It’s good to listen

Maybe it’s coincidence — probably it’s coincidence — but two people I talked to for stories this week, two people who are about as unalike as it’s possible to be, said basically the same thing.

One is Jonathan Gribetz, a rigorously trained academic who has degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Columbia, and now teaches at Princeton. He’s modern Orthodox and grew up in Englewood.

The other is Tuvia Tenenbom, more than 20 years older, born in Jerusalem to a charedi family but no longer practicing. He’s not an academic but a reporter, theater director, and writer.

Both of them talked about listening to other people.

Dr. Gribetz is a historian. By definition, although he’s a modern historian, still most of his human sources are dead; he works mainly with the documents and other artifacts they leave behind.

Tuvia’s work as a journalist and writer more obviously involves listening, but the kind of immersive projects he undertakes, which have him living surrounded by people not like him — the charedim he wrote about most recently, from the world that first gave him life, are not nearly as foreign to him as the Syrian refugees and non-coastal-elite Americans and other groups in which he embedded himself for earlier work — also demand careful and nonstop listening. It’s not just for the length of an interview. It’s for a whole year.

Both of them, in different words but with the same meaning, say that in the end, people are people.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some who are so evil or so damaged that they’re outside normal bounds, or for that matter maybe there are some who are so saintly that they’ve slipped those bonds in the other direction, but those people are exceedingly rare.

Most people are people. They’re the product of their families, their times, and their circumstances. When you listen to them carefully — when you open your heart and your brain and your ears — you might hear echoes of your own life.

That doesn’t mean that at bottom all people are the same, all disagreements are silly, and all conflicts can be ended with a hug and a handshake.

But it does mean that when you listen, you might be surprised at what you hear.

And that’s a good way to think in the month of Elul, as we approach the holidays.

—JP