If a Tree Falls
Hear my prayer, Lord! And let my cry for help come to You. Psalm 102:1 NASB
Hear – If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear, does it make a sound? An interesting existential question. What is the relationship between a physical event and the perception of the event? If God doesn’t hear, does prayer make any sense? According to the prophets, the stupidity of idolatry rests on the answer to this question. Gods of wood and stone do not hear; therefore, praying to them is totally nonsensical. But the God of Israel hears. That’s why prayer is even possible. There is no lead ceiling in Hebrew thought, even if God doesn’t answer.
If this is true, then why does the petitioner in this psalm need to beg for God to hear him? God hears! That is an ontological fact of the creation. If this is so, then what is the point of pleading? Perhaps we can answer this question if we start with the proper syntax. In Hebrew, this verse does not read, “Hear my prayer, Lord!” It is:
YHVH shimah tefilati veshavati elecha tavo.
As you can see, the divine name of God comes first. Does that matter? Isn’t the English translation equivalent? Well, I’m not so sure. In Hebrew, emphasis depends on word order, not on punctuation (since there isn’t any). Our English translation adds the exclamation point at the end of this phrase, but in Hebrew the exclamation is created by placing the most important word first, and that word is not “hear.” It is God’s name, YHVH. Nothing about hearing matters unless it is first addressed to the only God who hears. In other words, unless God hears, prayer is not only useless; it’s pointless. Heschel points out how important it is to recognize this:
“To the philosopher God is an object, to men at prayer He is the subject. Their aim is not to possess Him as a concept of knowledge, to be informed about Him, as if He were a fact among facts. What they crave for is to be wholly possessed by Him, to be an object of His knowledge and to sense it. The task is not to know the unknown but to be penetrated with it; not to know but to be known to Him, to expose ourselves to Him rather than Him to us; not to judge and to assert but to listen and to be judged by Him.”[1]
But that doesn’t mean prayer is like talking. Consider this:
“Prayer is not a soliloquy. But is it a dialogue with God? Does man address Him as person to person? It is incorrect to describe prayer by analogy with human conversation; we do not communicate with God. We only make ourselves communicable to Him. Prayer is an emanation of what is most precious in us toward Him, the outpouring of the heart before Him. It is not a relationship between person and person, between subject and subject, but an endeavor to become an object of His thought.”[2]
When the author places the divine name first, he positions himself in a special relationship with God. He is not addressing the transcendental God of theology. He is asking for God’s attention. Heschel comments:
“The purpose of prayer is to be brought to His attention, to be listened to, to be understood by Him; not to know Him, but to be known to Him.”[3]
“The purpose of prayer is not the same as the purpose of speech. The purpose of speech is to inform; the purpose of prayer is to partake.”[4]
By placing God’s name first, the one who prays establishes a dependent relationship, but a relationship, nonetheless. This God, the one whose name I know, is asked to turn His attention to me, to recognize me in my needy condition, not because my need is primary but because He is a God who listens. He is the subject of this sentence, not my petition. And, by the way, I am in no position to demand that He hear. He hears. What I need is His face turned toward the sound of the tree falling in the forest.
Topical Index: hear, šāmaʿ, attention, prayer, Psalm 102:1
[1] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 114.
[2] Ibid., p. 200.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 202.
