It’s as if all of creation was waiting for us to learn to add nishma to na’aseh, to add listening to doing.
In this week’s parsha, the covenant with God at Sinai continues to be processed and expanded, and it is here that we find the Israelites offering their famous response to this covenant – na’aseh v’nishma. We will do and we will hear or listen (Exodus 24:7).
The gemara says that God called out at that moment– who revealed to my children this raz, this great secret (Shabbat 88a)? This is indeed a moment to be celebrated. Something has shifted in the universe with their saying na’aseh v’nishma. You can feel it in the text. Twice before the Israelites have responded to the covenant by saying – kol asher diber Hashem na’aseh. All that God has spoken we will do (Exodus 19:8 and 24:3). But this third time they add the word nishma – kol asher diber hashem na’aseh v’nishma. All that God has spoken we will do and we will listen (Exodus 24:7). Now the covenant is complete.
We kept saying –yes, we’ll do it, yes, we’ll do it, but that wasn’t enough. God was waiting for us to add nishma, to realize – ah, You don’t just want us to do things in the world, You also want us to listen. You don’t just want us to be Your hands on earth, but also Your ears and Your heart to listen and hold each other’s pains and joys. It’s as if listening was the missing piece that God and creation had been waiting for all along.
We Are Naturally Doers
Learning to be listeners in addition to doers has never come easy for us. God created us humans with that same word, na’aseh (Genesis 1:26), with the energy of doing and making. That’s how all of creation came into being, through this doing energy. And so we are naturally infused with a predilection towards doing; our habitual ingrained response to any situation is: “what can I do about it.” Imagine someone coming to you with a problem, a child or a friend perhaps, and notice what rises up inside you, the urge to “help,” to do something for them, to end their suffering by fixing the problem. We can honor this urge; sometimes – often – we do need to be in the doing mode.
Our Desire To Be Known
And yet at the same time there is in God, in the universe, in all of us a thirst for something more, something else, not to be made better, not to be fixed, but simply to be heard and seen and known. I invite you to feel that thirst in yourself, like a constant silent whisper inside, a whispering wanting yearning ache to be fully heard and understood, to be seen and known. Notice how much you want that and have always wanted that, the terrible longing fin your body for nishma, for deep listening and hearing.
God’s Desire, Too?
I wonder whether this listening isn’t what God, too, wanted from the very start of creation. The first time the root shama, to hear or listen, is used in the Torah, it is said of the first humans, Adam and Eve – vayishmi’u, they heard God’s voice walking about the garden (Genesis 3:8). Perhaps this is what God was wanting in that moment – perhaps this was in fact the purpose of all creation – for God Godself to be heard and seen and known, to be in intimate relationship with humanity. And so God wanders about that first garden and the people indeed hear God’s voice, but here is the tragedy, the tragic beginning of all of our struggles – they can’t handle it; they hide themselves from hearing that voice; they put up a wall. They say – stop, I don’t want to hear You, I don’t want to really know You. They are afraid of intimacy.
We can relate to that hiding, too. We want to listen and to be heard, to know one another and to be known – we want that badly – and at the same time, we are terribly and tragically frightened of such intimacy, with each other and with God and ourselves. We hide. We find a nearby bush and hide behind it, often hiding behind our na’aseh, our doingness, our busyness. We say – I’ll do things for you, but I don’t really want to hear you, to listen, to know you.
Finally, Nishma at Sinai
And so, going back to the Torah story, the yearning for nishma, for someone to really hear and listen, continues in the world for many centuries. God manages to find individual humans who can listen, but they are few and far between. The yearning is for a whole people, a society of listeners. And that is exactly what happens at Har Sinai. After several failed attempts, where the people keep coming back to God and saying just na’aseh – yes, we’ll do everything you said – after several rounds of that limited response, the people finally get it: we need not just to do but also to listen, to hear God in our lives, to be God’s listeners in addition to being God’s doers.
Learning From God How To Listen: Hagar’s Story
Nishma. We will listen. What does it mean to hear, to listen? Learn from God. God started the world with the na’aseh doing energy of creation, but continues to be present in it primarily with nishma listening energy. Consider how God was with Hagar, whose son Yishmael was named for precisely this divine listening capacity. Hagar was alone in the desert and felt God’s caring listening presence with her. What good does such listening do, we often wonder. We feel the urgency of solving problems in a practical way, doing something – na’aseh – let’s solve it already. She’s sad, she’s thirsty, she’s despairing. We want to do something to relieve her. But here with Hagar, God simply listens, first when she is pregnant and again when she and her young son are banished and running out of water (Genesis 16:9-15 and 21:16-21). In both cases, God’s listening is a kind of magical force that helps her feel seen and known and strengthened so that she can persevere and move forward. From this place, she can suddenly see new options, like the well in front of her.
Being listened to opens up space for us inside to regain our strength and perspective and see new possibilities. We don’t solve the problem through listening, but we bring space and kindness to it, and that changes everything. It transforms us and it transforms the world around us. I wonder whether this is the raz, the secret, God was referring to with na’aseh v’nishma. The great divine secret is the incredible power of listening to heal and transform in a way that action alone often cannot. A true mystery, a kind of magic, how simply listening can change us.
The Experience of Being Listened To
Like Hagar, we, too, have access to this divine listening presence, sometimes through connecting directly to God and at other times, through the intermediary of another human being. The feeling is one of being received without judgment or agenda or hurry, a wide open door of acceptance for you as you are, nothing to fix or do, a patient open ear, a quiet stillness and presence that makes room for all of you. You can share what’s on your heart, invited into the gentleness of this holding space, invited to keep opening and sharing, to cry, to unburden, letting all your troubles and your worries and your confusion and your celebrations, all the ways you want to be seen and known, letting that all topple out of you into the open heart of this quiet waiting presence. Letting it all be held in that container. Whether you experience it with another person or on your own or with God, this is the divine listening presence. That’s what nishma means and brings into the world.
Becoming a Listener
Indeed, when we are able to listen in this way to one another, we are actively fulfilling our nishma promise; we are bringing God’s listening capacities into the world. Maybe sensing that capacity in yourself, the stillness in you, the presence, the full attention, the opening and acceptance, welcoming what wants to be heard, like an open door, like a catcher’s glove awaiting the ball thrown by the pitcher, opening to receive what comes Feeling how good it feels in your own body to be a receptacle for another person or for your own parts’ worries and sorrows, to become a holding container, to let go of all distractions and just be here now with someone, fully present, how still and calm that makes you and how it fills your heart with connection and caring.
Listening To God, Too?
And maybe sometimes, strangely, we can offer this listening presence to God, too. We usually think primarily of God listening to us, but relationships are always a two way street, and I wonder about the other direction, about being present and open to receiving God, to knowing God, offering a tikkun, a repair, for Adam and Eve’s initial hiding from God’s voice, offering now to open to it, to listen. Nishma, we say, not just that we will do God’s word, but also that we will hear it, we will listen for it, listen for God’s voice in ourselves and in the world. We will listen for God’s voice as it walks through the garden of our lives looking for connection and relationship. How has God been speaking to you lately? Calling to you? How might you listen with more presence and attention, noticing the inklings of the divine reaching out to you in the everyday moments of your life? Perhaps, since you are made in God’s image, the yearning in you to be heard and known is a mirror of God’s own yearning to be heard and known. Offering yourself as a vehicle for that knowing, for the knowing of God in whatever way is possible for you.
Moshe’s Desire To Know God
I’m not saying I know what that means exactly, to listen to God, certainly not to know God. But it feels like buried in each of us, there is a deep desire not just for us to be known by God, but also for us to know God, a desire that was planted in us as a seed of connection, the yearning to both know and be known by our Creator. I think we can see this most clearly in Moshe. We say that Moshe was the humblest person on earth, but perhaps what we mean is that he was the best listener. He knew how to get in touch in himself with that deep desire to know God, to let everything else fall to the wayside so he could really listen and stay true to that desire, saying to God – Hodi’eini na et derakhekha, “show me your ways, please,” ve’eida’akha, and “let me know you” (Exodus 33:13). Let me hear you and know you. Can you feel how powerful that would feel, to say that or to have someone say that to you – I really want to know you. Maybe checking inside for any inklings of your own deep desire to know God, to know yourself, to know others, to know truth, to know essence, to know love, just touching that desire and opening up to being a listening nishma presence. You don’t have to be Moshe or any different from who you are. Just opening and listening as you are to God’s voice wandering through the garden of your own life, wanting to connect to you, to know and be known by you.
At Sinai, we said na’aseh v’nishma, that we would do and we would listen. I don’t discount the doing at all. It’s important, too, but it is nishma which is often overlooked. Nishma is in a way the call to neshama, the call to soul as well as body, to internal as well as external growth and work. i invite you to recall the sensation of being listened to and carry that with you into your life, to remember to pause the na’aseh, the six work days, for a short rest in nishma and neshama, in soulful listening, to yourself, to those around you and to God..
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