Bsoul, Sami: Kindle Store