Hearing What We Cannot See

This week's portion opens as Moses resumes his parting soliloquy to the nation. He points out that remaining loyal to the Sinai Creed was the surest way to ensure the continuity of the G-dly flow of energy in his absence. He doesn't over-promise however. He is well aware that the "signal" of the G-DLY broadcast would be inferior without the powerful MOSES BOOSTER that he brought "to the table."

I think this might be one of the reasons there is a noticeable effort to use the action verb of "Hearing." I say noticeable only because in each of those instances the text would have flowed more naturally with the use of the word "Doing" or "Observing" (as in other similar biblical exhortations, "IF YOU WILL FOLLOW MY STATUTES ETC. then I will reward you ...etc.") It might be that the focus on HEARING is an observation on the unexpected spiritual rewards that surface when the visual, more frontal nature of the Man/G-d dialectic is replaced by an auditory one.

Though "seeing" would score higher than "hearing" in the sensory hierarchy, given the more "tactile" quality one would ascribe to the former over the latter, there are ways that "HEARING," which is the "entry point" to understanding and comprehension, offers us an altogether different KIND of proximity to "the subject at hand."

A beautiful quote from an unusual and delightful (rather pricey) book titled "Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature" by Angela Leighton drove this point home for me. "As well as being invisible, altering noise, sound is also a physical object which literally touches the ear when heard. At some frequencies, this might be unbearable." As Murray Schafer points out in The Soundscape, “Hearing and touch meet where the lower frequencies of audible sound pass over to tactile vibrations. Hearing is a way of touching at a distance.”

It is worth noting that MOSES was not asking the Jewish people to embrace a revolutionary paradigm of spirituality in a vacuum. Moses was speaking from the gut. From the place of his own deepest pain and longing. For MOSES, the reality that he was going to die without ever having stepped foot into Israel was for him akin to coming to terms with a permanent unrequited love.

And yet, on some level, the knowledge that he had brought his people to the border, knowing they would enter, offered him a different form of consummating that love. He WOULD enter the land of Israel through his ongoing bond with those who would actually cross the border. (much like the parent who remains with the child after seeing them off on a flight to a foreign country. Though they cannot go past the customs areas and certainly can't board the flight, they are with their child wherever they are.)

I bless you and me and all of us with the gift of being able to truly "hear" (... to really get it on some level is a hearing that offers us a glimpse, a different kind of seeing!) whatever it is in our life that we are looking for but still have not found and thus cannot see.