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and her son away, the Torah tells
us that when their water ran out
and the young Ishmael was at
the point of dying, Hagar cried,
yet God heard “the voice of the
child” (Gen. 21:16-17).
Earlier when the angels came
to visit Abraham and told him
that Sarah would have a child,
Sarah laughed inwardly, that is,
silently, yet she was heard by
God (Gen. 18:12-13). God hears
our thoughts even when they are
not expressed in speech.
The silence that counts, in
Judaism, is thus a listening
silence — and listening is the
supreme religious art. Listening
means making space for others
to speak and be heard. As I point
out in my commentary to the
Siddur, there is no English word
that remotely equals the Hebrew
verb sh-m-a in its wide range of
senses: to listen, to hear, to pay
attention, to understand, to inter-
nalize and to respond in deed.
This was one of the key ele-
ments in the Sinai covenant,
when the Israelites, having
already said twice, “
All that God
says, we will do,
” then said, “
All
that God says, we will do and we
will hear [ve-nishma]” (Ex. 24:7).
It is the nishma — listening,
hearing, heeding, responding —
that is the key religious act.
Thus, Judaism is not only a
religion of doing-and-speaking;
it is also a religion of listening.
Faith is the ability to hear the
music beneath the noise. There is
the silent music of the spheres,
about which Psalm 19 speaks:
“The heavens declare the glory
of God
The skies proclaim the work of
His hands.
Day to day they pour forth
speech,
Night to night they communi-
cate knowledge.
There is no speech, there are no
words,
Their voice is not heard.
Yet their music carries through-
out the earth.
”
- Tehillim 19
There is the voice of history
that was heard by the prophets.
And there is the commanding
voice of Sinai that continues to
speak to us across the abyss of
time. I sometimes think that
people in the modern age have
found the concept of “Torah
from Heaven” problematic, not
because of some new archaeo-
logical discovery but because we
have lost the habit of listening
to the sound of transcendence, a
voice beyond the merely human.
It is fascinating that despite his
often-fractured relationship with
Judaism, Sigmund Freud created
in psychoanalysis a deeply Jewish
form of healing. He himself
called it the “speaking cure,
”
but it is in fact a listening cure.
Almost all effective forms of
psychotherapy involve deep
listening.
Is there enough listening in
the Jewish world today? Do we,
in marriage, really listen to our
spouses? Do we, as parents, truly
listen to our children? Do we, as
leaders, hear the unspoken fears
of those we seek to lead? Do we
internalize the sense of hurt of
the people who feel excluded
from the community? Can we
really claim to be listening to the
voice of God if we fail to listen to
the voices of our fellow humans?
In his poem, “In memory of
W B Yeats,
” W H Auden wrote:
“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
”
From time to time we need
to step back from the noise and
hubbub of the social world and
create in our hearts the stillness
of the desert where, within the
silence, we can hear the kol
demamah dakah, the still, small
voice of God, telling us we are
loved, we are heard, we are
embraced by God’s everlasting
arms, we are not alone.
The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan
Sacks served as the chief rabbi of
the United Hebrew Congregations of
the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His
teachings have been made available to
all at rabbisacks.org.
Our Link to the Past
T
he Book of Numbers
opens with an optimis-
tic picture of a nation
poised for redemption. The
Israelites have been freed from
Egypt. They have received the
Revelation at Sinai, which pro-
vides them with a moral and
ethical constitution along
with a faith commitment
that establishes their mis-
sion to the world.
The nation is now
structured into 12
uniquely endowed tribes.
Physical and spiritual
defenses are organized
with a standing army for
military might and the
tribe of Levi dedicated
to teaching Torah and
arranging the sacrificial
service. Everything seems ready
for the conquest and settlement
of the Promised Land.
Instead, what follows is total
degeneration. The Israelites
become involved in petty squab-
bles and tiresome complaints;
the reconnaissance mission
advises against entering Israel.
Korah, Datan and Aviram stage
a rebellion against Moses, and a
prince of one of the tribes pub-
licly fornicates with a Midianite
woman. The result is that the
entire generation that left Egypt
is condemned to die in the
wilderness; and only Moses’
successor, Joshua, and the new
generation that has been born
in the desert may live in the
Promised Land.
How can a nation so com-
mitted to becoming a “kingdom
of priest-teachers and a holy
nation” lose its idealistic sense of
purpose and “gang up” against
the very person who was their
great liberator and law-giver?
Our portion opens with
a command to count the
Israelites. Twenty-five chapters
later, however, a second census
is ordered. But the identification
of each Israelite for the pur-
pose of this census is different.
The first count included “the
families (providing everyone’s
tribal affiliation harking back to
Jacob, Isaac and Abraham), the
household parents and
the individual personal
names. The second time,
the tribal affiliation and
the personal names of
each were excluded, pro-
viding only the names of
the household parents of
each individual.
In the first census, each
Israelite felt connected to
his tribal parent, to his
biblical patriarchs and
matriarchs. By the time
of the second census, that con-
nection was woefully gone. Each
related only to their immediate
biological parents.
Lineage has everything to do
with responsibility and ancestral
empowerment. Tragically, the
desert generation lost its con-
nection with the mission and
empowerment, with the dream
and the promise of the patri-
archs and matriarchs. The sec-
ond census no longer connects
them as the tribal children of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This
loss of connectedness results in
a disconnect from God, from
the promise and the covenant
of that God, from faith in their
ability to carry out the unique
message and mission of Israel.
By disconnecting from their
past, they lost their future. They
did not even merit individual
names, names which could only
be counted if they were linked
with the proud names of the
founders of Jewish eternity.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is chancellor of
Ohr Torah Stone and chief rabbi of
Efrat, Israel.
TORAH PORTION
Rabbi
Shlomo
Riskin
Parshat
Bamidbar:
Numbers
1:1-4:20;
Hosea 2:1-22.