but David gets a full treatment in the scripture. He evolves from this youthful gay love affair into a mighty king and warrior who was also a shameless, even malicious womanizer. He played the harp and he played the field. He had multiple wives and concubines and, in one notorious instance, sent the husband of one of his lovers into a hopeless battle so that the poor man could be conveniently killed. He was plagued by critics and enemies, and some of his own children broke his heart in rebellion and insurgence. He was a person, albeit a prominent one. But he was a person like you and me—flawed, conflicted, driven by both demons and passions.
Why does the tradition embrace this kind of man and why does Christianity anoint him as the ancestor of Jesus? Because he was real—just as life is so glaringly real. The same intuitive and passionate man who wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” is also the despicable old cad who has to have a young maiden brought to lie with him because he couldn’t keep himself warm.
If this seems inexplicable, it is because life itself is inexplicable. It is never “all good” or “all bad.” It is cancer to career to isolation to laughter. It is not the “all hell” or “all paradise” being poorly vended by the faiths today. It is nuanced, painful, lyrical, and it moves from defeat to compromise to a victory and then to a mistake and then a stroke of insight that amounts to bittersweet wisdom. I’ve seen such moments more often in a hospital room, in the cemetery, or under a wedding canopy than in a synagogue. I’ve heard people suddenly, gutturally, truly praying from their hearts more freely than when they were holding a prayer book and following a service outline.
The scripture was not written for angels; it was written for people. You can believe in it if you read between the lines and the edicts and the colorful miracles. You can believe in God, but you should not wait for God. Turn to God not to suddenly intervene and solve your problems—that’s the pretext of cults or religious coercion, and it puts dangerous people in charge of your spirit. Turn to God (however you define God) for the strength and resolve to face your challenges—it’s more of a sure thing. God is discovery; God is the result of your creativity and resolve. God is not some sort of divine bellhop.
Don’t read the scripture as a series of perfect letters. The Bible is like fine leather; the flaws in it reveal its true texture and quality. The writers and the characters struggled with a tantalizing combination of truths and fears and myths and uncertainties, and they were trying to make sense of both the harshness of life and the certitude of death. In other words, they were like you and me—in our balancing act, we do best as spiritual pragmatists. We balance faith with the facts. When we are wrestling with something, we go to the library or to the web and find the right text—grateful these humanly created sources are accessible.
WHEN I WAS STILL a child, my father told me a story about his experiences as a soldier during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948–49. My father was not even twenty years old, an infantry sergeant, who found himself one night around a campfire with three other sentries.
Immediately upon declaring its independence, the new state of Israel had been invaded by several neighboring Arab countries. A significant number of its fighters were emaciated Holocaust survivors who had somehow managed to gain access to the land. My father was one of the several thousand whose families had been born in what was the British mandate of Palestine.
The situation for Israel was decidedly grim. Its army was limited in numbers and munitions, divided among many languages, and generally inexperienced with everything but the notion of Jews succumbing to great and powerful forces.
Among the four soldiers, my father was more or less a secularist who wrote poetry in his native Hebrew about romance and freedom and the dreams of a people hoping to have a safe haven at last. He identified with Jewish history more than its prayer books; that history was now an existential crisis for him and his army pals.
The other three, also young, homesick, and fearful, included one Orthodox Jew, one survivor of several Nazi death camps, and one Christian American—a veteran of World War II who had now volunteered for this tour because of what he had seen Europe do to its Jews. The night was long and a cold wind blew in from the Samarian Mountains. The four men were charged to stay awake and watch for enemy infiltrators. They were exceedingly vulnerable and made shoddy jokes along with small chatter as they rubbed their gloved hands over the campfire. They methodically checked their weapons, worried about an ambush at any moment.
They began talking about God.
What was God’s role in this terrible situation, my father asked out loud. Would God protect them and the precious little land they were attempting to defend? Was there even a God?
“What God?” The Holocaust survivor rang out with bitterness. “After what I saw in the camps, after I saw my parents murdered, people gassed, children thrown into sacks and beaten to death for sport, you think there is a God?”
There was an interlude of silence as the young men felt the cold begin to carve its way into their bone marrow. They added more wood to the struggling fire as the pious one began to softly sing psalms to himself. The three others looked at him as he hummed and formed ancient words that turned into little bursts of fog flying out of his mouth into the frigid midnight.
“What do you think?” My father asked the psalmist. “This one says there is no God while you shiver here praying to him.”
“Of course there is a God,” came the reply. “And in fact, God is so involved in this that really none of us will have anything to say about the outcome of this war, whether we live or die. It is up to God to decide if we are to have a Holy Land again. It’s already been preordained in heaven so there’s really nothing for us to worry about. We are just part of a higher purpose.”
The American cleared his throat. “I tend to agree with that, I must say. And it’s not like I go to church or anything. Not on any regular basis. I mean, sure, on Christmas Eve and such, but not all the time. But I do feel that God has something to do with this. After what happened in France and Italy and then in Germany, when I got there. Not just to the Jews, but also to my buddies and so many people I saw get killed or maimed. All the suffering. Maybe I’m here because after all of that I want to see some justice done. And that makes me feel that this Jewish story here, this reclaiming the land, is, well, biblical. I just want to see some evidence that God cares or something along those lines.”
“Maybe you just like war,” my father teased him. “Or you don’t have any friends back in Utah where you came from.” All of them laughed out loud, a cascade of nervous release and a fleeting sense of comfort in the shared predicament of mortality.
“It’s Idaho,” came the smiling rejoinder from the American. “And so what do you think about God?”
My father really did not know. He thought about it for a moment. “For some reason, when we sit here and talk about God in this situation we’re in, I’m thinking about and really missing my mother’s homemade honey pastry. I can practically smell the kitchen and the little cakes coming out of the oven, dripping with sweetness, and my mother smiling at us and telling us to wash our hands before having the treat. We did, of course, but then we always had to wash them again afterward because they were sticky with the honey. We licked our fingers before she made us wash our hands again.”
The four sat around, wistful and worried and hoping to get back home to their kitchens, their bedrooms, their little sanctuaries where no one could do them any harm. After a while, my father suggested they vote on the question: Is there a God or not?
Whenever my father told me this story, he would pause and chuckle at this point. He liked it, I think, that he was the one who put the question
