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Mussar

The Exalted Thing We Overlook: On Shame, Need, and the Power of Asking God

· editor
In short: Drawing on a verse from Psalms (12:9) and its two interpretations in the Talmud (Berakhot 6b), this article explores the human instinct to feel shame when asking others for help. It argues that God embedded this very capacity for shame within us — not as a weakness, but as the raw material for genuine prayer. King David teaches that the same inner force that makes us blush before other people is, when rightly directed toward God, among the most elevated acts of the human soul.

The verse “K’rum zulut livnei adam” — loosely, “as the exalted are despised among mankind” (Psalms 12:9) — is interpreted in two distinct ways in the Talmud (Berakhot 6b):

  1. The verse refers to the contempt (zilut) that people show toward prayer and its great, exalted (karum) power.
  2. The verse refers to a person who is forced to depend on others — and who, as a result, must demean himself (zilut). From shame, his face changes color repeatedly, like a certain bird called the karum, whose plumage shifts with the rising sun.

When the Creator fashioned the human being, He wove into human nature an instinct to feel ashamed when asking other people for help or kindness — so deeply so that the shame produces a visible, physical change: a person’s face flushes and shifts when turning to others in need.

And yet, at the very same time, the Holy One blessed be He wove into that same nature an equally deep and essential need — the need to ask for help and kindness from Him.

King David teaches us that the part of the soul which causes us to feel shame before other human beings is, in its very essence, the highest and most elevated dimension of a person’s inner work. It is precisely the act of asking God for help — the act that draws on this instinct God planted within us, but directs it rightly — that is the karum, the exalted thing, that people so thoughtlessly despise.

Worse still: by misdirecting that instinct — by turning it toward requests of other people instead of toward a genuine request of the Creator — a person transforms the very karum within his soul into something that wounds him. He inflicts needless shame upon himself, all as a substitute for the one true request that so many are too quick to dismiss: the request addressed to the Master of the World.