[Be-Ahavah U-Be-Emunah – Shoftim
5772 – translated by R. Blumberg]
On a tour
of Jerusalem’s Old City, the teacher told his students: “We are standing right where
King David’s palace stood, and it was from here,” added the teacher, “that he
saw Batsheva bathing.”
That
teacher is crazy! Is this what he found to arouse the imagination of those students?
Instead of stirring their imaginations about King David’s positive traits, his patience,
his ability to remain silent in the face of insults, his thirst for G-d, his
military valor, his fortitude as a national leader, his holiness and his
purity, his self-sacrifice to build up the Kingdom of Israel…this is what he
chose to arouse their imaginations?! As though our imaginations are not
sufficiently provoked by all the evil winds blowing in from the West!
Yet that
teacher’s remark was no slip of the tongue. Rather, it reflected a complex worldview,
as that teacher made clear in his further remarks: “Let me emphasize that King David
was just a man – a man with weaknesses, a great man with great weaknesses, a
man composed of good and of evil, not an ideal man.”
Heaven
help us! That’s what he saw fit to say? And, in fact, one student responded, “I
can identify more with a figure like that than with a pure, holy person”.
“Indeed!” responded the teacher.
Woe to the
ears that hear such things! Unfortunately such talk is part of an entire methodology
of taking the greatest and most holy figures and bringing them down to eye level.
Sure life is hard, and the struggle against our passions is no picnic, and
sometimes we fail, and sometimes we are frustrated and despondent because we
don’t succeed in escaping our evil impulse.
But what
is the solution? To be more courageous. To increase our longing for G-d, to gaze
upon our great figures and to emulate them. Instead, they’re taking those
illustrious figures and making them small. They’re transforming them into the
everyman, with one foot in the light and one foot in the darkness, light and
darkness mixed together. And all so that we can identify with them!
Instead of
drawing the student higher and higher, arousing his spiritual ambitions, understanding
and awareness, instead of empowering him, they leave him below and lower,
together with him, those who were high up. And then it’s easy to identify with
them.
The
student can learn Torah one moment and then read unclean material on the
Internet.
Yet King
David, himself, did not identify with his own sin. Our Sages point out that he wept
over his sin for thirteen years. As it says, “I cause my couch to melt with my
weeping” (Tehilim 6:7).
This has
nothing to do with our Sages’ dictum that “whoever says David sinned is in error.”
Rabbi Yitzchak Abarbanel says that he did sin, but even Abarbanel holds that
David was a spiritual giant and he repented completely, escaped his sin and was
purged of it. True, according to Abarbanel, King David committed a grievous sin
once in his lifetime, but that does not make him a sinner. If someone lied once
in his lifetime, that does not make him a liar, and if someone lost in battle
one time that does not make him a loser. We don’t label people as a result of
one-time deeds.
David was
not a sinner, not even partially. He was a great man, righteous and holy.
Yet even
such a person can occasionally stumble. Even Moshe became angry. Even he erred.
Yet that
doesn’t make us say that he was errant or wrathful. We don’t judge a person
based on exceptions to their norm.
Before we
say anything new about King David that our Sages didn’t say, we have to learn
the elementary truths. There is nothing against advancing new interpretations
on the Tanach. There are hundreds and thousands of them. Yet they have to be
motivated by faith and reverence for G-d. Towards that end we have to study the
basic books such as Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s Mesilat Yesharim.
Learn his
section on saintliness [Chasidut] and you will see that David thirsted for G-d,
and not, G-d forbid, for his sin. “Like a hind crying for water, my soul cries
for You, O G-d. My soul thirsts for G-d, the living G-d” (Tehilim 42:2-3); “I
long, I yearn, for the courts of Hashem” (84:3); “My soul thirsts for You. My
body yearns for You” (63:2); “I will delight in Your commandments, which I
love” (119:47).
The
Ramchal instructs us: If you wish to achieve saintliness, learn the Psalms and
emulate them! Surely every young yeshiva student has learned Mesilat Yesharim.
Probably that same teacher learned it too. So, he should review it ten times, a
hundred times, until it sinks in deep.
The figure
of King David is not up for grabs. You cannot say about him whatever you want,
or fashion a new personality for him that samples a taste of all worlds, and
that accords legitimacy to dialectically strolling along a pathway of life that
combines purity and impurity. Even if one takes the approach of Rabbi Yitzchak
Abarbanel, one should learn about King David’s remarkable repentance spurred by
his fierce longing for the holy.
