There was a man who visited his friend in a far-off town once a year. When he arrived one year, he was shocked to find a towering tree in his friend’s backyard, standing well over sixty feet tall. Most puzzling, though, was the fact that just last year there had been no trace of such a tree, not as much as a small sapling. Perplexed, he asked his friend, “I was here just a year ago, and this tree wasn’t here. What happened? Did you plant a fully-grown tree in your yard?” His friend smiled and explained, “This is the Chinese bamboo tree, a very rare and unique tree. Once you plant it, you must water it every day and make sure it has adequate sunlight. If you miss even a single day, the seed will die. For five whole years, you must tend to the plant diligently, without seeing a single inch of growth for your efforts. But once you’ve cared for the seed for five years, the tree grows at an accelerated rate, expanding exponentially over the course of just a few months to a staggering height of over sixty feet.” The man was shocked to hear this, and as he and his friend walked away, he began to ponder the meaning of this strange tree. He eventually asked out loud, “Does the tree take five months to grow? Or five years?”
What Is the Deeper Meaning of Shema?
When Yaakov Avinu is finally reunited with Yosef after twenty-two years of separation, in what can only be imagined as an intensely emotional scene, Yaakov embraces Yosef, sobbing on his neck (Bereishis 46:29). Rashi, quoting the Midrash, explains that as Yaakov embraced Yosef for the first time in twenty-two years, he was saying k’rias Shema. What is the meaning of this? Why not wait until after this joyful and emotional reunion with his long-lost son to pray? The answer often given is that Yaakov was overcome by intense emotion and wanted to channel this emotion toward Hashem through reciting k’rias Shema. However, there may be a deeper layer here as well.
This practice of reciting Shema at seemingly puzzling moments occurs once again in Parashas Vayechi. Before Yaakov’s death, he gathers his children to his bedside and attempts to tell them when and how Mashiach (the ultimate redemption) will eventually come (Bereishis 49:1). However, as the Gemara (Pesachim 56a) explains, at that very moment, Yaakov lost access to his nevuah and was unable to reveal this secret. When this happened, he was gripped by fear, worried that perhaps his inability to share his prophetic knowledge was due to a spiritual deficiency in one of his children; perhaps one of his children was not worthy of receiving this information.
Immediately, in order to relieve this concern, the shevatim declared in unison, “Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad!” Only after this declaration did Yaakov understand that his inability to see the keitz ha’yamim (the days of Mashiach) was not due to a lack in his children but rather because Hashem did not want to reveal these secrets at this point in time. Yaakov then proclaimed out loud, “Baruch shem kevod malchuso le’olam va’ed.”
What is the meaning of this exchange? How did the brothers assuage Yaakov’s concerns by reciting Shema? How did this prove that there was no lack in his children? In order to address these questions, let us delve into the spiritual concepts of seeing and hearing.
The Spiritual Concepts of Seeing and Hearing
The spiritual concept of seeing is the idea of observing something as it is, i.e., in a completely static state, lacking any movement. When you see a picture, you grasp the entire image instantaneously. There’s no process of constructing or building the picture in your mind; everything is just there, at once, without any effort.
The spiritual concept of hearing, in comparison, reflects a process; a movement through time; an evolutionary progression; one of effort, concentration, and organization of parts. When you hear someone else speaking, you must collect all the pieces of sound together and then reconstruct them into a connected picture within your mind so that you can grasp their meaning. (When you read a sentence or witness a process, you are experiencing the spiritual concept of “hearing,” despite the fact that you are using your “eyes.”)
Hearing is a process of creating oneness out of fragmented parts. When you listen to someone talk, one word by itself lacks meaning and is forgotten. If you hear another few words, it still means nothing and fades to memory. The words from the past exist in a pool of knowledge and memory in your mind. You wait until the end of the sentence to give shape and meaning to the pool of words that created that sentence. When you finally finish listening to the sentence, you must then reach back into your memory and look at the sentence as a whole; only then does it gain meaning and clarity.
Speech exists only within time, where there’s a sequence of one word after another. If someone spoke all the words at once, you wouldn’t hear anything; it would just be noise. [At Matan Torah, Hashem originally spoke all ten dibros at once. This is because Hashem does not exist within time, so in that case, speech as well did not exist within time.] Thus, listening entails gathering disparate pieces into oneness. This is why the word Shema, which means “listen,” also means to “gather,” as we see when the pasuk (Shmuel I 15:4) says “Va’yeshama Shaul es ha’am.” This can’t mean that Shaul “heard” the nation before war; it means that Shaul “gathered” the nation before war to prepare for battle.
Clarity and Confusion
In addition to “static versus process” and “clarity versus creating clarity,” there are several other fundamental differences between the concepts of seeing and hearing. Seeing is more reliable, while hearing is always questionable. This is why the Hebrew word for seeing, “re’iyah,” shares the same root with the word for proof, “raayah.” Witnesses must see an event with their own eyes; hearing isn’t enough (or at least doesn’t carry the same weight). As the saying goes, “seeing is believing”; when you see something, it is far more convincing than hearing about it. (It’s important to state that even seeing is subjective, and one’s physical perception does not reveal a thing’s true nature. However, relative to hearing, seeing is more objective. For more on the topic of subjectivity and the limitations of physical perception, see chapter on Parashas Chukas, “Intellect Provides Limited Knowledge.”) Furthermore, seeing occurs outside of oneself; in other words, your experience of sight is perceived as something external, not something occurring within you. If you look at someone, you don’t perceive them to be inside of you but rather to be outside of you. Hearing, on the other hand, is something that you perceive as taking place within you. Let’s try to explain this.
Hearing is a very difficult process; it requires memory and reconstruction of many different parts. It takes place within you; you have to put the words together yourself, one small fragment at a time. When you’re listening, words are received in small pieces, and you need to reconstruct it inside your head. You recall the fragments and create the picture or sentence inside of your head. This is why hearing is so subjective, because each person is reconstructing their own picture inside their own mind. This is of course why no two people ever hear the same thing. If you’ve ever been to a shiur or lecture with a friend, you know that you usually come out with different perceptions. This is because, during the reconstruction phase, we project our own worldviews and perceptions onto the words that we’re trying to reconstruct. We therefore end up reconstructing what we think the person said or meant, instead of reconstructing what was actually meant by the original speaker. This is also why so many mistakes can occur during the learning process. The goal of hearing and learning is to get past the words that are being spoken and get back to the inner meaning behind them. You might think a word refers to one thing, while the speaker uses that very same word for something else entirely. Genuine listening requires negating our own ego and ownership over truth and understanding what the speaker truly means. This is true of all forms of communication, especially in relationships.
Olam Haba vs. Olam Hazeh
The relationship between seeing and hearing reflects the relationship between Olam Haba and Olam Hazeh. This world is a place of movement and process, of change and growth, which reflects the process of hearing. In this world, you get to choose who you’ll become. Olam Haba is the place of being, where you experience the ecstasy of everything you’ve built, and thus reflects the concept of seeing, static and unmoving. No longer can you move or become, but instead, you enjoy everything you created during your life in Olam Hazeh.
Weekday vs. Shabbos
Another manifestation of this principle is the relationship between Shabbos and the six days of the week. Throughout the week we build and grow, whereas on Shabbos we rest from creative activity, experiencing what we have accomplished during the week. (And more generally, where we experience the person we have become so far, after a lifetime of working on ourselves.) This is why the Gemara (Berachos 57b) says that Shabbos is “me’ein Olam Haba – A taste of the World to Come.” Just as Olam Haba is the place where we enjoy everything we have built in this world, Shabbos is the time where we enjoy everything we have built during the week.
This explains a seemingly strange pasuk regarding Matan Torah (the receiving of the Torah). The pasuk (Shemos 20:15) says that when Hashem gave us the Torah, “Ro’im es ha’kolos,” we “saw the sounds.” Of course, we don’t see sounds; we hear them. What, then, does this mean?
This world is a place of movement, a place of “hearing.” In this world, we build our “selves”: we learn, we work, we grow, we become. The spiritual realm is devoid of movement. It is a place of static perfection, of “seeing,” of being. It is in Olam Haba that we experience everything that we built and actualized while in Olam Hazeh. Matan Torah was an experience of Olam Haba taking place within this world. At Matan Torah, we transcended the physical world of time and space; we all became prophets and experienced the infinite spiritual nature of reality. In such a dimension, there is no hearing or movement, only sight. Therefore, sounds weren’t heard; they were seen. Movement became static, becoming became being.
In our next article, we will delve deeper into this fascinating topic and try to understand it on an even deeper level. In the meantime, may we all be inspired to continue to embark on the journey of becoming our ultimate selves!
