And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment and begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him off by himself away from the crowd. He put his finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue; then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him, “Ephphatha!”–that is, “be opened!”–and immediately the man’s ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly. (Mark 7.35-36)
Perhaps no Jewish theologian of the twentieth century gained more esteem than Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose life spanned three-quarters of that century. In his book on prayer, a profound and prolific exposition of the exercise of prayer, Heschel tells the story of a rabbi who lived a hundred years earlier who was approached by a shoemaker in his village who had a question about his morning prayer.
Explaining his situation, the shoemaker told the rabbi that his customers were poor men who owned only one pair of shoes, prompting the shoemaker to pick up their shoes in the late evening, allowing him to work on them all night into the morning, finally delivering them in the morning before the owners had to go to work. When, the shoemaker asked the rabbi, should he say his morning prayer?
Put in a quandary by his situation, the shoemaker asked the question if it would be better for him to pray quickly the first thing in the morning and then go back to work, or should he let the appointed hour of prayer go by and, every once in a while, raise his hammer from the shoes, uttering a sigh, “Woe unto me, I haven’t prayed yet.”
Retelling the story, Rabbi Heschel offered this simple answer, “Perhaps that sigh is worth more than prayer itself.” Both brilliant and blinding, the answer offers an understanding of prayer that moves us from the level of the mundane and mediocre to the heights of the erudite and exceptional. For, indeed, sometimes a sigh is the greatest of all prayers.
If we have doubts, they are surely laid to rest in the text that the evangelist Mark presents to us today when he tells of Rabbi Jesus’s encounter with a deaf-mute man in the pagan district of the Decapolis, a man who is brought to the Galilean by friends who beg the Teacher “to lay his hand on him” so that he might hear and speak again.
Reminiscent of a similar scene in the scriptures when loyal friends lower a paralyzed man through the thatched roof of a house so that the Rabbi might lay his hand on him, this story shows the same communal act, a conjoint petitioning of the Galilean for healing in this dire situation, human effort exhausted, divine intervention implored.
Memorable and mesmerizing, the response by Rabbi Jesus is immediate and impressive. Taking the man away from the onlookers, the Rabbi first puts his finger into the man’s ears and then spits upon his fingers, bringing them to the mouth of the mute man, touching the man’s tongue with his wet fingers. And perhaps the next move by the Rabbi is the most important, as he looks up to heaven and groans.
That use of the word “groans” stands out like a marquee sign, causing us to stop and stare, to look and listen. Taken from the Greek word, stenos, the term is sometimes translated as a sigh or a murmur, the connotation in each instance being the same, an unarticulated, undecipherable utterance from the depths of the soul that expresses grief, anger, or desire.
Confronted and challenged by the human condition, filled with upsets and setbacks, the soul speaks a language all its own, primitive, wordless, chilling, a sound that erupts from deep within a person who feels a pain that defies words, who wails and weeps in the face of injury and injustice, lettered-words too weak to capture or contain the hurt in the heart.
Joining humanity in all ways, save the stain of sin, the Galilean, earth-bound now, having left the realm of bliss where there is no pain and no suffering, reacts to the human tragedy as any other human with a heart would and should, with an outpouring and an outburst of sadness and sorrow, responding in groans and sighs to the brokenness of humanity that stands before him in the form of a deaf and a mute man.
In that groan, Rabbi Jesus shows that he shares in the lot of humanity, where sickness stalks people like a sinister shadow and where everything on the human body breaks like a crystal decanter battered by a bat. Face to face with the fragility of life, the Rabbi utters the prayer that is always the first and the last of prayers, an audible groan, an inarticulate sigh, an almost inhuman howl, always an attempt to say, “This should not be,” but the words simply won’t come.
It is not only here, in this singular instance, that we find the Rabbi praying to the high heavens without words, offering instead the basest and the purest of human prayers, speaking to the Most High God not in words, but in weeping and wails. We will see the same response when he stands before the grave of his friend, Lazarus, tears dripping down his cheeks, words stuck in his throat. Seeing the sisters of Lazarus mourning the loss of their brother, he groans, the only sensible response to the senselessness of death.
As always, there is a lesson for us in the text, the reaction of Rabbi Jesus reminding us that prayer does not have to be pretty and proper and prissy in order to be heard by the heavens. Such prayer may have its place, but when the wreckage and breakage and pillerage of the human experience lay before us, we, drained and dog-tired, may find words can’t be found for what we’re feeling. Sometimes, as Heschel rightly said, a sigh is worth more than a prayer, or better said, a sigh is the best of prayers.
When encountering the recurring human experience of need in its manifold manifestations, exhausting and depleting, we often find ourselves praying with groans and sighs and wails that express in the best way possible the hurt and the harm and the hollowness that the human heart feels. Trusting that God does not need words from us in order to hear us, we offer guttural sounds, sounds from the gut.
The contemporary writer, Edward Hays, in his book, Prayer Notes to a Friend, says it well when he writes that sometimes our prayers need to be pure brazenness, which, to many, may sound like pure craziness. “When you pray,” Hays says, “howl like a wolf, don’t bleat like a lamb.” Explaining that God fails to find pleasure in cool-as chrome prayers and aches for us to pray for what we truly need, Hays urges us to “throw our dishwater tepid prayers down the drain, replacing them with furnace feverish petitions.”
And surely there is no more feverish prayer than those that pour out of our shattered hearts, escaping from that sanctuary, not in words, but in groans, lifted to the high heavens, not on the wings of angels, but on screams from souls that demand to be heard, that knock on the door until fists are bloodied, that stay until the wails become whimpers and the groans become gray ashes in the furnace.
Somehow, somewhere, we prettied up prayers, believing that the prettier the package, the surer that they would be heard, failing to see that the purest prayers do not need wrapping paper and pretty ribbon. Quite the opposite. Like Rachel who wept uncontrollably for her children, we put away the pretty and put before God the real, believing in our heart that God grasps wails more than he does a trainload of words, much like a mother who listens for the cries of her baby, not for the babble of words.
We are told in the Hebrew scriptures that when Moses led the Hebrew slaves into battle against the Amalekites, he kept his arms raised to the heavens and, as the day wore on, his arms weakened and his groans increased, until finally Aaron and Hur propped up his arms with their own, and, in this way, God heard the prayers of Moses and brought victory to the slaves. It is a good image for us to remember when we stand on the battlefields of life.
Early in his book on prayer, Rabbi Heschel offered this thought. “In a sense,” he wrote, “prayer begins where expression ends. The words that reach our lips are often but waves of an overflowing stream touching the shore. We often seek and miss, struggle and fail to adjust our unique feelings to the patterns of texts.”
He continued, “The soul can only intimate its persistent striving, the riddle of its unhappiness, the strain of living twixt hope and fear. Where,” he asked, “is the tree that can utter fully the silent passion of the soil? Words,” Heschel wrote, “can only open the door and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.”
It is a sentiment shared by another rabbi, the Galilean Teacher, who also understood that where words end, weeping begins, and where the talk of the tongue ends, the language of the heart begins. Seeing the deaf and mute man standing before him, broken and beaten by life, the Rabbi looked to the heavens and groaned, that prayer finding its way to the Most High God, who allowed the mute man to speak words again, but only after the Lord God had heard the wordless cries of a shattered heart.
–Jeremy Myers
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