Ego, Again
My enemies have taunted me all day long; those who deride me have used my name as a curse. Psalm 102:8 NASB
Deride – The psalmist finally gets down to the real reason for his complaint. It took a while. All those verses about how he feels—abandoned, anxious, abused, avoided, alone—come down to this: “My enemies taunt me and deride me.” Ah, so now we see that the real issue is ego. The Hebrew verb (הָלַל hālal) is about making someone look like a fool or a madman. “Listen, God, if You’re really my protector, then get rid of these people who treat me so badly.” “My pride has been injured. My reputation sullied. It’s not fair. You, God, are supposed to take care of me. They don’t respect me at all. How can You stand by and let them do this to me?” Does it come down to this? [You might compare this with the investigation of Psalm 51 here.]
It may be that the psalmist has a legitimate complaint. Perhaps he can engage some clever lawyer to file a defamation lawsuit. He certainly tells us—and God—that he is being mistreated. But the lesson here is his honesty, not his experience. Notice Heschel’s comments about prayer:
“To be able to pray, one must alter the course of consciousness, one must go through moments of disengagement, one must enter another course of thinking, one must face in a different direction. The course one must take in order to arrive at prayer is on the way to God. For the focus of prayer is not the self. . . Feeling becomes prayer in the moment in which one forgets oneself and becomes aware of God.”[1]
“In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender. God is the center toward which all forces tend. He is the source, and we are the flowing of His force, the ebb and flow of His tides.”[2]
Perhaps we love the psalms for their human honesty. David doesn’t hide behind religious platitudes. He isn’t the all-righteous man. He’s us. These are our feelings, our struggles, our egocentric journeys of the soul. We feel abused, misunderstood, taken advantage of. We want justice!—for us, of course. To hell with all those “enemies” who taunt us with their personal attacks. When David writes these words of self-justification, we concur. We don’t think of Heschel’s insight about a change in direction because we are caught up in what’s fair—for us. That’s why the psalms are so disrespectful of religiosity, and so absolutely essential for humanity. My life isn’t the life a saint, at least not in the way the word is used today. I suspect your life doesn’t qualify for sainthood either. And neither does David’s. But we all qualify for human, created in the image of the God who built us as emotionally charged beings. We all qualify as the nexus of yetzer ha’ra—yetzer ha’tov. And we all must choose. Thank God for psalms like this one. The solitary bird is not alone.
Topical Index: pride, fool, hālal, prayer, ego, Psalm 102:8
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 221.
[2] Ibid.
