Seeing One Another

This week, while reading Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt’s incredibly important book, Biased: uncovering the hidden prejudice that shapes what we see, think, and do, I was struck by her account of teaching inmates in San Quentin. She was really reluctant to hand them back their term-papers with all of her corrections - she had virtually covered them in red ink. She tried to soft-pedal it to them, hoping that she wouldn’t crush them with some constructive criticism. Here are her reflections:

“Some of us are doing life,” one student reminded me. “I think we can handle a little red-pen criticism.”

I handed back the papers. Their heads went down to study my comments. After some time, their heads lifted, and some seemed moved to near tears. “I just can’t even believe it,” one man said. “Somebody sat down and spent all this time on my paper, thinking of what would make it better and how I can improve. That’s never happened to me before.” 

I offered them the chance to turn in a second draft for feedback, before the final version was due. And every student in the class took me up on that—even though incorporating my suggestions meant rewriting fifteen-page papers by hand, starting from scratch with a pencil and a sheaf of notebook paper. I critiqued those, and they rewrote them a third time. They were hungry for rare validation and driven to be heard. (Page 125)

We live in a crisis of seeing and listening. We look at the same thing and say it is different. We look at each other and don’t feel seen. And we speak to each other and we don’t feel heard.

Moses felt the same thing in this week’s Torah reading, when he tried to speak to the Ancient Israelites: “Moses spoke to the Descendants of Israel, but they did not listen.” (Exodus 6:9)

Moses can’t convince the Israelites or Pharaoh, God can’t convince Moses. No one gets fully seen or heard. Pharaoh’s heart is hardened and the Israelites don’t listen because they are impaired by their “shortness of spirit and the difficulty of their oppression” (Exodus 6:9).

What can we do?

The answer is in Dr. Eberhardt’s experience at San Quentin. Show people that we take them seriously, that we hear them, that we care. This is not easy. Like Dr. Eberhardt we are often concerned about what we would feel in someone else’s shoes as opposed to seeing them for who they are and where they are.

Let’s go into this Shabbat, this special weekend celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and leading up to the inauguration of President-Elect Joe Biden, with a spirit of listening and seeing and softening our hearts. Let us give one another the opportunity to show each other who we are. Let us be open to one another. Let us begin to overcome our own preconceptions and see what it would be like to listen in our hearts.

Wishing all of you a Shabbat Shalom, a good weekend, and a better, healthier, safer 2021 for all,

Rabbi Jonathan