Learning to ‘listen’ and not just ‘hear’

It was silence of such magnitude and such power, I was sure that even the angels in heaven were standing still. I remember it like it was yesterday.

On the day after Shavuot — the festival that commemorates the moment 3,000 years ago when an entire people stood in silent awe at the foot of Sinai — time stopped on a road in Gush Etzion. An innocent drive home, on a beautiful road in the mountains of Judea, was cut short by gunfire and Sarah Blaustein, of blessed memory, mother, wife and beloved neighbor, would never hear the sweet sounds of her children again.

That night in 2001, 10,000 people came to the cemetery in Gush Etzion to bid her farewell. Ten thousand people make a lot of noise, but cemeteries have a way of making people quieter, and a funeral at night, under such painful circumstances, has a way of making time stand still.

There were muffled sobs and many tears, but no one uttered a word as the coffin was carried to the freshly dug grave. My wife and I stood behind Shaul Goldstein, the mayor of Gush Etzion; he was not up front with a microphone, he was simply there as a neighbor of Sarah’s from the nearby town of Daniel, paying his last respects. I doubt he even knew Sarah, especially as she had only immigrated to Israel a short nine months before from Lawrence, but we were all neighbors nonetheless.

And as Sarah’s husband bid his own farewell to his beloved wife, and we listened to the painful words of his parting eulogy, we noticed that Shaul Goldstein was crying.

There were no cameras, it was not a ‘photo-op’, and I doubt anyone else even noticed, but it is a moment that has stayed with me. There, beneath the stars, in the shadow of the mountains of Gush Etzion, where 2,200 years earlier the Maccabees had fought the armies of the Greek empire, and where 50 years ago the Etzion bloc fell while the world was silent, 10,000 of us, heard the pain of our fellow Jews, and just listened.

What does it really mean to listen?

This week we will read the portion of Yitro, and relive the experience of the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.