Is anybody listening?

Every time someone asks about what a chaplain does, there is usually someone who answers.

“She listens.”

They’re not wrong. Listening is a large part of what I do. But listening is not a simple thing.

Get The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

It is not something a person does alone. Listening is a team sport, with at least two players: the person speaking and the person listening.

The listener can only work with what is offered.

That may sound obvious, but in my work as a chaplain, I have learned that it is not. Every person I meet is carrying a story, and I don’t get to decide what part of that story they will share with me.

Sometimes they know exactly what they want to tell me, but usually they don’t — and then again, sometimes they surprise themselves.

A patient tells me something they have never said out loud before.

A wife talks about the argument she had with her husband the morning she fell ill.

A son, caring for his infirm mother, suddenly remembers a story from childhood.

Someone tells me they are angry with God.

Another says in a stage whisper: “To be honest, rabbi, I have never believed in God.”

So many say, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

I think: I do. Because being listened to changes what a person is able to hear in their own story.

Parashat Ki Tavo, particularly Devarim 27:9-10, has something to say about this, too.

Moses and the Levitical priests gather all of Israel and begin with an unusual command:

“Hasket u’shema — Silence! Hear, O Israel!”

And then Moses says:

“Today you have become the people of the Eternal your God.”

It is striking to me that the moment in which Israel becomes a people begins with listening.

Not speaking. Not explaining. Not reacting. Not even understanding.

Listening.

And then comes the next verse:

“V’shamata b’kol Adonai Elohecha — Hear the Eternal your God and observe the commandments and laws that I enjoin upon you this day.”

Listen.

And then respond.

Early in the history of modern clinical pastoral education, the chaplain and theologian Anton Boisen described the people we encounter as “living human documents.” A person’s life is a text: not a problem to be solved, but a story to be encountered and understood. Our experiences, relationships, losses, hopes, fears, bodies and beliefs all become part of that text.

I love this idea because it describes something I have experienced over many years of spiritual care work: Every person I meet is carrying a story, and I don’t get to decide what part of that story they will share when they meet me.

I can ask a question. I can notice. I can wonder. I can sit quietly. But the person in front of me has to decide what to tell me.

And sometimes, what they tell me surprises them as much as it surprises me.

This is what makes listening so much more than a passive activity.

In order to become a people, we have to learn how to hear. We tend to think of listening as something we do for another person. A chaplain listens to a patient. A friend listens to a friend. A parent listens to a child.

But Torah asks us to listen to God, too:

V’shamata b’kol Adonai Elohecha.

Hear the voice of the Eternal your God.

The relationship between God and Israel is, at least in part, a relationship of speaking and listening. God speaks. Israel listens. Israel cries out, complains, argues, questions and pleads. The relationship between us is reciprocal.

We are partners with God in creating the world we inhabit. The choices we make, the way we treat one another, the communities we build, the care we offer and the justice we pursue all shape the world we share.

This is part of what it means to be in covenant: to listen, and then to respond. This is not a silent, one-way street relationship.

Abraham and Moses argue with God. Jeremiah protests. Job demands an answer. The Psalms cry out in anguish, gratitude, rage and hope.

Jewish prayer itself hopes that we can speak and that someone is listening.

This is how I was drawn to the work of chaplaincy. I don’t meet someone because I have the answer to their suffering — I don’t even know what their question is. Often they don’t either. I meet a person, a living human document that I have not yet read.

And I wait.

Sometimes the story comes easily and sometimes in fragments. Sometimes it comes through tears, or anger, or laughter. Sometimes the most important thing that happens is silence.

There is a kind of humility required to listen this way. I have to resist the temptation to fill the silence. I have to resist deciding what someone’s story means before they have finished telling it. I have to trust that what I offer is enough.

Because listening is not passive.

When we truly listen to another person, something happens between us. A story that had been held inside enters the space between two people. The speaker may hear themselves differently because someone else has heard them. The listener is always changed by what they have received.

Perhaps this is true of our relationship with God, too.

We listen. We respond. We hope God listens and our world changes.

“Silence! Hear, O Israel.”

The Torah does not say: “Understand everything.”

It says: “Listen.”

And listening is where relationship begins.

Before we can become a people, we have to hear one another. Before we can accompany someone through grief, we have to listen and hear the particular shape of their loss. Before we can know what another person needs, we have to give them space to tell us.

And before we can participate in the continued work of creating the world with God, we have to learn how to listen: to God, to one another, and to ourselves.

The work of listening is never finished. There is always another story, another voice, another layer.

This is the invitation of Ki Tavo: not to obey, but to listen and to become the kind of people who can hear.

Because what we hear asks something of us.

And what we do with what we hear becomes part of the world we create. PJC

Rabbi Kara Tav is rabbi of spiritual care at Congregation Beth Shalom and is a chaplain at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.