What Kind of People do We Want to Be

Moderator, Marcia Pally: opening remarks

Dr. Carol Gilligan: Well, so there's no mystery about it. I've just returned from Israel, where I was involved in the journey to peace of “Women Wage Peace,” an extraordinary organisation that began in 2014 after the Gaza War, where a group of women got together and said, basically, this cannot go on. This has to stop. This must stop. And then they said, we need a new language. We need a different voice. And women must be involved in every step of the negotiation. 

So they committed themselves. In 2014, they gave themselves four years to persuade their political leaders to reach an agreement to end the conflict. So you can count. Here we are in 2017. And this year, they had a journey to peace.

And I think it's the journey to peace. First of all, what's extraordinary and related to what you said, Marcia, is “Women Wage Peace” involves women across all the divisions - Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, young women and old women, religious women and secular women, women from moderate settlements and women from Tel Aviv. And the first thing that they said is they need a non-binary language, that is a language that everyone that doesn't contain the oppositions, but a language that can open the way to a different kind of listening.

So the event that I just came back from was held in the Judean Desert, way down near the Dead Sea, near the Jordan River, in Area C of Israel where Palestinians can come without a permit. And they built these two really huge tents because there were thousands of women. I wish I could show you the picture, but you can Google it and see it.

And the tent was a tent of reconciliation, which was to reconcile the children of the foremothers, Sarah and Hagar. And so I mean, as an example of covenant and listening, this was an experience. I mean, I'm still, I just was writing something about it.

And I confess that there's a moment in every day where on my computer or on my phone, I call up this photograph of this march, because it was so hopeful. And it was, Rabbi, so joyous, really all of the women. 

Rabbi Sacks: I think that's an absolutely terrific story. And it's just a beautiful illustration of what you've written about for so long and what I found and other people have found life-changing. 

And it's a lesson we need within the Jewish community. I remember way back in 2000, at the Hebrew University, I organised a big conference to see if we could bring religious and secular and the different strands of Judaism together.

And we had academics from all strands in Israel and from 16 different countries, from Harvard, from Princeton, from Yale. And they covered all the strands and all the ways of thinking. After two days, I said to Elaine, ‘You know, there's good news and bad news about the Jewish people. The good news is we're among the world's best speakers.’ 

Carol: The world's best what? 

Rabbi Sacks: Speakers. 

‘The bad news is we're probably the world's worst listeners.’

There was actually no listening going on at all. And I thought to myself, this is actually a spiritual problem. And I want to explain why.

You would have thought that for a religion with 613 commands, there has to be a biblical word that means to obey. In biblical Hebrew, there is no word that means to obey. And the absence of this word was so acute that when Ben-Yehuda restored Hebrew as a spoken language in the 19th century and needed a word that means obey, he chose the word ‘letzayet,’ which is an Aramaic word, not a Hebrew one.

What word does the Bible have instead of to obey? Shema, 

Carol: To listen.

Rabbi Sacks: which means to listen, to hear, to understand, to internalise, and to respond indeed. So Shema Yisrael, the key and fundamental mitzvah of Judaism, is to learn how to listen. In fact, in my Siddur, the Koren Siddur, you will see in order to emphasise it, I translated Shema Yisrael not as “Hear O Israel,” as it's usually translated, but “Listen O Israel.”

Now, we saw the, I had the incredible gift… I am one of the world's worst listeners, but I had the incredible blessing to be married to Elaine, who is undoubtedly one of the world's greatest listeners, and who has taught me that listening really is a spiritual art. 

And one of the things I found it difficult to explain to non-Jews is that as a Chief Rabbi, I had to obviously, as a religious leader, had to expound on the benefits of marriage. But because in Jewish law we have this problem of the agunah, the woman who can't get a divorce from her husband, and thus is a chained wife, a fair amount of my time was helping people to get divorced. 

So, we did a lot of stuff - prenuptial agreements, get legislation, all this stuff, communal sanctions against recalcitrant husbands, but it left us with some residual cases where the husband refused to give a divorce, and cases that had been going on for years and years and years. Every English court had failed, every rabbinical court had failed, and so I decided on a surprising tactic. 

I decided I'm going to mediate this with a lady who is a speech therapist - sadly no longer alive - who really was the world's most aerobic listener. And the two of us sat - but I mean obviously in order to get this to work, we had to - spent a few days making sure that the young couple would sit with us, with no lawyers, and no parents sitting in the room, and all the rest of it, and they agreed just to sit with the two of us, myself and a speech therapist, who'd never been engaged in marital or divorce counselling, because I knew she was the best listener I ever heard.

And she sat, we sat, for seven hours, and her listening drew all the poison out of that relationship. Until after seven hours, her sheer power of listening got the young man to give his wife a divorce, and thus free her. And she said to me after they left, “Jonathan, what a shame we didn't meet them three months ago, because if we had, we could have saved the marriage.” 

And that moment made me realise, in the most vivid way, how listening can solve the most seemingly intractable problem.

I think the world is short on listening today. I think the whole world has become Jewish, because you know what's happening on universities, they're shouting down or they’re banning speakers that they don't agree with in the name of ‘safe space.’ And the truth is a safe space is one where people who disagree with you listen to you with respect. And listening needs to be brought back into the world, and it will solve local conflicts, and even the most intractable of all, if Israelis and Palestinians, if Jews and Muslims can finally learn after all these years since Sarah and Hagar, the time has come to listen to one another. 

Marcia: One of the places that I've learned my lessons about listening is in inter-religious theology and inter-religious work, and so I'd like to bring the Reverend Joel Hunter's voice of what you just said, which is the first thing that you do when you talk to somebody you think you disagree with, or you hate, or you fear, is find out why the other side is for the other side. And that's a very kind of deep listening that can undo the entire structure of the kind of animosity that you just described. 

Is that what you found was going on with the various women you encountered, or in other places in the Middle East? 

Carol: You know, what was so striking to me about the “Women Wage Peace” is they really appreciated what was involved in listening.

I mean, how, in a sense, what it calls from in you to listen to somebody who you may disagree with, and one of the things that they came to, because they have thought so carefully about these questions, that's why I think I'm elected to speak in any sense for them. But one of the things they knew is that you had to start with what they call a non-binary language. 

In other words, you have to be very thoughtful about how you're going to cast the conversation, so that it is really a conversation which invites people to come into it, and it is a conversation where they can be listened to - I would put it - in their own voice, in their own terms. So, in other words, to enter the conversation doesn't mean they have to buy into your framework or your way of seeing the world.

So, for example, one of the things that's been very hard for them, they get criticised from the left because they won't use the word ‘settlement’ or ‘occupation,’ but because they want to include people who live in and there are women from the settlements who say if there's a peace agreement, we will move behind the Green Line, which is extraordinary, because the people who live there, that's not how they think about their world. 

So, you know, what I say to my students, and it really is effective, because it does shift your thing, is I say, ‘Notice what happens when you replace judgement with curiosity.’ 

So, instead of coming to you to sort of judge you, which means I'm going to see where you fit on my map of the world, I do what you've just talked about, which is I become very interested in how you see your world.

And I think, you know, for me personally, the more incomprehensible it is to me how somebody could see the world in a way that to me makes no sense, the more curious I become. 

How is it that from your point of view, this is how you look at the world? 

So, you know, when I talk about radical listening and meaning two things, which is that the word radical means ‘root.’ So, how do you listen for the question, where is this conversation coming from? Where is it rooted? In other words, you know, literally, where are its roots? How do you get to this? 

And then the other meaning of radical, which is transformative, that this is a conversation which could change things.

And as far as in my experience - and it really has been exhilarating - I have seen this group in Israel, this group of very diverse women, really struggling to have a conversation that could change things, because the one thing they are convinced of is that things have to change. They cannot go on in the way they have. So.

Rabbi Sacks: And of course, one of the things I think we were talking about before was Freud's troubled relationship with Judaism and Jewish values. And yet, I think - perhaps almost without realising it - Freud did one of the most Jewish things imaginable. He actually called psychoanalysis “the speaking cure.”

But actually psychoanalysis is the listening cure. And it is the act of listening that does cure and allow it. 

Carol: Yeah, I was going to say he said something in his studies on hysteria that was extraordinary, which was basically his studies of women.

He said the patient knows everything of pathological significance. In other words, everything of significance to her illness. But she may not know that she knows it.

So the only way that he, initially, this is in his early work, could come to know what he needed to know in order to help this other person was to listen for what she knew, but didn't know that she knew. 

Rabbi Sacks: And I don't know if you've noticed, but it actually affected the English language. Until relatively recently, every metaphor we had for knowing or understanding was basically visual.

We talk about foresight, hindsight, insight. We talk about somebody's perspective, somebody's point of view. We talk about a man of vision.

We talk, when you understand something, you say, ‘Ah, I see.’ And that is basically the Hellenistic tradition, which is very visually orientated. It's only once psychoanalysis came to America, that this new locution suddenly appeared in the English language - I hear you. I hear where you're coming from. 

And that is an unexpected consequence of psychoanalysis and the way it affected, as it were, the American soul and the American language.

And I just love the story that Viktor Frankl used to tell about when he was a psychotherapist in Vienna. And he had a patient who calmly called him up one night at two in the morning and said, “Dr. Frankl, I know you've treated me for several years and I respect you gratefully, but I have to tell you that all your therapy has failed, and I have decided that life isn't worth living and I'm going to commit suicide.”

And Frankl kept her on the phone for two hours, giving her reason after reason after reason to live. And after two hours, she said, “Dr. Frankl, you've changed my mind. I'm not going to commit suicide.” 

The next day, he went around to see her and said, “Which of my arguments persuaded you?”

And she said, “None of them. They were all total rubbish.”

So he said, “Why did you decide to live?”

She said, “The fact that somebody could listen to me for two hours in the middle of the night convinced me life was worth living.”

So, you know, if this can work at a micro level, it can work at a macro level. It's very delicate. It's easily disturbed and destroyed, but it is transformative. 

Marcia: I think this is one of the emerging outcomes of our print-centric building on what you were saying, our print-centric culture. There's my favourite 15th-century priest who worked in the Vatican - and how many of them, I mean, after all, do you have? - was Nicholas of Cusa, who objected to perspective in painting for its ocularcentrism, in that he held that it gave one visual perspective on things.

And not only that, it chose for you, the viewer, which perspective to have, whereas the earlier form of painting provided you with a landscape to choose what you were going to see. And he preferred, over ocularcentrism, the activity of listening, because it's a dialogue - at least if not a trialogue and beyond. 

Rabbi Sacks: I would add one point, actually, Marcia, and it's an interesting one, because you asked about interfaith dialogue as well.

There was one little essay, it's almost unknown, but should be widely known, by Franz Rosenzweig, called “The New Thinking,” in which he talked about speech thinking. And he contrasted two words that we often use interchangeably, dialogue and conversation. He said, platonic dialogue, you always know what's going to happen.

Socrates is going to meet a know-it-all. He's going to ask him a series of questions. At the end, the know-it-all will be so confused that he finally confesses. He doesn't know what he's talking about. And you know the end in advance, that’s dialogue. 

Whereas in conversation, you don't know how it's going to end. You don't know how it's going to go. You only know that in unpredictable ways, both of you will be changed at the end. 

Marcia: If this remarkable story about the couple is possible, and this remarkable story about these women is possible, how can we enlarge our practise of listening in society so that we do much more of that rather than sealing ourselves off in bubbles and in-groups and out- groups and finding - which I think is very pernicious - that I feel better when I dehumanise or stop listening or stop being curious about the other.

Carol: You know, it's funny because I find myself disagreeing with you, Marcia. I don't think anyone actually feels better when they do that. I mean, they may, I mean, it's almost like building a fence for yourself. And so you may feel protected by doing that. 

So I found myself wanting to add to this conversation that I think it's a huge - excuse me - I think it's a huge risk to listen to somebody. Meaning really to listen, meaning to open, you know, my view of the world to your experience and particularly - but of course it's true for anybody - your experience is different from my experience.

So, if I really go to you because I think - and I think you said this in the opening - that if I listen to you, I will learn something I don't know. Then I have to be willing to have, you know, to have my world shaken. So to me, the question about listening is what are the conditions in which, you know, can we venture forth to another person with that kind of curiosity or openness that we can really be interested in what their experience is, and willing to risk that we could learn something that could change it. I think that's the barrier to listening. I really do. 

Rabbi Sacks: And I think, you know, you almost, if I'm not mistaken, quite briefly, but very tantalisingly, in that book “In a Different Voice,” almost hinted that there was a difference here between a Hellenistic approach and a Hebraic approach.

Carol: You saw my Hebrew school coming out. 

Rabbi Sacks: It was, it was terrific stuff. And I think to myself, you know, we're not very good at listening within the Jewish community, but there are things that tradition has given us that make us more receptive to it, if only we can overcome our resistance.

Famously, for instance, we have right at the beginning of the Bible, two completely different accounts of Creation. What you were talking about in terms of perspective, you have completely, you know, Genesis 1, the view from nowhere, you know, the cosmos. And Genesis 2, the first man, the first woman, God is suddenly not up there. He's down there planting a garden, matchmaking - Oy, he's not married, let's make him a wife - and the whole stuff.

And, you know, you're constantly thrown into these different perspectives. I pointed out in my book against religiously motivated violence, “Not in God's Name,” how in the story of Hagar and Ishmael, when Sarah has Isaac and then has Hagar and Ishmael, there's no way you can read that story and not identify with Hagar and Ishmael, and not with Sarah and Isaac. You're almost forced against your will to identify with the people who've been sent into exile.

Likewise, that horrendous scene in Genesis 27, where Jacob is dressed up in Esau's clothes and, “Who are you my son? I'm your son Esau.” And then he leaves and then Esau comes in with the food he's prepared for his father and slowly, aged Isaac and young Esau, who clearly love one another, suddenly realise this deception that's been perfect. There's no way you can read that and not sympathise with Esau rather than Jacob.

So these things are forcing you to realise that there is such a thing as a different voice, a different perspective. And this is continued in the rabbinic literature. So you never get the Mishna telling you what's the case.

You always get Rabbi X says this and Rabbi Y says that, and Rabbi Z comes along and says how can he be right and how can he be right, and Rabbi Alpha says well you're also right, and on it goes. And I will never forget that lovely statement in the Masechet Eruvin in the Talmud, which says why was the view of Hillel accepted rather than the view of Shammai? Because the school of Hillel taught the views of their opponents as well as their own and taught the views of their opponents before their own. In other words, it was active listening that made the law follow Hillel.

Carol: I have to tell you because when you said you said two contradictory things. You said as Jews we're bad at listening and then you said your wife, who I assume is Jewish. 

Rabbi Sacks: Believe me, I hope so.

Carol: It's the best listener whom you know. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, she's so un-Jewish you wouldn't believe it but she really is a Chief Rebbetzen and…

Carol: So I wanted to say that I just, I learned something that was astonishing to me.

I was in Israel last May and I was invited to speak at the Knesset and by the women who were on the left in the Knesset. So I came and I talked and after I talked there was this very, very lively question period and one of the women who was there said to me, do you know about “Ezer Kenegdo?” And I had never heard this phrase in Hebrew. I didn't know it at all.

So it turns out that in Genesis, the story you were just talking about, after God creates Adam the earthling, God sees that Adam needs a companion. He needs company and first God creates the animals and then God says this is not sufficient. God, what Adam the earthling needs is an “Ezer Kenegdo.”

Now you must, there must be Hebrew speakers in this audience. Ezer means helper but ezer does not mean, there's no connotation of subordination or subservience, because God is described as an Ezer. 

Now kenegdo means by opposing.

Someone who helps by opposing. That is by pulling or encouraging someone to move in a different direction than where they were headed. And God creates woman as an “Ezer Kenegdo.” In other words, to help Adam by opposing. 

And one of the most fascinating things is, you know, as English speakers, we know this phrase from King James as helpmate or helpmeet, which I think is one of the most sort of egregious mistranslations because it completely loses the sense of kenegdo. That one can help by opposing.

So in a certain sense, writing in Bereishit, in Genesis, in the very beginning story of Creation, is an extremely interesting, I mean apropos, for example, “Women Wage Peace.” That women can help by opposing war. That's how we can help.

And I think in terms of what this says about the Jewish tradition, that this is in Genesis. 

And of course, Rashi says so. He says what ezer kenegdo means is, if he's right, she helps him. And if he's wrong, she opposes him. And that's exactly. 

Carol: I think that's wrong. I think that's, I think it's not what it means. I think that's trying to kind of smooth it over. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, of course. He was a bloke. Don't forget. 

Carol: Yeah, I know. I know. I think, I mean, I think from your response, there are a lot of people here who will understand this conversation. I mean, that to say no, it's not if he's wrong, but in other words, that if you really want to help, I mean, I'm fascinated because in a way, I mean, you know, the sense of to help is one of the most, well, it's an extraordinary human, it's a human impulse.

I mean, you can see it even in very young children. If someone's in distress, you want to help. But to help is one of the most, and certainly for women to be helpful, is to be a good woman.

But the idea is that the way you help is not to agree necessarily, or to go along, or to say, ‘Of course, you're right, whatever you say.’ But that may be the way to help. And what, what is needed? Why? I mean, the idea that this is why we women were created.

Rabbi Sacks: And yeah, and Adam gets it wrong at first. And the Bible is very subtle here, because he opens his eyes, he sees his wife. And he says, “Zot haPa’am etzem meiAtzamai uVasar miBsari,“ Now I have found bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” “LeZot yikarei isha,” She should be called woman, “Ki meiIsh lukacha zot,” because she was taken from man.

And there, there are two things wrong with that. Number one, he gives her not a name, but a noun, a generic description.

And number two, he sees her as derivative of, perhaps subsidiary, to him. And then what happens happens - the sin, the exile, and so on. 

And just as they are about to leave exile, there's a fascinating pair of verses. It says, “And Adam called the name of his wife Chava, “Ki hee hayita eim kol chai,” for she was the mother of all life. So he suddenly realises that he got it wrong in thinking of her as a generic helper. And he recognises her as an individual by giving her a proper name. And that name signifies the thing that she can do, which incidentally, God can do, bring new life into the world, that he cannot.

And in the very next verse says, “VaYa’as Hashem Elokim leAdam ul’ishto kotnot or vaYalbishem,” And God made for them garments of skin” - or Rabbi Meir translated garments of light - and “he clothed them,” and then they left Paradise. In other words, God finally forgives them. When Adam recognises the individuality and independent integrity of his wife, as the mother of all life.

Carol: Doesn't the word “Chava” mean life? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yes. 

Carol: So he calls her ‘Life.’

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah. The life-giver, the giver, the one who gives birth to life. Yes. 

Marcia: You look like you have a different interpretation.

Carol: I was trying to avoid this. Well, I mean, I think he calls her ‘Life,’ at least that's very arresting to me, because before he explains, it's because you give life and everything else. I wonder whether he experienced her as life. And that’s…

Rabbi Sacks: The Hebrew language as a very, the word for life in Hebrew is “chayim,” and it's a very interesting linguistic feature, because chayim is a plural. So singular, although you can call an animal, chai. What's, a zoo, is what? Gan Chayot, yes? So an animal life can be in the singular, but human life cannot be in the singular.

The word chayim, which is a slightly different word from Chava, but the word chayim is always in the plural. 

Carol: So what about chaya? What is it? 

Rabbi Sacks: No, that's, that's not a great word. Actually, I wouldn't go down that road, Carol. Vilde chaya is a wild animal. You don't want to know these things. 

That itself is separate from Chava. Chava is, is one who gives life, and chavaya, incidentally, is an experience, a vivid experience. Slightly different words. 

Marcia: I wanted to pull out a couple of words that we've heard tonight. One of them is curiosity replacing judgement, and radical listening. This is sort of in one basket, and find out why the other side is for the other side, and so on. And then this word opposition, and I'm thinking that maybe those two baskets are not in opposition, and what appears to be oppositional at first may be a matter of radical listening, and of this deep root, to the root curiosity about why the apparent opponent has the position that they do, the perspective that they do. Or we have to get rid of these visual metaphors. 

So, because I, I've heard from kenegdo this, the importance of opposition, but also in the effort to replace judgement with curiosity, and to be open to radical listening. We don't, we don't want to entrench in opposition, right? We want, we... 

Carol: I think that this is where the ezer comes in, because the idea of it's opposing in order, it's to help. So, the idea of, I mean, it's not opposing for the sake of opposition. It's not opposing to oppose. 

Rabbi Sacks: You know, the, the, one of the huge cultural problems today, um, which is brought about by the internet, by smartphones, by social media, is what they call Google filters and Facebook likes.

Carol: Oh, right. 

Rabbi Sacks: Which tend to filter out the views that are different from our own, and the end result is that we are surrounded. Our friends hand on to us the bits of journalism that they think support our cause, or sometimes the bits of journalism that speak to our sense of paranoia and persecution.

And so you get these media filtering out humanity into non-communicating sects of the like-minded, which is really incredibly, incredibly dangerous. 

And, you know, um, Cass Sunstein, who - is he at Harvard now? 

Carol: He's at Harvard now, yeah. 

Rabbi Sacks: He was at Chicago. Um, he did a couple of books, very, very important books. One of them was called “Why Societies Need Dissent.” That's - Baruch Hashem - something we've never been short of in the Jewish community. And more recently, he wrote a book called “Going to Extremes,” in which they've done lots of experiments where if you spend a lot of time with people who agree with you, you will become, you and the group will become more and more extreme.

And all of these things, you know, are affecting not just politics in the Middle East, I suspect even politics in Europe and politics in the United States. So that what were once differences of opinion become today a little more like the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness. And you begin to get, you know, real deep chasms of fear and suspicion and misunderstanding and “the Politics of the Apocalypse.” So I think that we've got work to do here.

Marcia: Some of the work we have to do here is here. I have been told that at this point in the hour, I am to present you with some of the questions from the audience, inspired by what you said so far. And I'm going to combine two, because I think they're interesting together.

So what's the difference between curiosity and listening on one hand and moral relativism on the other? Let's try that one. 

Rabbi Sacks: The real difference here is that intellectual curiosity comes from the fact - John Stuart Mill was great on this, but the Rabbis were - that real intellectual engagement, whether at yeshiva or at university, is a collaborative pursuit of truth, which only comes when you argue with and listen to the people who disagree with you. And that, out of that, comes the collaborative pursuit of truth.

And that is in fact, you know, what Sir Karl Popper spoke about a scientific method. You expose hypotheses to refutation, you know, conjectures and refutations. There's a case in the Talmud, where Rabbi Shimon HaAmsoni, who had always used a certain exegetical principle, was finally, well into his late career, somebody came up with a counterexample, one verse in the Bible, to which it didn't apply.

And he said, ‘Great, you know, I will now abandon all my previous life's teachings.’ And his students said, ‘What, you just, one counterexample, you're going to abandon your whole life's teachings?’ “K’shem sheKibalti s’char al haDrisha, kacha akabel s’char al haPrisha.” And he said, replied, just as I had the reward for the exposition, so I will receive the reward for the retraction. And that is Sir Karl Popper, 2,000 years before Sir Karl Popper. So, and as it happens, he was wrong, because if you'd only waited till Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Akiva managed to answer the exception anyway. 

Moral relativism is the statement that there is no truth. So, don't even try to collaboratively pursue it, because it doesn't exist.

Carol: I was just thinking that, you know, I think the implication of the question is, if I think that I have the moral truth, then why would I listen to anybody else? I mean, I think that's, so if I'm going to listen to somebody else, it's because I think, I mean, it is because I think that I would be interested in their experience, that maybe we would come together to a different truth. I mean, I think that's the whole idea of it. So, I think the fear that if I listen to you, I will lose my moral truth, that means I really can't listen to you.

So, I think the premise of this question is, it would lead you not to listen. So, I think that to listen, I mean, one of the things about science that I think is so remarkable, and I talk with my students about it, is the thing about science is it's an argument from evidence, and that any theory or any explanation is always provisional. That's why every paper ends with “More research needs to be done.”

So, it's like, as far as we know now, we would reach this conclusion, but we might know something new tomorrow, or we might discover something new, at which point, then we would reach a different conclusion. So, when we argue, we argue from evidence, and then I think that opens us to, because evidence is experience. It's like arguing from experience.

So, I know my experience, but I don't know your experience. So, if I knew your experience, it might change my argument, and I think we're not talking about different positions within one framework. We're really talking here about two different frameworks, and I think one framework really precludes listening.

I mean, it makes, why would you listen? 

There was a time when I was doing couples therapy with my colleague in Boston, Terrence Real, and there was a man in a couple - you told your couple story, I'll tell a couple story - where a man kept asking his wife a question to which he knew the answer, and I remember turning to Terry at one point, and I said to him, ‘Why are you asking if you know?’ And I said to Terry, ’You know, if I know that it's 8:25, I don't turn to you, Rabbi Sacks, and say, what time is it?’

Rabbi Sacks: Oh, I keep a different time altogether. I only keep Jewish time, you know, this relation to the real time is slightly provisional. Finish the story.

Carol: Well, no, so, I mean, the story is, do we ask a question to which we know the answer, in which point we're really only, I mean, we're not listening, we're testing the other person, or do we ask a question because we think that from the other person, we will learn something we don't know, and then on the basis of that discovery, or that experience, or that evidence, we might come to a different understanding of what in the situation we might consider to be moral. 

Rabbi Sacks: There's also one other point that I must make here, that the issue at stake here is not just the question of truth, it's the question of justice. And there is a Roman law principle, which I think Judaism agrees with 100 percent, and that is justice requires “Audi altarem partem,” justice means listen to the other side. 

And unless you are capable of listening to the other side, you are incapable of justice. 

Marcia: Yeah, I think that was exactly Joel Hunter's point, in “Find Out why the Other Side is for the Other Side,” and I think… 

Carol: You know, I think the judgement curiosity part, that I don't want to get lost, is it's not just replace judgement with curiosity, it's notice what happens when you replace judgement with curiosity, and it completely changes.

I mean, if I sort of catch myself, and I'm sort of sitting and judging, and if I say notice what happens if I replace judgement with curiosity, what happens is my whole relationship to the other person shifts. 

Rabbi Sacks: This reminds me of this wonderful story of two guys who are doing frisbee throwing in Central Park, and a Japanese tourist, who hasn't seen frisbee throwing before, is standing there watching them for half an hour. And after half an hour he comes up to them and says, “I've been watching you doing this for half an hour, I'm really impressed, but tell me which one of you is winning?”

And that allows you to reframe things. Not everything is a binary “I win, you lose,” sometimes the whole essence of the interchange is that you both test and enhance the perception and the skills of the other.

Marcia: The next question actually builds right on this, so I'm going to plunk it out right now, and I think points to some of the same principles. How do you listen to people who want to destroy you? 

Rabbi Sacks: In my humble opinion, you can't listen to people who won't give you a hearing. 

Carol: You can't listen what? 

Rabbi Sacks: You cannot listen to people who won't give you a hearing. Listening means - as you've said so eloquently - a basic assertion of respect for both sides, and so the result is that we have to show people, as powerfully as we can, that no gain was ever really finally achieved by violence. That those who really refuse to respect the other will never be respected by any other.

And that some, I look, you know, I, as I said, I've battled this pretty hard ever since 9/11 through my books, “Dignity of Difference” and “Not in God's Name,” and I've been trying to really say, to to Christians and Muslims throughout the world, that all of us children of Abraham, at least concede our basic right to be, and now let's wrestle with our sibling rivalry. But I find it quite difficult and I refuse to engage in public conversation with a radical who fails to recognise my right or my people's right to exist.

Marcia: Carol? 

Carol: Of course I'm very curious. Why did they want to destroy me? I mean, I mean, that's where I would begin, and because it doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, almost in the same sense, what would they gain by that? And the idea that somehow, I mean, I think it's very much the same thing we were talking about before.

The idea if I could destroy everyone on earth who disagreed with me, then what? I would, I would live in peace? I doubt it. I mean, the sense that I can't tolerate somebody being on this earth with me who doesn't see things the way I see. I mean, there's such a, there's, there's such a set of assumptions wrapped up into that. 

Marcia: I wonder, um, there are times when someone is trying to destroy you, but I, in my experience, there are also times when people fear that someone is trying to destroy them, and with a different kind of listening, you may get to the root of things that show a different relationship and a different situation if you can, if you have the hearing, the space, maybe the facilitation of the kind Jonathan talked about.

Carol: You know, Marcia, you started at the beginning talking about covenant, and I think, you know, I found myself thinking - because I think the way I heard you, and I don't know if that's right - was that you imply there had to be a covenant in order to enter into listening. But to me, it's through listening that you come to a covenant. So the idea is I don't have to be in some relationship with you in order to listen to you, but it is through listening to you that I find myself coming into relationship with you. Because otherwise, I don't know who I'm in relationship with, honestly. 

Rabbi Sacks: If I can just tell you a story that I found quite moving, it's, it's quite a, it's a story with stages.

Around, I think, 2002, an American journalist from the Wall Street Journal called Daniel Pearl was murdered by jihadist terrorists in Karachi. His last words - they made him say - “I am a Jew.” And I got to know Daniel's father, Judea Pearl, who's, I think, a Professor of Computer Science on the West Coast in, I think, UCLA, and I also got to know the Pakistani High Commissioner in London, Akbar Ahmed, from Karachi, who today holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair in Islamic Civilisations at the American University in Washington. And I discovered that they knew each other and were, had become friends.

And I made a half an hour programme about them for the BBC, for BBC television, showing Judea and Akbar speaking together in our home. And then I took them together to a Jewish school, the JFS, and a Muslim school, the Islamia School, and, you know, just showed the reaction that Jewish pupils had and Muslim pupils had to this coming together of two people who might have been thought to hold great hatred for one another.

And I asked Judea what had led him to seek out Akbar, and he said, “Hatred killed my son, so I will devote the rest of my life to fighting hatred.”

Now, that programme made a certain impact, but what was really interesting is that Akbar, who, as I said, moved from England to America, where he teaches, had a daughter called Dr. Amina Hoti, who was originally teaching at Cambridge - our Cambridge, not your Cambridge - and is now teaching in Pakistan. And we had a little conference in London in January, and she came and spoke and showed us a little video. And Amina, Akbar's daughter, is now teaching my book, “Dignity of Difference,” in Pakistan to students from Waziristan, who were Al-Qaeda people, and who have now become peace activists.

She can't do this in the name of interfaith dialogue, because all interfaith tuition is banned in Pakistan, but she's doing it in the name of tolerance.

And I have to say, and let me, not only have you courageously led our Jewish thought here, but I am absolutely astonished by the courage of so many Muslim women today, who are the most powerful, moderating, and moderate voices within Islam, and many of them are famous. 

Amina is not so well known, except in Pakistan, but to see this woman dealing with these most extreme people, who certainly did not concede my right to exist. And somehow, by teaching, getting them to encounter some of my teachings, and they've now become peace activists, it just tells you that we're too wrong to give up altogether on hope, and that people can change. 

Marcia: I'm going to come back now, this time to really combine, but I just will take a point to reassure you that in my last two questions, I didn't say - just so that I don't misrepresent myself to you - that covenant is the precondition for listening, but rather also that listening brings us into a covenantal reciprocity. And I think if we can, in this note of hope, if we can hold on to that, even when things look very dire, and we fear, as Thomas Hobbes said, “Fear is the most powerful motivator.” I think it's... 

Carol: When you're afraid, it's very hard to listen. 

Marcia: Yeah. The two last questions that I think we might have time for is, how do we listen in an era of fake news? And what about the lost verses of silence, in particular, this person wrote about the women who were, kept silence about sexual abuse? 

Carol: What are the, what's the question about? 

Marcia: So one was fake news, how do we listen in an era of fake news, and the second one, so I'll let you pick up where you want, is what about, could you comment on the lost voices of women who have kept silent? 

Carol: Well, the thing that's so interesting is they didn't lose their voices, because we're hearing them now, and I think, I remember I was on a train in Japan with a young woman, and I made the comment, ‘No one loses their voice.’ And people, and I always think for good reason, there are reasons why we hold our voices in silence.

We may do that for a long, long time.

In fact, it was really funny when I was in Israel, one of the extraordinary experiences I had is, a good friend of mine took me to meet a woman named Tamar Eshel, who's 97 years old. And I'm writing a novel that involves the ‘48 war, and I was very interested in people, Israelis, who had been involved with the Palmach at that time, and really been in Israel. So this extraordinary woman - I mean, she's 97 years old, and she was all bent over when I first met her - and we started to talk about her experiences in the Palmach, and so forth, and she, actually, she was born in London, she was a British citizen, and therefore, she was used by the Intelligence, even before, by the Yishuv, I mean, going way, way, way back.

Anyway, this woman just came to life. It was amazing. She talked for two and a half hours straight, but one of the things she kept saying is that there were certain things that were secrets, and I thought, ‘Are you going to take these to your grave?’ I mean, you know, here it is, however many years later, and she still wasn't going to tell about the secrets of the Intelligence, and the Yishuv, and whatever.

So anyway, I was telling you about this Japanese chain, and there I am with this young Japanese woman, and she suddenly says, “I have to write this down, ‘No one loses, no one loses her voice’.” And I think what you see now with this whole “Me Too,” and women coming forward, is women may have been silent for a long time, and I personally happen to think when someone doesn't speak, there's a very good reason why. 

And they often know something, and I think when people think they're not going to be heard, or their experience is going to be questioned, or they're going to be told that they're crazy, or that they're making it up, or that what they know couldn't have happened, or something like that, it's actually quite wise not to speak. 

But what you see now is the people who didn't speak for years, when the resonance changes - I have a friend who calls it - that what we need is a “Cello World,” that is a world where when we speak, there's a sounding board, so what comes back is enlarged, it's even more sound, that when the resonance suddenly shifted, suddenly everyone had a voice. 

And you know, one of the things from my experience in the years where I was working with girls, and spending a lot of time with 9, 10, and 11-year-old girls, who certainly have a voice. I remember at that time, the Boston Globe, you know, it's really, you know, and people who say we want girls to have their voices, I say, ‘They do, you know, and would you like to listen to what they have to say?’

But I remember the girls, there was an article about ‘Harvard psychologist, you know, helps girls to find their voices,’ and the girls said, ‘You know, we have our voices,’ which they do, and what I was thinking of, I mean, just to give you one example. We were talking one afternoon about the kind of thing you talk about with children, ‘Is it ever good to tell a lie?’

And one 11-year-old from an inner city school, you know, in Boston, says, “My house is wallpapered with lies.” 

So people who say ‘We want girls to have their voices,’ I always say, ‘Really, I mean, do you really want to hear what girls will say, if they tell you what they see?’ But what was striking to me, in travelling around the world with girls, was how often in the course of the day, girls are told, ‘Shh, don't say this, people won't appreciate it, if you say this,’ ‘Don't say this,’ you know, basically, ‘Don't say what you're really feeling and thinking.’

And when I was interviewing adolescent girls, I learned to do something, which was the opposite of what I had been told to do as a researcher. And I think it's because - maybe this is because I'm Jewish - but I get bored very easily. I have very little tolerance for sort of canned stories or rehearsed things. And so I would find myself interviewing adolescent girls, and I would hear something that struck me as not terribly interesting, and I would start to say to girls, ‘Is that true?’ or ‘Do you believe that?’, or ‘Do you really feel that way?’ And what would come back was the word ‘actually.’ 

Like a girl who said to me, “I don't like myself enough to look out for myself,” and I thought, ‘Well, that's really sad.’ 

And I said, “Do you really feel that way?”

She said, “Actually…” and then she told me, “This is how I look out for myself, by never saying what I'm feeling and thinking.”

And I actually - actually, I'm using the word now - I was astonished, because I've read, and I've actually written at great length about Anna Frank's Diary, which I find fascinating, because she edited her diary, which I didn't know - many people don't know - and that's mostly what we read, was the edited version.

But in what turned out to be, sadly, her last diary entry, she says in her diary, where she's writing in her diary to this imaginary friend, Kitty, “I never say what I'm really feeling and thinking.”

So I think the pressures on us as women, not to say what we're feeling, thinking, not to say what we see, or to act as if we don't know what we know, is huge. And one of the reasons that I find it so exhilarating, this “Women Wage Peace,” is I feel that's a group of women who has decided we are going to say what we really feel and think about what's going on in this conflict, and what we really feel and think is it's got to stop. 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, how do we listen, or who to whom do we listen in an age of fake news? 

There's a report and an editorial in today's Times, London Times, which is very interesting. Until now, no newspaper has been able to make a profit with the fact that so much news is today read on the Web, in Google News and things. And for the first time now, young people are beginning to say, in increasing numbers, we are willing to pay for good journalism. 

Carol: Hmm… 

Rabbi Sacks: Because of the impact of fake news. And one of the very, you know, any newspaper or any broadcasting medium that establishes an impeccable reputation for telling the truth, come what may, I mean the BBC World Service, for instance, in many countries of the world, allowed a certain voice to be heard that would never be heard otherwise back in the old days, and so I think people are now reacting against fake news because they do want to know that I can listen to something I can trust. 

The second thing about, you know, the voices that are being heard just now in the past few weeks about sexual harassment and abuse, one of the things I did -, I mean it was scary at the time - the year before I became Chief Rabbi, was to organise a big conference in London called Traditional Alternatives on Women.

It was the first time that the community and the Rabbinate had heard the pain and the anger of Jewish women at the way they were treated in Jewish Law. And it became terribly important to have created that arena where they could speak and know that they were being listened to. 

It eventually fuelled what was 20 or 22 years of actually working to ameliorate that situation. We had to learn to listen before we could make the necessary changes, because people didn't want to listen.

And finally, I just end with, you know, a very obvious point, but a powerful one. The Hebrew Bible talks about, has two cases where the word Torah, Jewish teaching, is used in connection with an abstract noun, a moral noun. And Malachi talks about the Priest, and “Torat emet al pihu,” the Law of Truth is on his tongue. And the famous Eishet Chayil, the last chapter of the book of Proverbs that we recite every Friday evening, talks about the woman of Eishet Chayil, which I translate as the woman of strength, says “Torat Chesed al leshona,” the Law of Kindness and compassion is on her tongue.

It's a little-known fact that for 2,000 years, Hebrew was a language spoken only by men. Because from the days of the Mishna, the lingua franca was Aramaic, and then Yiddish, and then Ladino, so only rabbis actually communicated in Hebrew, and there were no women rabbis. 

So it was a language only spoken about by men, and only in the last 150 years or so has the woman's voice, the different voice… 

Carol: Kol isha.

Rabbi Sacks: ..Come back into the Hebrew language, and we know what was missing.

There was plenty of Law of Truth, but too little Law of Compassion.

That was the different voice, and now I hope all of us have been listening, and I salute these two wonderful women who have me completely outnumbered, but in fact all of us completely entranced. 

Marcia: I'd like to thank our guests very much, Carol Gilligan and Jonathan Sacks.

Thank you very much for being a wonderful audience and for your wonderful questions.