David the Sharecropper Who Knew How to Ask God

There is a teaching in the midrash-aggadah tradition about how to ask for something. It uses a series of comparisons. A woman who borrows from her neighbor and a woman who does not know how. A sharecropper who knows how to approach his landlord and one who does not. The clever borrower arrives well-dressed, cheerful, with a walking stick and a ring, asking first about the landlord's crops, his bulls, his goats. She or he creates warmth before making any request. The landlord, moved by the relationship that has been honored, offers twice what is asked. The borrower who arrives dirty and downcast, complaining that the land barely returned what he put in, receives nothing. The landlord tells him to return what he owes.

The midrash then says: David was the clever sharecropper. And it traces his method through the opening of Psalm 19.

David did not begin by asking. He began with praise. "The heavens relate the glory of God." The heavens heard this and asked: do you need something? "And the sky tells the work of His hands." The sky heard this and asked: do you need something? He continued: "Day to day gives utterance." Only then did the Holy One ask directly: what do you want?

And David asked for the hardest thing: "Who can discern errors? Cleanse me of hidden faults." He was asking for forgiveness not just for the sins he knew about but for the ones he did not know about, the ones he had committed in unawareness, the ones buried below the level of his own perception. God said: you are excused. Then David pressed further. Acquit me of the hidden transgressions, the deliberate ones I performed before You. Forgiven. Then: keep me from intentional sins. Let them not rule over me. Then I will be blameless, cleansed of great transgression.

The teaching continues with David's final argument, which is among the most daring formulations in Psalms. He said to God: You are a great God, and my sins are numerous. It is fitting for a great God to forgive numerous sins. The verse he cites is (Psalms 25:11): "For the sake of Your name, Lord, pardon my iniquity, for it is great." A lesser man would have minimized his sin to argue for forgiveness. David did the opposite. He said the sin is large. The forgiveness must therefore be correspondingly large. And since God's greatness has no limit, the forgiveness He can extend has no limit.

This is what the midrash means by a clever borrower. It is not manipulation. It is theological honesty in the form of prayer. David knew that approaching God without adequate preparation, without the relationship having been tended, without acknowledgment of what God had already done, produced nothing. Not because God withholds capriciously but because the unprepared soul cannot receive. The man who arrives downcast and complaining has already closed himself off from the gift he came to ask for.

The second teaching woven into David's story is about the hidden structure within a human being. The hidden wisdom of David concerns what King David understood about the relationship between the soul and the body, between the visible and the invisible. All the great arrangements that the Holy One built into creation, all the gears of the divine mechanism turning against one another so that a small motion in one place causes larger movements elsewhere, this entire structure is covered with physical skin and flesh. Only the region of the physical is apparent. But inside, hidden within great established places, the soul in all its parts and roots drives everything. David's citation of (Psalms 139:14) is the key: "I praise you for the awesome wonders you have imbued in me, your actions are wondrous and my soul knows this well." The body cannot grasp many things the soul knows. The awareness of the soul is finer than the awareness of the flesh.

Put these two teachings together. David approached God as a clever sharecropper because he understood, from his knowledge of the soul's workings, that what happens in prayer is not a transaction between a human voice and a distant God. It is a movement of the inner structure, the soul drawing toward its source. When David praised the heavens, he was not flattering God. He was aligning himself with the order of creation, recognizing the movement of holiness through the world before making a personal request. That alignment opened something. The request, when it came, arrived in the right place.

The Midrash Rabbah, with its 3,279 texts, returns to David's psalms more than to almost any other source. The reason is not sentiment. It is that David is the model of a soul that knows how to move. He knows when to sing and when to weep. He knows that the path to forgiveness begins with praise, that the claim to forgiveness is strongest when made in terms of God's greatness rather than the petitioner's smallness. He knows that the soul sees what the body cannot. And he knows that all of this, the praise and the petition and the inner knowing, fits together into a single act: a man standing before God, dressed for the occasion, telling the truth.