We see this in David’s ecstatic dancing before the Ark of the Lord, as it is brought to Jerusalem, with whirling and joy unbridled enough that his wife upbraids him later for not acting like a king. 3 The Books of Samuel tell us that David was a man who was loved by many, but David himself only seems to express love for God, for the Beloved without horizon. Before he knows for sure that David is a threat to his throne, King Saul brings David into his house to calm his vexations by playing soothing music. When the night wind blew through, he would awake and compose psalms. The rabbinic tradition imagines David going to sleep each evening with his harp by the open window. How can we realize our obligation to serve and love others? Emmanuel Levinas says that in our choosing to come into awareness of this responsibility, we become chosen. But David is aware of this responsibility, chosen for this responsibility, and his struggle with how to live into this responsibility is a struggle that is familiar and intimate to each of us. In truth, his failures to do so are profound and chilling. It is not that David always succeeds as a shepherd in the conventional sense that is, in literally protecting his family and his people. The shepherd bears this heavy responsibility to assume responsibility for others, but it is borne of an awesome knowing that each of us are caretakers for the other. As a precocious wunderkind, David tells Saul that he is ready to fight the giant Goliath precisely because he has killed bears and lions as part of protecting his sheep. But we can’t ignore it – almost all of the patriarchs and matriarchs in the Hebrew Bible were shepherds, a job that most fundamentally requires practice in the art of caretaking. It is easy to either romanticize the shepherd’s calling (the humble/simple servant of God), or ignore it altogether, overly-metaphorized as it has been (the shepherd as religious leader and the people as the flock). ‘He is tending the sheep.’ 2 David is sent for, recognized, and secretly anointed. “So he asked Jesse, ‘Are these all the sons you have?’ ‘There is still the youngest,’ Jesse answered. When the prophet Samuel, with the intention of identifying the future king, asks Jesse the Bethlehemite to bring forward his sons, the prophet sees a row of hearty young men, but he knows the king is not among them. In fact, the first thing we learn about David is that he is a shepherd. And in a way, it is those two grappling archetypes inside him that makes his story so uneven and so compelling. In this spirit, it is worth remembering that before he was king, before the fame and the infamy, David was a shepherd and a poet. Robert Pinsky writes that “even though is both horrible and beautiful, he is so in a way that reminds you of human beings.” 1 Indeed, there is something about David that brings us closer to our own imperfect selves – how vast our longing to love, how devastating our failures to do so. He was a betrayer, an adulterer, and a murderer he was a grieving father and a confused monarch. And he was also a man who experienced immense grief and suffering in his short time on earth. He was a warrior without peer, a prodigious lover, the unifying king of ancient Israel, the seed of messianic consciousness (it is said the Messiah will come from David’s line). King David did everything large-screen format. Since Leonard Cohen died, I’ve been thinking a lot about King David, perhaps the ur-ancestor in Cohen’s lineage as a Jewish poet who also sought the “secret chord” that would bring God joy. King David, Leonard Cohen and the Search for Meaning Leonard Cohen at the Arena in Geneva, 27 October 2008 (Wikipedia)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |