Asking and Listening

Ernesto Sirolli is a special kind of management consultant.  He helps guide communities to fulfill their own passions, to achieve the most success possible with their own ideas. 

In a TED talk that he gave, he told a funny story about when he was in his twenties and he traveled from Italy to the Zambezi valley in Africa as part of a relief organization, the goal of which was to help the African communities grow food.

So they traveled to Africa and arrived at the valley which had beautiful soil, good sunlight, but no agriculture.  The Italian group set themselves up, had brought Italian seeds with them, said to the locals, we want you to show up and we will tell you how to plant the seeds and have successful agriculture.

The locals by and large did not show up.  The relief organization offered them with money to show up.  A few showed up.  They planted tomato seeds.  Over the next months the plants grew and produced big, beautiful tomatoes, bigger than any produced in Italy.  The Italians were so excited.

The tomatoes were just about fully ripe.   Everyone went to sleep.  

During the night, 200 hippos emerged from the river and ate all the tomatoes.  The next morning, one of the locals said to one of the leaders of the relief agency, this is why we don’t have agriculture in the valley.

The leader asked, why didn’t you tell us about the hippos?

And the local said, you never asked.

Sirolli told this story to illustrate how easy it is not to ask and not to listen, but of course, how important it is to ask.  How important it is to listen.

I want to challenge us to think carefully about our own lives, about all the times that we approach our loved ones - our spouses, our parents, our siblings, our children - with plans and expectations - without asking them what they think, what they want, what they need, or where the hippos are.

Imprisoned By Our Own Bitterness

I want to talk a bit about bitterness, specifically how our bitterness can destroy us.  I promise I’ll get there, but first, a word about my grandmother.

"Joseph and His Brothers," Anton Franz Maulbertsch, 1745

My grandmother lived with us during her final years and she used to love to come to synagogue every week.  She enjoyed following the stories in the Torah.  I sometimes sat next to her and she would would lovingly, with humor, offer advice to the characters in the stories. Of course we read the same stories each year, but she would jokingly advise the characters to act differently this time around so they would avoid their terrible fate.  

When we got to the story about Joseph each year, she would urge him, Joseph - don’t brag so much in front of your brothers. Remember what they did to you last year?

Of course each year when we read the story, it plays out the same way.  Joseph ignores my grandmother’s advice and brags to his brothers.  They throw him into a pit and sell him into slavery.  And when there’s a famine in the land of Canaan, the brothers go down to Egypt and whom do they face, asking for food?  Their brother Joseph, whom they don’t recognize because it’s been awhile and he looks different.  

He looks Egyptian.  New haircut, new outfit.

Joseph is bitter.  How could he not be?  He is looking at the people who initially left him to die and then sold him into slavery.  How could he not be bitter?

Living as a Jew in the World

Off the coast of India is an island where the inhabitants have lived relatively undisturbed for generations.  They are hunter-gatherers, they speak a language that is not comprehensible to anyone else, and they have had almost no encounters with the rest of the world.  The island was in the news recently.  It seems a young Christian missionary came to the island, tried to teach Bible, and it didn’t end well for him.  You can find the details in the media if you’d like.

Joseph in Egypt

A few days ago I told our third and fourth graders about the island, leaving out what happened to the man who visited, and I asked them, was there every a time when the Jewish community as a whole lived completely apart from other types of people?  I wanted them to think about Jewish history and if Jews as a whole were ever as isolated from outside influences as the people on this island near India have been.


One said - yes, when we were in Egypt.   And I said, it’s true that the Israelites lived in a separate area, called Goshen, but did we have anything to do with Egyptians and other people?  And the student said, “Yeah I guess we did.”

If you think about it, you will probably agree that Jews have never lived in complete isolation from other people.  Wherever we lived, we have been exposed to other cultures including: Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, French, Spanish, American.

Hanukkah begins tomorrow night.  The part of the story about Hanukkah that interests me the most has to do with the way our ancestors handled a different culture, in this case Greek culture.  There was a whole range of response to Greek culture - some said, we don’t want any part of it and they tried to isolate themselves.  Some changed their names, adopted Greek culture, and barely remained connected to Jewish tradition.  Some found a way to do both - to adopt the best practices of the Greeks but to find a way to stay true to Jewish tradition.  Call it tradition and change, call it creative adaptation.

I’m going to call it living as a Jew in the world.

And I’m going to ask us to think about ourselves in the United States in 2018.  What do we do to figure out how to live in this world as a Jew?  How much of American culture to adopt?  Which aspects of being Jewish are non-negotiable.  Meaning - I dress American, I eat American foods, I listen to American music.  But I also do x, y and z as a Jew and I won’t give those up and I don’t want my children and grandchildren to give those up. What is our x, y and z?  Do we have limits?  Is everything up for grabs?