When I introduce the shema, that central call of Jewish tradition, I often say it is the call to listen—to listen to the one-ness that underlies and connects all of life.
In some ways, that understates the case for the centrality of the act of listening in Jewish tradition.
My teacher Barbara Breitman writes that “listening is both an essential skill and a spiritual practice. The Shema, the central statement of Jewish faith, declares that hearing is the quintessentially sacred act for Jews: ‘Hear O Israel, YHVH is our God, YHVH is One.’ Indeed, the Shema announces that listening is the spiritual discipline through which the Oneness of God can be known.”
Listening is the spiritual discipline through which the Oneness of God can be known.
“Paradoxically,” she continues, “the name for God used in the Shema [Adonai, really Y-H-V-H] is precisely the one name that cannot be spoken, that is ineffable, exhorting Jews to listen precisely to that which cannot be spoken, to hear in the living silence that which unites us all.”
Not only are we listening—we’re listening to the spoken and the unspoken, we’re listening to the pauses, the catches of breath, the searching for words—all of it. God is in all of it, and making space for each molecule of that can make space for God, says Jewish tradition.
What does that mean in practical terms?
When listening to another person with this kind of patience and attentiveness, Breitman writes, “we begin to sense what is moving in the other’s inner life. It is the kind of listening that enables others to come to speech, to find their own voice. As early feminists discovered, it is possible to ‘hear each other into speech,’ to listen in a way that literally enables a previously hidden or buried aspect of the speaker’s self to emerge through articulation. This is listening as a spiritual discipline, meant to be practiced with focus, commitment, and intentionality.”
I have had this experience before. Of not knowing what I was going to say, or even what I thought or how I felt, until someone has given me the space to say it—to feel my way into my own inner experience in the presence of another. This is listening as a sacred act—allowing another to find themselves, to find words they didn’t know they had.
In a sense this turns those words into prayers.
Abraham Joshua Heschel describes the difference between speech and prayer: “The purpose of speech,” he writes “is to inform; the purpose of prayer is to partake. In speech,” he says “the act and the content are not always contemporaneous. What we wish to communicate to others is usually present in our minds prior to the moment of communication. In contrast, the actual content of prayer comes into being in the moment of praying.”
When we listen in such a way that allows another to find their own content in the moment, their speech is transformed into prayer.
I’m fortunate to have a profession where I get to do a lot of writing. In many ways the experience is the same. Sometimes, I think I’m going to say one thing when I start writing. But I discover over the course of a draft that I had something to say I didn’t even know was in there.
That said, as beautiful an opportunity as that is, the blinking cursor can’t signal to me that it understands, that it knows how I feel, that I have a companion in my journeying. Only another soul can do that.
So when Barbara Breitman writes that hearing is the quintessentially sacred act for Jews, it means, like a blank page, allowing someone to fully unfurl their thoughts, emotions, inner experiences, but doing so in such a way that they feel the connection of another—a connection through which the presence of God’s oneness is manifest.
Now, Breitman writes this in the context of teaching Jewish pastoral caregivers how to listen—pastoral care, as Rabbi Dayle Friedman writes, means “offer[ing] a spiritual presence to people in need, pain, or transition.”
What this suggests is that this type of listening is not reasonable to expect at all times, in all places, in all moments. If I want my wife to listen to me about something that happened at work, while we’ve each got kids clamoring around us for dinner or a show they want to watch, it’s not reasonable to expect her to give me that kind of listening. Further, not all of us are trained in this way.
Still there is something humanly intuitive about being spiritually present to someone in need, pain or transition, when the moment is right, where do we have the ability to be present in that way.
What does this look like? The most basic component of it is to fight the urge to do, to fix, to respond, and instead just to be—to have the presence of mind to just be present. Our presence is a present.
Rather than filling the silences with our own thoughts, jumping in to complete the thought of another when they’re searching themselves, we just stay there with them; hang in there with them, just be.
As Breitman writes, “the challenge is to believe in the power of presence in a world that values doing and knowing over being, but that is precisely what we are called to do.”
As we say many times, that’s what Shabbat is. Shabbat is a manifestation of the recognition that we have to intentionally foster being rather than doing, living rather than acting. Shabbat is a manifestation in the dimension of time of the recognition that sometimes less is more—that in stillness, in listening, in hearing, we are letting God in.
Shema yisrael adoinai eloheinu adonai echad. “Hear O Israel” — People of Israel, or all of us who wrestle with the divine — “Adonai Eloheinu” — Adonai, that word representing the unspeakable manifestation of being, of presence, is our god — “Adonai Echad” adonai is one, that presence connects, unites us all. Especially when we listen for it.
