I’d like to share with you a conversation I overheard on the Skyline Trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, where moose lounge in the grass on either side of the trail. They seem completely comfortable about human beings and, in fact, seem not to mind posing for photos.
This particular conversation took place between a mother with an accent straight from the U.S. Bible Belt, and her thoughtful six-year-old son.
The son, who understands that moose are a kind of deer, asks: “What are deer good for?”
Poor Mom is totally thrown for a loop by the form of the question, but she tries to answer it just as it is asked. She says: “Well, they eat leaves and bark in the forest, and um, they eat, and that, um, helps keep the forest healthy. And they, um, provide food for hunters. And they, um, live in groups and they’re good to each other.”
The son probes a little deeper: “Do deer know that they’re good?”
Mom is quick with this one, at least she knows something about it, she thinks. She says: No, they don’t know they’re good. They don’t have higher intelligence like human intelligence. They don’t have higher judgment like we do. They have a different kind of judgment, like, um, judgment about when there’s danger. It’s, um, like the book of, um, Genesis says. It says, “God saw that it was…”
She waits for her son to fill in the blank.
He says, “Um….”
But Mom isn’t really expecting him to know the answer. She just wants to steer the conversation back to something familiar, and help him connect nature to spirituality.
So she says: “It was good. Everything God created is good.”
Isn’t this a beautiful exchange? Mom actually has no clue how to answer what she’s been asked. She has no clue how to understand the wildlife around her. So she clings to something certain, a tried and true bottom line, a compass even in unfamiliar territory.
This is the situation of the Israelites in the narrative of Parshat Re’eh. After 40 years of nomadic life in the desert wilderness, the only life known to the entire younger generation, they are about to cross the river into the land of Israel. There, the men will do a lot of army service. The women will try to keep life going in the base camp. And in preparation, Moshe teaches about practices that will keep them connected with each other and with their spiritual source, God. He instructs them in how to eat, in the care of widows and orphans – of which there will be a lot — and reminds them not to be led astray by false prophets, that is, demagogues who prey on despair and get rich off other people’s false hopes.
The parasha begins:
Look, I have placed before you today a blessing and a curse. The blessing, which is listening to the mitzvot, and the curse if you don’t listen to the mitzvot.
Three interesting things to note about the language:
(1)The word mitzvot. It means commandments, instructions, Jewish ritual practices, ethical actions, good deeds. Modern scholars of ancient Near Eastern languages have pointed out that the ancient root of the word mitzvah means “a connection.” We can think of mitzvot as the practices that connect us with other people and with animals, with community, tradition, family, and God.
(2)The grammar of the sentence about the blessing and the curse. It says: the blessing, which is listening to the mitzvot, and the curse if you don’t listen to themitzvot. Traditional commentators have noted that this is not a teaching about reward and punishment. It does not say “you’ll get blessings IF you do this, and curses IF you don’t.” The Torah’s words are more like a description: the blessed life is the life that makes use of these practices. It’s good if you live this way. If you don’t, the results will be bad.
(3)The verb “listen” in connection with the mitzvot. As Moshe explains it here, the most important practice isn’t knowing the technologies of connection, and it isn’t doing them. It’s listening to them. I would like to suggest that Moshe is recommending listening as the most effective technology of connection.
Tomorrow, two couples in our community will be celebrating their weddings, and, in their honor, I would like to speak about connection, blessing, and listening in marriage.
For me, the greatest blessing of marriage has been a deep connection with my partner. Through years of enjoying mundane activities together, of meeting extraordinary challenges large and small, we have created shared memories, values, and ideas. I get to live every day with my best friend.
How do I keep this blessing alive? By meeting the biggest challenge that I find in this intimacy: remembering that the other person is another person. No matter how much we do together, no matter how much I know about him, he and he alone is the person having his experiences. Knowing 99% of the time what he is about to say does not absolve me of the responsibility of being a listener, a mirror, a receiver of what he would like to share. By listening, I help create an interpersonal space where he can think, feel, and be affirmed in love. Some call this “hearing the other person into speech.”
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas says that you can never know another person. He means: if you think you do know, you will accidentally look past the other person, and see only your own knowledge, instead of the human being facing you who, more than anything in the world, wants your recognition and your response.
The mother I met on the trail is our negative role model here in listening to your dear (d-e-a-r) one. She did not know how to listen to her deer (d-e-e-r). She did not understand that if you listen quietly to wildlife, they will share with you their truth. Instead of pausing, and looking into the faces of the moose nearby, she launched into the facts she thought she knew. And when she discovered she didn’t know them, she retreated even farther back into principles that she wasn’t even sure how to apply in the real world.
If you follow the advice offered in Parshat Re’eh, the best technology for navigating through a new adventure isn’t just knowledge, and it isn’t just action – establishing a routine together. It’s the practice of creating connection through all the things Moshe recommends: eating together, providing mutual financial support, setting aside time for spiritual renewal, trusting one another and, above all, hearing one another into speech.
— Laura Duhan Kaplan, 2010
Image: Audrey Hepburn and her deer Pippin
photo by Bob Willoughby, http://thejulietnotes.blogspot.com