There is a difference between hearing and listening, often concealed by the fact that the Hebrew verb shema means both. But they are very different. Hearing is passive, while listening is active. Hearing needs no special concentration, but listening does. It involves attention, focus, and openness to the other. One of the greatest gifts is finding someone who really listens to us. Sadly, it happens all too rarely. In conversation, we are often so focused on what we are going to say next that we don’t really listen properly to what the other person is saying.
And so it is with prayer. Someone once defined prayer as listening to G-d listening to us.
Look at the stunningly beautiful lines of Tehillim 19 that we say on Shabbat mornings, telling us that “the heavens declare the glory of G-d; the skies proclaim the work of His hands,” despite the fact that “There is no speech, there are no words.” Creation sings a song to its Creator, which we might hear if we listen attentively enough. During the pandemic, when there was little noise from traffic and airplanes overhead, we could hear the birdsong and other sounds of nature more vividly than ever I remember.
Listening is a primary theme of Moshe’s speeches in Devarim. The root sh-m-a appears no fewer than 92 times in the book, an astonishing number. That is what I hope we gained from this distressing time of isolation: the ability to slow down our prayers and listen to them, letting their poetry penetrate more deeply than at other times.
Communal prayer is more than an expression of community. It is also a builder of community. We are social, not solitary, beings. We long, most of us, for company. And even the wonders of all the social media options (TikTok, Twitter, Zoom, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.) cannot compensate for the loss of the real thing: face-to-face encounters.
But there is one gain to praying in isolation. Tefillah b’tzibbur involves going at the speed of the congregation. It is hard to slow the pace so as to be able to meditate at length on any of the prayers themselves – their meaning, music, rhythm, and structure. Prayer is essentially a kind of counterpoint between speaking and listening. But communal prayer often involves more speaking than listening. The lockdown meant that we could listen more to the poetry and passion of the prayers themselves. And prayer is about listening, not just speaking.
Rabbi Yaakov Leiner, whose reflections on listening started us on this journey, said that the tragic month of Av is a time when it is hard to see the presence of G-d. We lost two Temples. It seemed to many that G-d may have abandoned His people. But precisely when it is hard to see the Divine Presence, we can focus on listening.
I believe that listening is one of the greatest arts. It opens us to G-d, to our fellow humans, and to the beauties of nature. For me, prayer in isolation is a gift that allows me to slow the prayers so that I can listen to them speaking to me. Praying is as much about listening as speaking. And faith itself is the ability to hear the music beneath the noise.
