It's time to listen
I was going to just post a past blog post today, but with the situation in Gaza, it feels important to write something for where I am in this moment. This may not be the most coherent thing I’ve ever written, but it’s what I need to say today.
[Image description: a rusted iron sculpture of circles inside circles, with the word Listen in a serif font cut out of the inner circle. In the blurred background, there is a silver birch that has dropped most of its leaves against a blue sky with a small cloud.]
I’m two and a half years through converting to Judaism. One of the things that has been most significant for me in this process is the Shema, the declaration of faith / prayer / meditation that Jews are instructed to repeat twice daily. Its first line is “Listen, Yisroel: the Eternal your God, the Eternal is One.”
One day a while back, I decided to take the initial instruction literally, and so, in the morning, after the first line of the prayer (which is quite long in its full form), I have taken to pausing with my eyes closed, and paying attention to all of the sounds I can hear: all around me, and within me. It’s a kind of meditation: leaning into what is present in this moment through my sense of hearing.
Although the process is one of direct attentiveness, it is also one of deep relaxation — relaxing into the sound world of here and now, not judging any of it, or taking any of it anywhere: just letting all of it, and all of me, be what we are.
It’s a valuable experience to bring from morning prayer into the rest of my life: to relax into paying attention to what is around me, and what is within me, without judgement, and without agenda.
This kind of attention is too often absent from our relationships with ourselves and with one another, and I believe its lack is the source of much of the conflict in our lives, from interpersonal squabbles to outright war.
In every communication and conflict resolution/transformation training I have ever attended (and I’ve attended a lot) the bedrock of everything is listening, paying really deep attention, to what is going on — for yourself, and for the other person — without judgement, and without agenda, or at least with judgements and agendas temporarily suspended or black-boxed.
Because what happens otherwise is that we are consumed with our own perspective, our own worldview, our own beliefs, our own desires, our own emotions, our own hurts; we forget that others also have these things, that others are equally human and therefore deserving of attention, and that no one’s perspective, worldview, beliefs or desires — not ours and not theirs — necessarily accords with reality. Our own reality, yes, but not anyone else’s.
One of the most painful things for me about Israel/Palestine is not just the very real trauma, the very real pain, the very real violence on all sides in this 75 year long tragedy, but how little capacity even the most progressive Jewish spaces seem to hold for genuinely recognising, understanding and taking in the past, ongoing, and current harms and violence experienced by Palestinians. I am also learning, through my entry into Jewish life, firstly just how alive and well Holocaust denial and ancient antisemitic tropes like blood libel are, including in the Arabic speaking world, and secondly how retraumatising any attack on any Jewish people anywhere is.
There is of course a massive power imbalance between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people which should never be ignored (although it is ignored daily by individuals, communities, and politicians in all Western countries), but both the Jewish people and the Palestinians can justifiably state, “You do not understand how very real our pain and fear and suffering are,” both to one another, and to the world.
To understand one another, we need to listen, listen deeply, listen without judgement, and without agenda.
To be able to do that, even though we ourselves do not feel that our own pain is understood by another, we need first to listen to ourselves: listen deeply, without judgement, and without agenda, to our own pain, our own suffering, our own heartbreak. We need to give ourselves space to feel and to grieve — not so that we can justify our anger, fear, or contempt for others, but so that we can feel with and for ourselves fully.
Only then can we listen to others with our hearts cracked open enough to hear and understand.