David Who Became a Witness to the World by Sinning

There is a verse in the Psalms that looks, at first reading, like pure despair: The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved (Jeremiah 8:20). But the midrash on the opening line of Psalm 70 -- To the conductor, I have hoped, O Lord -- reads it as a goad, not a burial. The only thing Israel holds in their hands, the rabbis taught, is hope. And hope, properly understood, is not a feeling. It is a posture earned through waiting. God says in the midrash, in the most extraordinary way: David hoped in me and I answered him. Therefore, I have hoped, O Lord. God speaks the psalm in David's voice. Or rather, God and David have arrived at the same posture, both reaching toward each other with the same gesture -- the gesture of a being who waits because waiting is all they have and all they need.

What is the source of that confidence? The rabbis pointed to the verse in Lamentations (3:25): The Lord is good to those who wait for Him. Not to those who perform, not to those who have already succeeded, but to those who wait. And in Psalms (31:25): Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who hope in the Lord. Hope is something you do in your body. The heart must be active in it. Waiting is not passive collapse -- it is leaning forward.

Now set this against the companion teaching about David's confession after his sin with Bathsheba. David says to God, I have sinned against you alone, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment (Psalms 51:6). The midrash opens a parable: a broken man goes to the doctor. The doctor looks at the wound and says, I am so sorry for you, your wound is terrible. The patient answers: You are sorry for yourself, not for me. I did not break for my own sake -- I broke for your reward. The doctor's livelihood depends on wounds that can be healed. The broken man is not asking for sympathy. He is pointing out that his recovery serves the healer's purpose.

David says the same thing to God. I have sinned against you alone -- alone, not before the court of public opinion, not in front of the angels, but in the space between David and God where the account must be settled. And then: if you accept me back, all the sinners of the world will look at me and learn that return is possible. You will have gained a witness. God says to him in Isaiah (55:4): I made him a witness to the peoples. David's repentance is not primarily for David. It is for the record. Every sinner who will ever live needs to know that the door opens from the outside. David's willingness to confess publicly -- in a psalm that will be sung for all time -- is the demonstration.

This is why the rabbis placed the two teachings in proximity, even though they come from different texts. In the first, God says: I have hoped. In the second, David says: I have sinned. These are not opposites. They are the two ends of the same cord. David sinned, confessed, waited, and was heard. God waited for the confession, received it, and turned David into a monument to the possibility of return. The hope that runs through Psalm 70 is not naive optimism about the future. It is the knowledge, grounded in the story of David, that a person can fall to the furthest point and still be pulled back -- and that the pulling back is itself the proof of something larger.

The Midrash Rabbah tradition returns to David again and again precisely because his story contains the full arc in miniature. He was a shepherd chosen by God, a king anointed in secret, a warrior who unified Israel, a poet who spoke directly into the divine ear. He was also an adulterer and, in the view of the rabbis, indirectly responsible for a death. He did not hide from any of this. He wrote it into the liturgy. And in the very act of writing it -- I have sinned against you alone -- he made his brokenness into a gift to every human being who would ever read the words and think: if David returned, so can I. The joy hidden inside the deepest remorse is exactly that: the knowledge that the remorse itself is the beginning of the return.