I drove past them: A reservist’s struggle to love Haredim

A Hebrew version of this essay appeared in the Carmei Zion Shabbat newsletter for Parshat Ekev.

While driving across northern Israel during my last stint of reserve duty, I saw two ultra-Orthodox men trying to hitch a ride at the roadside. I had stopped for soldiers. I had stopped for kids. I did not stop for them.

How do you love a brother you are furious at? One who won’t share the burden you and your family carry? I’ve come to think the answer is hidden in a single Hebrew word that runs through Parshat Ekev.

Parshat Ekev is a parsha of listening. “And it shall be, because you listen” (v’haya ekev tishme’un); “And it shall be, if you truly listen” (v’haya im shamo’a tishme’u); and further, “Hear, O Israel, you are crossing the Jordan today to come and possess.” Again and again, our future in the Land of Israel is made conditional upon listening. Listening is the condition for dwelling in the Land: we hold onto the Land by listening.

But what kind of listening? Rabbi Jacob Leiner, author of the Beit Yaakov, taught in his essay on Rosh Chodesh Menachem Av that hearing runs deeper than seeing. With a glance we take in the surface; only when we make ourselves small in order to listen do we uncover the inwardness.

So there are two kinds of listening: and truly, one. The listening of Ekev is between a person and God: listening to God and obeying the commandments (bein adam la’Makom). The Beit Yaakov indeed spoke of this listening. But it seems to me that the very same principle holds also between a person and his fellow (bein adam l’chavero): to shrink or even contract our innerselves (and our egos) to make room to hear the other. This is the listening that turns a stranger into a brother. The same root, the same faculty.

Rabbi David Levi taught that hearing precedes seeing (Hearing Before Seeing). Moshe Rabbeinu opened with hearing — “Hear, O Israel,” and “And it shall be, because you listen” — and concluded at the opening of Parshat Re’eh, “See, I set before you today.” Only one who has first listened diligently merits seeing properly.

Through listening, we see. “All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God” (Psalms 98). The Pri Tzadik teaches (Purim, 4) that precisely when Israel was on the verge of losing hope, “great mourning among the Jews, and fasting, and weeping, and wailing” (Esther 4:3), they saw salvation. Fascinatingly, he reads the phrase, “the ends of the earth,” not as other nations or a geographic location but as the nation of Israel, itself. Precisely because the Jews of the Purim story were in such a desperate and terror-filled place, facing genocide at the hands of the evil Haman, they were saved.

Who among us did not dread that terror on Simchat Torah – Shmini Atzeret 5783 (Oct. 7, 2023)? Despite the terrible anguish of that day and despite the painful price of the war that continues to this day, what did we glimpse through the darkness? What did we see? Reshit tzmichat geulateinu – the beginning of the flowering of our salvation. We believers who serve in the IDF have heard what the prophet Elijah called the “still, small voice” above the deafening roar. It is heralding the first flowering of our redemption. We have heard the voice. Yet we still have not seen full salvation. But we know that we will see it. We pray it will arrive soon.

Back to that roadside. I looked at them through the window. I saw. I did not listen. I, who seek to hear the shofar cry of redemption, the still small voice, would not trouble myself to hear the hassid at the side of the road. How can I hold onto the Land with such selective listening?

My very real grievance remains: they did not serve and my family and I paid the price.

There is a well-known Israeli song by Naomi Shemer, sharing a teaching from Reb Nachman of Breslov that has become almost a second anthem of longing for the Land. Its melody is simple and unforgettable, and what it asks of us is not to look but to listen: every shepherd has his own tune, and every blade of grass its own song. The idea unfolds in stages. From the songs of the grasses, the shepherd’s own tune is formed. When we quiet ourselves enough to hear those songs, it becomes sweet to pray among them and joyfully serve God. And as the heart fills with that song, it begins to yearn toward the Land of Israel until, finally, from the song of the grass the melody of the heart is formed.

Notice what Reb Nachman asks of us: one cannot receive the grass’s song by looking at the field. You have to listen. Each blade, each Jew, carries his or her own melody. Yet the whole only becomes music when we make ourselves small enough to hear each singular voice.

If I cannot love every single blade of grass and hear its own particular song, then I cannot be whole.

Let us pray that we possess a listening heart. I am not offering the pity of one who looks down on my brothers, but the mercy of longing. My heart breaks that our brothers and sisters stand at the dawn with their eyes closed. They do not hear the sound of the shofar. We all pay the price.

Perhaps this is the very danger against which our Parsha warns us. “Guard yourself, lest you forget the Lord your God… lest you eat and be satisfied and build good houses… and your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God…” (Deuteronomy 8:11–14). Satiety itself endangers listening. It is precisely the goodness of the Land that tempts us to stop listening — listening between humankind and God, and between fellow people.

It is chilling to consider that a breakdown of precisely these two types of listening brought about the destruction of both Holy Temples in Jerusalem: the first when we ceased listening to the voice of God. The second when we ceased listening to one another, because of baseless hatred.

In a lecture at Yeshiva University, Rav Soloveitchik recounted that Rav Kook danced with the early pioneers of pre-State Israel, who took pride in their heresy, because he heard holiness in their devotion to the creation of a modern State in Israel. “If we were destroyed through baseless hatred,” Rav Kook wrote, “we will be rebuilt through baseless love” (Orot HaKodesh, vol. 3).

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg taught about the Ohel of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He shared that its holiness is not only from the righteous ones (tzaddikim) buried there, but from the people who gather to it — Jews of every background and every mode of dress, whole and broken alike. Their very togetherness is itself holy.

May it be God’s will that we merit to hear and love one another so we can again stand as one nation, with one heart, just as we did at Mount Sinai.