The Stories We Need to Hear

Opening ourselves up to receive the Torah of others

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

As we begin Shavuot, the holiday that commemorates the receiving of Torah at Mount Sinai, I think about the Torah that I need to learn right now.

When there are people we do not know, we find basic or generalized terms with which to define them. Often, there is a political motivation for smoothing out the complexities and painting a simple black and white picture. For instance, over the course of many days in 2019, we read about the violent mob surging toward the southern border of the US, and Trump wanted to be sure that we felt afraid and ready to lock our doors. But that’s not who they were, and many people I know who went to the border came back with so many stories of the people fleeing from violence, not inciting it.

This is just one example of reducing a people into a single story. Before I went to India with American Jewish World Service (AJWS) in 2015, I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s incredible TED talk on “The Danger of a Single Story”. She says that to create a single story is “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” Unfortunately, as Jews, our history has made that point clear repeatedly with tragic consequences. And we see it happening all over the world. It is the prerogative of those with more power to decide on what story to tell, how to tell it and what to include, a practice which has the potential to leave out crucial information, usually by design.

I think back to that trip to India. Among all the stories I heard, I was most captivated by those whose voices were intentionally suppressed: young girls at risk of child marriage, gay and transgender people and sex workers. When we went to Kolkata, for instance, I was faced with a moral challenge that pitted some of my greatest values against each other. When we met with sex workers and visited the organizations that help them get loans and medical care, I had and still have a difficult time accepting that sex work is legitimate work because I believe it is yet another way patriarchal societies devalue and objectify women, and especially when it remains underground. Yet hearing the stories of how some of these women created a life for themselves and earned a living wage, more than if they were housekeepers, often in order to care for their children and create a better life, I could understand it as a true story of women’s empowerment. It was not easy to reconcile those ideas. But the only way I could deal with the conflicts I felt was to take these women at their word. To choose to give the story of their lives more consequence than my inner conflicts.

Over the past week, I have been collecting personal stories about a place that I have deep connections: Israel. While the news seems to favor statistics and paints a particular picture from a limited perspective, I find it more helpful to hear stories of real people. It is they who are living with the decisions their leaders make in their name. Accounts of putting kids to bed in shelters in Israel, and those about families without adequate shelter because of failed leadership in Gaza. I have been appreciating Leah Solomon’s personal narratives about interacting with people like the grocer and sharing his response to what’s happening as it relates to access to vegetables to sell and the new signs up at the neighborhood hummus restaurant announcing it has a Jewish owner despite its Arabic name. It is all too easy to reduce a situation to a single narrative without hearing multiple stories.

While listening to Morning Addition on Thursday, I had my heart broken by the very human account of two people who are living through the current conflict. They are friends, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who met through a group called Parents Circle, a group for people who have lost children in the ongoing conflict. It may not have been the best thing to listen to because I’m sure a few tears ended up in my smoothie as I mixed the ingredients. Politicians using the conflict to advance their position, terrorists of Hamas using the innocent to advance theirs.

I am hardly impartial but I am on the side of humanity and human rights, and we are far from a situation that allows people to live with dignity. This violence is taking civilian lives including children and is unacceptable and unbearable. Listening to these two people who have both been through the unfathomable experience of the violent death of a child brought me great hope. They have every reason to regard the other as an enemy and yet they have formed a real friendship. Their common enemy is the conflict, and though they did not say this explicitly, the occupation as well, and their common goal is peace. I believe that listening to stories of others is a powerful way to understand because the media’s portrayals are often misleading.

As the Jewish people prepare to celebrate Shavuot and spiritually receive Torah again, I think not only about the stories coming from Israel and Gaza but also the ones we tell and the ones we choose to hear. The Torah was given in the desert, in a place that is vast and viewed as ownerless.  Our ancient Rabbis taught in the Midrash that a person must make themselves like the desert in order to receive wisdom and Torah. How do we do that? We need to let go of judgements, of society’s expectations of us or of unreasonable expectations of ourselves. Isn’t social media all about presenting ourselves in a curated way that we only tell part of the story? How much of our authentic selves do we put out there to others? When it comes to what we learn, are we part of an echo chamber that repeats only our own ideas back to us or do we allow ourselves to hear new perspectives?   

We need to open ourselves to encountering Torah and engaging with the stories of others so we can learn and grow as human beings. It is often the stories we do not want to hear, or the ones that make us the most uncomfortable, that challenge what we believe, and that lead to the most growth. 

This holiday, I am praying for peace, for an end to violence and needless killing. I am committing myself to making sure I do not allow the single story to shape my ideas and values. In service of that, I will do my best not to shy away from the difficult conversations and open myself to greater understanding.

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