Word: נשמע, nishma, “we will listen” (or: hear, obey)
Context: The second word of the famous phrase from this week’s parsha – נעשה ונשמע, na’aseh venishma – “we will do and we will listen.” The Israelites say this phrase as part of their continued acceptance of the Torah in our parsha– “Everything that the Lord said we will do and we will listen” (Exodus 24:7).
Elsewhere in the Torah: Twice earlier in the story of the giving of the Torah, the people voiced acceptance of the Torah, but in each of those other times, they only used the word na’aseh without nishma, saying simply: “Everything that the Lord said we will do” (Ex 19:8 and 24:3).
It is as if God was waiting for the fuller form of this statement – for the nishma, the listening, to be added to the na’aseh, to the doing– in order for the acceptance of the Torah to be complete.
Other than these three places, the word na’aseh is used only once in the whole Torah – in Genesis, in the creation of the human being. There God says: na’aseh adam – “Let us make a person in our image . . . “ (1:20). The people of Israel, upon accepting the Torah, throw the same word – na’aseh – back up to God, as if to say: You created us for this purpose in Your image; we, too, will be do-ers and creators in the world exactly as You prescribe, as You want us to, being Your hands on earth, fulfilling Your work.
Interpretation: There is one problem with this agreement, and it is perhaps the reason God does not allow the acceptance of the Torah to stop here, to be complete with the word na’aseh: doing, creating, producing, fixing, actively bringing God into the world through deed and action – all of that is not enough. That side of things, the Genesis creation side, does not fully fulfill the divine image planted inside us.
What else does God want? Nishma – hearing, listening, internalizing. Or, to play with the word, what God wants is neshamah, “soul.” Rachmana liba ba’iy. “The Merciful One wants the heart,” the heart which feels and trusts and believes and listens, not just the hands and the legs which act in the world. God wants us to take into our heart all the words that God is speaking continuously in our lives through every encounter and person and emotion that comes our way, to really take all those words, all those messages – kol asher diber Hashem, “everything the Lord speaks” – into our hearts and hear the love, the strength, the compassion and the light that are endlessly flowing our way.
We need to act, but we also need to hear, to pause for a moment and be receptive, to open up to listening and taking in.
Indeed, to do both of these, to act and to listen, is to fully inhabit our divine image, to imitate God’s own way of being. Yes, in the creation story, where the verb “to do,” asah, predominates, God acts primarily as a do-er, but later, we see God listening – first, to Hagar and to Leah, each in their own distress, who name their children – Yishmael and Shimon – for this aspect of God, and later, to the cries of the Israelites in Egypt, and in our parsha, to the cries of the mistreated stranger, widow and orphan. God is both do-er and listener, and wants us, too, through the Torah, to fulfill our fullest potential in both these arenas.
Message: There is an inner Torah and an outer Torah and they are linked. Don’t think it is enough to do the mitzvot with your body, and let your heart and soul wander elsewhere. Na’aseh venishma. Do it from the outside and from the inside, whole-heartedly and with intention and attention. But more than that, as you go about this concrete life of productivity and action, don’t forget the listening aspect. Don’t forget that listening, too, can have a profound impact, listening to someone else’s cries, yes, and also pausing to hear the words of God pulsing through the universe inside your very own heart, in your own cries and yearnings and stirrings. Shma Yisrael. Listen, Israel, listen to all of it, because it all comes from the One; it is all God knocking at your soul’s door.
Photo by jonas mohamadi from Pexels
