Listening to What Often Seems Absurd

Sigmund Freud deserves fame as the teacher
of what’s mistakenly defined by most of his supporters as a “talking cure.”
To be effective its most vital feature
is not the talking about facts which patients feel are true yet can’t be really sure,
but that there’s somebody out there who listens
to them. Talking may alleviate our pain because our feelings and our words are heard.
Talk unfreezes us with mental frissons,
released from mental prisons where we’d lost our freedom due to thoughts that were absurd.
Therapeutic as the Freudian couch is
our listening process — even when we’re lying down, we’re told in Deuteronomy! —
troubled less by thoughts that lead to grouches
when we are being heard not just by God but other listeners with bonhomie.

Inspired by an article by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks on the Shema, a prayer based on a text in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, “To Lead is to Listen,” posthumously published on Shabbat Eiqev 5781, 7/28/21. The prayer’s name, “Shema” means “listen.”

In Judaism listening is a deeply spiritual act. To listen to God is to be open to God. That is what Moses is saying throughout Devarim: “If only you would listen.” So it is with leadership – indeed with all forms of interpersonal relationship. Often the greatest gift we can give someone is to listen to them….

Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz and went on to create a new form of psychotherapy based on “man’s search for meaning,” once told the story of a patient of his who phoned him in the middle of the night to tell him, calmly, that she was about to commit suicide. He kept her on the phone for two hours, giving her every conceivable reason to live. Eventually she said that she had changed her mind and would not end her life. When he next saw the woman he asked her which of his many reasons had persuaded her to change her mind. “None,” she replied. “Why then did you decide not to commit suicide?” She replied that the fact that someone was prepared to listen to her for two hours in the middle of the night convinced her that life was worth living after all.

Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.