The other day I heard Sam telling Keith a joke about a group that meets to share funny stories. Most of us have heard it.
A well-known tabloid reporter went to the Annual Banjo Joke Convention to report on it for her newspaper. Part of the convention was a joke competition. The first comedian came out and said, "Number 57." The crowd burst out laughing.
The next comedian walked on stage and said, "36." A round of laughter gripped the audience. Some of the people around the reporter even fell out of their chairs. Another one came out and said, "42." The chuckling lasted for minutes.
The confused reporter turned to the person seated next to her and asked, "I don't get it. Why are they just saying numbers?"
The guy replied, "Well, we know all the jokes so well that all we cataloged them and gave them each a number. Now when anyone wants to tell a particular joke all they need do is call out the number."
The next banjo player came out and said, "Number 103." Silence. Not even a guffaw...
The reporter asked, "What happened?"
"Some people just don't know how to tell a joke."
I told Sam that is was joke #17. He did not laugh. You and I know that the manner in which someone expresses something can be crucial to how it is understood. In fact, making ourselves understood is a very difficult task.
I knew this long ago. When she was only a few hours old I held Avigail in my hands (it may have been the first time after the birthing room). I took her aside and said to her (in Hebrew, no less, a language she did not know!): “I will do all I can to make sure that we communicate clearly. However, I can guarantee that there will be times when, regardless of what one or the other of us does we will not be able to understand each other.”
That thought came to mind again recently, after my mother, who loved to talk and tell stories about the various things she had seen or heard, read or experienced, suffered her stroke. The blockage hit the left side of her brain, the area that controls speech. Not only could she barely speak, the stroke also blocked the use of her right hand so she could not write either. She had almost no means of making herself understood. She and I would sit together for hours at a time communicating as best we could. Mom's sight, hearing and comprehension were as sharp as they had always been, but she could not make her needs, concerns and desires nor her joys, pleasures and excitements known to us. Sometimes her efforts to communicate would result in odd, or funny misunderstandings.
All this reminded me of an event that is told of in the literature, of a silent debate that took place about a century or two ago.
The Pope decided that all the Jews had to leave Rome. Naturally there was a big uproar from the Jewish community.
So the Pope made a deal. He would have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community. If the Jew won, the Jews could stay. If the Pope won, the Jews must leave.
The Jews realized that they had no choice. They looked around for a champion who could defend their faith, but no one wanted to volunteer.
No one wanted to be the one to risk losing a debate with the pope. Finally an old man named Moishe said that he would do it, since if no one did, the Jews would be forced to leave. He asked only that neither side be allowed to talk during the debate. The Pope finally agreed.
The day of the great debate came. Moishe and the Pope sat opposite each other for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. Moishe looked back at him and raised one finger.
The Pope waved his fingers in a circle around his head. Moishe pointed to the ground where he sat.
The Pope pulled out a wafer and a glass of wine. Moishe pulled out an apple.
The Pope stood up and said, "I give up. This man is too good. The Jews can stay."
An hour later, the cardinals were all around the Pope asking him what happened. The Pope said: "First I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity. He responded by holding up one finger to remind me that there was still one God common to both our religions.
"Then I waved my finger around me to show him that God was all around us. He responded by pointing to the ground, showing that God was also right here with us.
"I pulled out the wine and the wafer to show that God absolves us from our sins. He pulled out an apple to remind me of original sin. He had an answer for everything. What could I do?"
Meanwhile, the Jewish community had crowded around Moishe, amazed that this old, almost feeble-minded man had done what all their scholars had insisted was impossible! "What happened?" they asked.
"Well," said Moishe, "First he said to me that the Jews had three days to get out of here. I told him that not one of us was leaving.
"Then he told me that this whole city would be cleared of Jews. I let him know that we were staying right here."
"And then?" asked a woman. "I don't know," said Moishe. "He took out his lunch and I took out mine."
Yes, we laugh. But, amazingly enough, the silent debate motif appears in a number of cultures and there are even variants of it in Jewish literature. Usually, it has the simpleton besting the wise or smart.
Nonetheless, there they were, the powerful Pope and the simple Jew, misconstruing each other's signs. As Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher of the middle of the 20th century wrote:
Each of us is encased in an armour whose task is to ward off signs. Signs happen to us without respite, living means being addressed, we would need only to present ourselves and to perceive. But the risk is too dangerous for us, the soundless thunderings seem to threaten us with annihilation, and from generation to generation we erect the defence apparatus.1
My friend Keith has a T-shirt that says: “My wife complains I never listen to her... or something like that.”
Too often we prevent ourselves from reading the signs, from truly hearing, from being present and receiving the teaching of Rabbi Nachman (in the words of the poet Harvey Shapiro):
“The word moves a bit of air,
And this the next, until it reaches
the one who receives a friend's word
and receives a world therein
and is therein awakened” -
We wave our hands about, move our lips and squeeze air thorough our vocal chords, yet it is as though (as said by MacBeth in the words of Shakespeare) we do no more than tell a:
tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Is it because we do not make our signs clearly enough? Or is it that the one who “receives a friend's word” does not look or listen carefully enough? Or, is there perhaps static from solar noise storms that interferes between the sender and receiver?
When I was seventeen (this was 1964)... it was a very good year. Our Young Judaea youth group would sit on the living-room floor of our advisor's apartment in the Wilshire district of LA and discuss Ahad ha-Am, and Nachman Syrkin and even Martin Buber. We were intrigued by Buber's idea of the I-Thou experience... treating “others” not as some thing to be used, but as “thou-s” to be encountered. We worked on similes to express what it might be like to truly “encounter” rather than “use”. As seventeen year-olds it was easy to recognize the moments when couples gaze into each others eyes, oblivious of everything around them. But, how could we extend that kind of convergence into broader combinations of relationships?
We also spoke of the “I-Eternal Thou” relationship. How do we encounter God? Or, how does God communicate with us? How do we know that divine aleph is being spoken? Is it like that moment when we've been on this long hike in the hills and we turn another corner of the path and face an expanse with the sun gleaming on the grasses, the aroma of orange blossoms, the distant hum of bees, and the crisp air that suddenly fills our lungs... that causes us to stop and express that breathtaking “Ah!”? One of us (I like to think it was me) suggested that we are like radios. God is out there, broadcasting to us continuously on all frequencies. We need to turn on our receivers, adjust our antennae, and tune the dial so we could pick up the signal. (Yes, this was before “turn on, tune in, and drop out”.) But, this is not as simple a task as one might imagine. We are busy with all the usual “I-it” encounters-eating, learning, working, simply even standing up straight-that we're working on elevating to “I-Thou”. Even Buber himself told about how he had failed, utterly, to appreciate the presence of a Thou, when he thought he was “tuning into” the Eternal Thou2 and the young visitor who requested his attention, instead shortly thereafter committed suicide.
We feel ourselves hobbled like my mother and me, both in our ability to speak and our capacity to listen.
Many linguists believe, based on the evidence (among this deaf youngsters in Nicaragua who created their own language), that language communication is built into humans. So, why should we be misunderstood so often and how can we improve our listening skills?
How do we fine-tune our receivers?
How do we clarify our signal?
Let's focus on signal production for a moment. Ben Azai (who, though he died young, before he was ordained a rabbi, was known as one of the disciples of R. Akiba and had many of his own thoughts saved in rabbinic literature), said: “Be careful in your words, that your hearers shall not err through them.”3 In Hebrew, among the terms for “words” is one that quite literally means “things”. We should handle them with care, shape them correctly and send them out into the world only when we are certain that they will not crumble under the pressure they might meet. Another Hebrew term for word is teivah. This is the same word that appears in the Bible for Noah's ark and is used in modern Hebrew for a mailbox. Just as a teivah is a container, our words house our thoughts and intentions. The Ba'al Shem Tov (the founder of Hassidism) had a wonderful teaching4
about how we should shape our words, using a creative reading of the Noah story. There God tells Noah to make a skylight in the roof of the ark (Gen. 6:16). The Hebrew word for “skylight, window”, tzohar also means to shine. Therefore, according to the Ba'al Shem Tov, every word we share should receive and then shine with light. Every container of our expressions should gleam and illumine with clarity. The Ba'al Shem goes on to explain how we might accomplish this by using the next part of the Noah story when God tells Noah that “ You and all your household shall enter the ark (read here “word”).” By this, the Baal Shem means, that you must put your entire essence into your words.
Granted, that's hard to do with every word. But let's see if we can move in that direction.
You may have noticed that each time I relate a bit of wisdom or a story, I've told you from whom it came (unless I refer to a colleague who has shared something in confidence). (And when I post this on my Web site later this week there will be links to these sources (and more).)
Not only is this nice and appropriate behavior, but, Jewishly speaking, it helps to bring redemption to the world! Well, that's pretty impressive. How do we “know” this? Interestingly enough, I had known the phrase:
“Whoever reports a saying in the name of its originator brings deliverance to the world.” kol ha'omer davar b'shem omro, mevi geula l'olam.
but, ironically, I learned it first without ever knowing from whom it came. I thought that was strange so I did some research and found a Web site (of course) that tells the story. The statement originates in the Talmud in tractate Megillah where it quotes from the Megillah of Esther: “And Esther told the king in the name of Mordechai”. And we know full well that this is what saved the Jewish people from annihilation in Persia, it must follow... as the night the day, that reporting a saying in the name of its originator brings deliverance to the world. This is the earliest anti-plagiarism statement I know of. And, it is another way of enabling our words to have light shining through them... we become the vessels for the light of their originators.
If we can form our words so that they are open to receive and transmit light... including the light of our predecessors, we are already on the path to being better receivers.
Yet, there are serious and well known problems here. We are forgetful and we lose things. Sometimes we lose our marbles. Other times we even lose the box in which we kept the marbles. We handle so many different boxes that we forget what we've stored in which box. This is not a new problem. It was understood by the first generation of the followers of the Ba'al Shem Tov... and it only got worse.
I don't think I've ever told you this story. Nonetheless, it is a famous one and you may know it.
The story is told by Elie Wiesel in the prologue to his book The Gates of the Forest. I do not know the origin of the story... whether Wiesel made it up or received it from another source.
When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: “Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer.” And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: “I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.” It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.
Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: “I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient.
(I believe it is Wiesel who adds the following line (or maybe R. Nachman of Bratslav):)
God made man because he loves stories.
This story is especially poignant today. A colleague recently asked:
If any of you can help, I need the story which tells of someone going into the forest and singing or telling a story and then with each succeeding generation part of it is lost so that first they only go to the forest, then they only remember they went. It is something like that. If you can please send it to me or tell me where I can find it.
All she knows now is that such a story exists! And, yes, Virginia... that also is sufficient. In receiving, the desire to find misplaced containers, the openness to accepting what is sent in our direction... even if it is “something like that”. Gets us ever closer to the intended “radio wave”.
Tomorrow morning we read from the section of the Torah called Nitzavim. There, Moses tells us our story and repeats to us the teachings we have received in the desert. Moses says [Deuteronomy 30:11-14]:
Surely, this Instruction which I give you today is not too baffling for you ,nor is it beyond your reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and deliver it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and deliver it to us, that we may observe it?” No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.
If such is the case with the divine message to us... that it is so accessible, surely it is similarly possible for us. We ought to be able to be open and receptive to the words of our family, our friends, our neighbors. We might shape our needs, concerns and desires our joys, pleasures and excitements so that those who are “Thou” to us will receive our words, and be therein awakened.
Well, that's...
1 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, Macmillan, NY, 1965, p 10
2 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, Macmillan, NY, 1965, p 13-14
...one forenoon, after a morning of “religious” enthusiasm, I had a visit from an unknown young man, without being there in spirit. I certainly did not fail to let the meeting be friendly, I did not treat him any more remissly than all his contemporaries who were in the habit of seeking me out about this time of day as an oracle that is ready to listen to reason. I conversed attentively and openly with him-only I omitted to guess the questions he did not put. Later, not long after, I learned from on of his friends-he himself was no longer alive-the essential content of these questions; I learned that he had come to me not casually, but borne by destiny, not for a chat but for a decision. He had come to me, he had come in this hour. What do we expect when we are in despair and yet go to a man? Surely a presence by means of which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning.
3 Pirke Avot Chapter 1
4 Tsava'at Harivash (76) (learned from Filling Words with Light, Hasidic and Mystical Reflections on Jewish Prayer, Lawrence Kushner and Nehemia Polen, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT 2004, p. xi-xx)
©Mark Hurvitz
2005