Dvarim -- 5774

“You talking to me?” Travis Bickel famously asks in the film Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976).  The children of Israel could well ask Moses the same question in this week’s parsha, Dvarim.

Moses begins the Book of Deuteronomy with a long soliloquy.  He recounts how the Generation of the Wilderness doubted God’s promise and was condemned to wander in the wilderness.  “Yet you refused to go up, and flouted the command of your God.  You sulked in your tents and said, ‘It is out of hatred for us that God brought us out of the land of Egypt, to hand us over to the Amorites to wipe us out’ (Deuteronomy 1:26-27).”   But Moses is actually speaking 39 years after that betrayal, and the people he’s talking to aren’t that first generation, but rather their children.  “Moreover, your little one who you said would be carried off, your children who do not yet know good from bad, they shall enter it; to them will I give it and they shall possess it (1:39).”  It is to these children, now grown, that Moses is speaking in Deuteronomy, not their faithless parents.  Yet he seems not to be aware of that fact.  He cannot see who the people right in front of him actually are.  Moses is stuck in the past.

Sometimes, the people we think we’re talking to are not the people we are actually talking to.  Our own needs may be clouding our ability to listen and process.  We may be projecting our expectations onto the other person.  Or the other person may be dealing with a situation about which we are entirely unaware.  All these keep us from clear, direct communication.

As I rabbi, I experience this regularly.  People sometimes assume I hold a certain belief.  People sometimes assume I’m judging them.  They are not speaking to Rabbi Dean Shapiro, but with their childhood rabbi, or their image of what a rabbi “ought” to be, or with their own guilty conscience.  There’s not much I can do about their projection onto me except be aware of it. 

It’s helpful to pause before beginning a conversation, to take stock of our emotions and our expectations.  It’s helpful to think through our hopes and needs from the communication (these are not the same thing).  It’s helpful to identify the person to whom we’re speaking as they truly are.

In these ways, we talk to, not past, each other.