Parshat Vaethannan

Parshat Vaethannan
August 15, 2008/15 Av 5768

"Hear O Israel, Adonai is Our God, Adonai is One" (Deut 6:4)

Parshat Vaethannan is the source for the Sh'ma— the most essential of Jewish prayers. Yet, as has often been noted, the Sh'ma is not a conventional prayer at all. Typically, a prayer consists of petitions directed at God, but the Sh'ma is directed at the People Israel. We are the ones who are asked to do something— we are asked to hear.

Most of us are not terribly good at serious listening. That's not to say that we don't communicate— we are constantly talking. If you are anything like me you chat on your cell phone while running errands, send and receive countless emails a day, and perhaps even text message, instant message, and facebook message on a regular basis. The trouble is, for all this talking, we only rarely take the time or opportunity to actually listen to others. And, truthfully, since others have the same problem—only rarely does anyone actually listen to us. We have forgotten the wisdom that all of our mother's once told us—"The Good Lord gave us two ears and only one mouth for a reason!"

I just got back from working and learning with two groups of Jewish teenagers on the Navajo Reservation. One of the highlights of that experience was a nightly ritual called "Circle." In Circle, everyone would gather under the brilliant night sky, and one by one each person would have the chance to speak, uninterrupted, while everyone else listened to them. The only instructions were that everyone should strive to speak from their heart when it was their turn and spend the rest of the time listening with their heart.

At first it was a little awkward—no one knew for sure how much they could risk opening themselves up to this group of strangers. But quickly, the participants seized the opportunity to have people really pay attention to them—and began to share stories of personal triumph and personal pain, experiences with their families and friends, their dreams and their fears. It was powerful to witness—when they knew that they are being sincerely listened to, even normally stoic teenagers suddenly have a lot to share.

Over the course of the program, nearly every one of them commented to me about how hard it is to find people in their lives who listen to them, and many of them recognized that they don't often give their friends or family their full ears either. Truthfully, the problem is not just one for teenagers. No matter our age or position in life, all of us struggle to find people who will not just hear our words, but really hear us. And we all have work to do in order to cultivate our own lev shome'ah, our "hearing heart."

Martin Buber wrote that we only spend a fraction of our lives engaged in what he famously termed: "I-Thou" relationships—the kind of encounters with other human beings in which we listen deeply to one another and are able to move beyond superficial exchange. Despite their rarity, the moments of I-Thou—when people in love talk softly to one another, when a parent relates to their child, when friends get lost in conversation, or teenagers share their stories under the stars—are the moments which lend quality and substance to our lives and invite the Holy One into the world.

The Sh'ma invites and challenges us to learn how to listen. It reminds us that listening is the beginning of meaningful relationships with one another. And coming together in relationships based on compassion and sincere communication, where all the barriers that separate us begin to fall down, is our best way to live out the deepest meaning of the phrase "Adonai Echad"—that the essence of God is Oneness.