The Golem and the Soul-Bird

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2008

A companion to Hineni, the previous post

You don’t hear many sermons about the end of David’s life at about 70 years. But I’ve always found 1 Kings 1-2 especially tragic: a man whom we remember for the psalms, vibrant with emotion, unable to get warm, which at least suggests that he’s emotionally and spiritually freeze dried.

Two Ways to Grow Old

Abraham, who married and fathered six children in his later years, “breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people” Gen 25:8 (NRSV). Moses was “120 years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated” (Deut 34:7 NRSV).

David, however, is unable to get warm. This is not ED, in modern advertising lingo, but spiritual wasteland, an I-It terrain relieved only momentarily by a flash of You. His advisers find a beautiful young woman Abishag to “lie in his bosom” (TANAK), recalling with more than a bit of irony the prophet Nathan’s parable of the poor man’s little lamb who nestled in his bosom (2 Sam 12.4).

My Father’s error or his joy

Abishag means something like, “My father’s error” from a root related to error (BDB p. 4, or 922 “go astray” for Hebrew buffs). At any rate, it’s not complimentary. Compare Abigail, an exemplary woman from a more positive time (1 Sam 25), whose name means something like, “My father’s joy.” How much grief David could have spared himself by turning to Abigail, rather than Bathsheba!

David might have answered this question that Martin Buber asks, “Take the much discussed eroticism of our age and subtract everything that is really egocentric-in other words, every relationship in which one is not all present to the other, but each uses the other only for self-enjoyment-what would remain?” (p. 95). Buber insists we build authentic marriages only in I-You mode of existence.

Emotions at the end

David’s sons aren’t grieving as their father lies near death. Adonijah is busy feasting himself as next king, while Bathsheba connives for David to designate Solomon his successor. In addition to the obligatory Deuteronomic admonition to keep the Lord’s statutes, commandments, and ordinances, David urges Solomon to take vengeance on two men against whom David had long held grievances.

David’s end shows the consequences of mishandling emotions. David failed to confront dysfunction among his sons, not least because they were just taking after the old man. But by stuffing emotions, ignoring conflict, playing favorites or at the other extreme giving his impulses free rein, David insured his premature emotional demise.

Buber calls feelings, cut off from the You of self and God “a fluttering soul-bird”; the severed It, the daily grind apart from God, he calls “a golem, an animated clod without a soul” (p. 93).

Healing Emotions through Worship

In the psalms worshippers do not indulge in a tabloid-style exhibitionism. Rather, they share the dynamics of their feelings without blow-by-blow detail. As such, they exemplify the proper role of feelings in worship.

Had he done what the psalms do, express emotions-all emotions-in a healing, disciplined way before the Lord, David could have ended his life able to express as vital and appealing a range of feelings as did the shepherd boy, the young friend of Jonathan, or the ecstatic worshipper who brought the Ark into Jerusalem.

I find myself grieving what David lost when he became heir apparent, then king of Israel. In a sense he’s one answer to Jesus’ question, “What does it profit you if you gain the world but lose your soul?”