Occupiers

For most Americans, ancient history is, well, ancient history. I say that in a jokey way, but the truth is that the history of ancient and medieval times is covered—to the extent it is covered at all—in our American high schools in a cursory way that by its nature cannot possibly lead students to a clear understanding of the specific way in which the roots of the modern world in all its political, inter-ethnic, and polarized complexity are to be found in much older times. Yet an argument could be made—and a cogent, compelling one at that—that there is no real way to understand the present other than as a function of the past, including the distant past. And this is particularly true, I think, of today’s Middle East: to understand the place of Israel in the world without any knowledge of the specific way modern Middle Eastern reality is rooted in antiquity is basically impossible. And yet I see, day after day, people writing about Israel on various web sites and in newspaper articles who seem to have no firm grounding in the study of ancient or medieval history at all.

The period I’d like to write about this week has the distinction of being (and by far) both the most obscure and the most crucial for any who wish to understand today’s Middle East. I’ll begin with the events of 614 C.E.

There are some years that themselves are famous. 70 C.E. is sort of in that category. 1492 definitely is. So is 1776. But who has ever heard of 614? And yet a convincing and fully cogent argument could easily be made that modern Jewish history began in 614 and that the events set in motion that year reverberate to this day in the region. Let me explain in more detail.

That Rome once ruled the world is the rare fact about ancient times that actually is known to almost all. The fact that the Roman Empire eventually split in two and that its two halves met their respective ends almost a full millennium apart, not so much. But that single detail is at least subtly crucial to understanding today’s Middle East. The Western part collapsed in 476 C.E. when the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustus—a hapless weakling with an unfortunate overbite—was obliged to hand over his throne to a man named Odoacer, the leader of the Germanic tribes who had successfully invaded the Italian peninsula and established themselves as the new overlords of Rome and its provinces. So that was the end of Rome in Italy. But the Eastern part of the empire, eventually called Byzantium after the original name of its capital city, continued to exist for many centuries and only met its end when the capital, by then called Constantinople, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 precisely five hundred years and two days before my birth. And that detail continues to echo throughout the Middle East today.

Ancient Israel was part of the Roman Empire. That too is relatively well known. Christians know it because the gospel narrative is set in Roman Judaea. And Jews—or at least traditionally observant ones—know it because we are still fasting on the Ninth of Av each summer to commemorate, among other catastrophes, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century when the Jews revolted against their unwanted Roman masters. But what happened after that? That’s where the thinking of even relatively sophisticated students of today’s Middle East gets seriously fuzzy.

To get a running jump at 614, let’s start three years earlier when, in 611 C.E., Iran (then called Persia) went to war with Byzantium and invaded from the east. Things went back and forth for a while, but then, in 613, the Jews of Byzantine Israel joined with the Persians to revolt against the Byzantines. And it worked too: in 614, the Persians, fighting alongside about 20,000 Jewish supporters—including men famous in their day but long since forgotten by all like Nehemiah ben Hushiel or Benjamin of Tiberias—captured Jerusalem. It was a bloody war. According to some ancient historians, the siege of Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of about 17,000 civilians. Another 4500 or so, taken first as prisoners of war, were eventually murdered by the Persians at the Mamilla Pool, then a man-made lake just outside Jerusalem and today the site of a very popular upscale shopping mall. Another 35,000 or so were exiled to Persia. But, as it always seems to, the tide eventually turned. By 617, the Persians determined that their best interests lay in making peace with the Byzantines even if it meant betraying their Jewish allies. And that is just what they did. In 628, the shah of Iran, King Kavad II, made peace with his Byzantine counterpart, a man named Heraclius. The Jews surrendered and asked for the emperor’s protection, which was granted. That lasted about twelve minutes, however: before the ink on the treaty was dry, a massacre of the Jews ensued throughout the land and Jewish residency in Jerusalem was formally forbidden. 

And now we get to the good part. Or at least to the relevant part for the situation as it has devolved down into our day. Just ten years later, in 648, the Byzantine Empire was invaded again, this time by the Islamic State that had grown up after Mohammed’s death in 632. (This is the empire ISIS today would like to restore.)  The Byzantines retreated, the Muslims took over, and Israel was then ruled by Muslim Arabs until the Crusaders arrived a cool four and a half centuries later in 1099.

It was a tumultuous time. The Islamic State was called a caliphate. (Is this starting to sound familiar?) There were several. The first, named the Rashidun caliphate, ruled Israel from Medina in what is today Saudi Arabia. Then power passed to the so-called Umayyad caliphate that ruled from Damascus. And then, eventually, power passed from the Umayyads to the third caliphate, called the Abbasid Caliphate that ruled from Baghdad.

At first, life under Arab occupation wasn’t that bad. Historians estimate that there were between 300,000 and 400,000 Jewish residents in Israel in those days. Umar, the second caliph of the Rashidun caliphate, eventually permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem. The famous Pact of Umar promised Jewish families security and safety, but also classified Jews as dhimmis, i.e., as non-Muslims whose presence in Islamic lands was begrudgingly to be tolerated as long as they accepted their second-class status and agreed to pay a special tax, called the jizya, that was levied against non-Muslims. Things were dismal, but tolerable. But tolerable didn’t last, particularly after the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in 691 and the Al-Aksa Mosque in 705. By 720, Jews were banned from the mount, the holiest site in all of Judaism.

And so did the Arabs come to Byzantine Palestine, a land that had been the Jewish homeland even then for one and a half millennia. The progression of foreign overlords feels almost endless, particularly if we count off the years since biblical times. The Babylonians ruled Israel for a mere 48 years before the first Persian occupation of the land, the one featuring such famous personalities as King Cyrus and King Darius, began and lasted for 206 years. The Romans ruled for 388 years, then were succeeded by the Byzantines. They ruled for 297 years until, as noted above, the Persians returned in the 7^th century for a paltry seventeen years. Then the Byzantines returned for a decade and were followed by the Arabs, who ruled the land for 461, until they themselves were cleared out by the Crusaders starting in 1099, who ruled for 192 years.

Working all that data yields the semi-astounding result that, in the almost two thousand years from the time the Babylonians laid siege to Jerusalem in biblical times until the Crusaders were finally defeated once and for all by the Mamluks (yet a different version of Arab invader), the Jews were able to restore Jewish sovereignty to the Land of Israel and rule over themselves for precisely one single century, the one stretched out between the Maccabean victory over King Antiochus in 164 B.C.E. and Romans’ successful invasion of the land a century and a year later in 63 B.C.E.  That’s a lot of years of occupation by a wide range of occupiers.

When I read modern columnists who seem to know nothing of Jewish history talking about the “occupation” and meaning the presence of Israelis in the parts of the Land of Israel that were lost to Jordan in 1948 and recovered more than half a century ago in 1967, I see red. I am fully sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, who have been pawns in a game not of their own devising for more than seventy years and who truly do deserve to be treated justly, fairly, and decently. But when I notice people stigmatizing Israelis as occupiers of their own homeland without reference to the fact that Arabs first came to Israel when their armies invaded in the seventh century and occupied the land for centuries until they were finally defeated by invading armies from the West—that seems, to say the very least, to martial half-truths in the defense of an already-adopted argument.

To understand where things in Israel are now, it’s necessary to take the long view. I understand that not everybody can take the time to earn a Ph.D. in ancient history. But to write authoritatively about the Middle East without appearing to have any knowledge of history, to reference Israelis as occupiers of Arab land without appearing to know that the Arabs themselves came to Israel as an army of occupation—that could be, I suppose, a mere oversight prompted by an abysmal ignorance of history. But why is it that I don’t think that? Not even a little bit!

Bahya Steps Forward

Last week, I invited readers to join me in peering through the mist to catch a glimpse of King Kohelet stepping up to take his place on the debaters’ stage amidst the top dozen people vying for the Democratic nomination and then to join me in imagining what he might have had to say if he had been there in person and not merely as a figment of our collective imagination. I tried to come up with several distinct lessons he might well have wished to teach, but all turned out to be variations on the same theme: that humility is the surest sign of wisdom and that, therefore, the least qualified leader or would-be leader will almost always be the individual the most of sure of him or herself, the proudest of his or her accomplishments, and the most certain that no one could possibly know more or do better than him- or herself. And then, life occasionally actually imitating art, I opened the newspaper the other day and found myself reading about a scientific study published just last summer in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Research that detailed the latest thinking on degree to which humility is not merely a virtue (like patience or generosity) but rather a critical personality trait that truly mentally healthy people cannot do without. (The original journal article has to be purchased—and for an exorbitant $35—to be read on- or off-line, but to see the New York Times article by Benedict Carey about the journal piece, click here.)

It makes sense too: in a world of highly polarized attitudes towards everything, people possessed of the kind of humility highlighted in the study turned out to be less dogmatic, less judgmental, less aggressive, and less likely to fall prey to what the author calls ideological or political polarization. They’re also less likely to fail in their committed relationships—which only makes sense given the need for compromise in such relationships. Perhaps even more to the point, the study found that the humble among us are more likely to have the psychological resources “to shake off grudges, suffer fools patiently, and forgive” themselves for inadvertent missteps or errors of judgment. In that regard, I can also recommend a very interesting essay by Peter Wehner that came out in 2017 (click here) about the worth of humility from a spiritual point of view. (Wehner writes specifically in Christian terms, but Jewish readers will find his views very resonant and highly applicable to themselves.)

I have my own odd relationship with the concept. One of my own culture heroes, although not one I’ve written much about in this space, lived in Spain a cool thousand years ago in the first half of the eleventh century. And, as the author of the first Jewish book devoted solely to ethics and ethical issues, he deserves to be far more famous than he actually is. There are a few reasons for this. First, my guy, Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda, is regularly confused—including by people who should certainly know better—with Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa, who lived about two and a half centuries later, and who became known as one of the greatest biblical commentators of his day. So maybe it was inevitable that the two Bahya’s would get confused with each other, but it’s a shame that that happens: Bahya ben Asher was insightful, creative, and intelligent, but Bahya ibn Pakuda was one of the handful of true greats: a giant in terms of his incisive intellect, his ability to synthesize diverse material, his literary ability…and the humility he brought to his writing desk even when working on a book that he could not possibly have imagined readers a millennium later still considering novel, interesting, and not even slightly stale. And then there’s the matter of language: Bahya wrote not even in regular Arabic or in Hebrew, but in Judeo-Arabic, the specific dialect of Arabic spoken by the Jews of Spain during what we in our day have taken to reference as the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry. So that means his book is read today in its original language by more or less no one at all.

When I first began to read Jewish classics, I was still in college. And in my junior year, which I slightly unexpectedly spent in France studying Hebrew, I found myself in a class devoted to reading the 1950 French-language translation by André Chouraqui. After a few weeks, I was completely in his thrall. To say that Bahya became my only friend that year is to exaggerate. (I wasn’t that lonely.) But he was a real (if spectral) presence in my life that year…and a very supportive one at that. I don’t know where other people read Bahya, but I read him each night before bed. And I carried his book around with me too, pausing to read a few paragraphs whenever the opportunity presented itself. What can I say? Friends hang out together! (Maybe I really was that lonely.)

It was from Bahya that I learned about humility as something to be cultivated and sought after. In the sixth chapter of his book, which is wholly concerned with the topic, he writes that “one should always show humility toward others and divest oneself of all pride for the sake of showing honor to God, casting off all sense of loftiness, all arrogance and self-importance…both in private and in the midst of a crowd.” And then he goes on to explain how Scripture makes a point of requiring this particularly of people in leadership positions. And now we get to my point for the week.

Aaron, for example, was the High Priest of all Israel—but he was not above cleaning the ashes off the altar each morning and delivering them to the dump personally as a way of reminding himself to avoid haughtiness and arrogance. Similarly, the Bible reports that when the Holy Ark was finally brought into the City of David, King David himself offered up the burnt-offerings and danced in the street to remind himself that, when all was said and done, he was just as unworthy to sit on the throne of Israel as any other mortal would also have been.

And then Bahya goes on to describe the true leader specifically in terms of the degree to which such a person successfully cultivates a sense of natural humility, speaking as little as possible, declining ever to pontificate in public, always avoiding vulgar language, never behaving in a tawdry, tasteless, or crude way in front of others, and instantly intervening when someone is being treated unjustly. True leaders, he goes on, always seek to avoid public praise and never pass up an opportunity to own up to their own moral or ethical errors. “Such people,” Bahya writes, “never blame the ones who blame them (for having done things that they did in fact do), nor would they ever be angry with whomever uncovered the misdeed in question. On the contrary, the true leaders will always say to an accuser, ‘O my friend, what is this evil act of mine that you know of in comparison to those of which you are ignorant and which have been concealed by God for my sake for such a long time? Were my deeds and sins known to you, you would run away….” That, Bahya says, is what it means to embrace humility as a personal virtue...and to qualify as a national leader.

What would our American landscape be like if the people vying for political office were to take these words to heart—actively seeking forgiveness for past missteps, owning up to an inability to know with certainty where any chosen path will eventually lead, openly admitting ignorance and shortsightedness, and actively—and vigorously—seeking the counsel of the wise when decisions have to be made instead of relying solely on an inflated sense of their own ability magically to know the unknowable? I can answer that question myself: a lot more appealing and a lot healthier than the endless contest we now endure to see which candidate or would-be candidate can speak with more brazen certainty about the future, can be more disdainful of his or her rivals’ points of view and opinions, and who can be as little self-effacing as possible in an attempt to convince the undecided voter to choose him or her as our nation’s next leader.

Bahya’s book is almost a full thousand years old. Its author has been gone from the world for almost that long. His precise dates are unknown, as is the site of his grave and the details of his personal life—whom he married, how many children he had, what became of them, etc. He is hardly known to the non-Jewish world at all, but even within the world of Jewish letters there are only very few who can say that they have read his book from beginning to end even once, let alone many times. If only our would-be leaders were among them!

Kohelet Joins the Debate

Last week, I wrote to you about my idea of expanding the idea of inviting various ushpizin to dine with us in the sukkah to include all sorts of non-traditional invitees. I’ve been thinking about that idea all week—wondering whom I should or could invite aside from Lady Oumuamua and Prince Borisov (neither of whom would actually be that much fun to host, given that they are both basically rocks whose sole claim to fame is their origin in deep outer space). Lots of potential ideas came to mind in that regard, some whimsical, some semi-serious, some almost reasonable. (And, yes, the whole concept of “reasonable” does need to be stretched just a bit if we’re going to talk seriously about inviting the spectral presences of the long-since-dead to dinner in the first place.) Perhaps I’ll propose the idea earlier on next year and invite suggestions about whom exactly to include on the invitation list.

And then I watched the debate on Wednesday evening between the top dozen individuals vying for the chance to run for President as the Democratic candidate in 2020. I realize that it would have been impractical to hold the debate in a sukkah, but that’s really a shame: seeing them all gathered in a rickety hut with canvas walls and a roof made of grass might just have moved things along a bit faster. (Was it only me who thought so, or did at least some of those people appear to be injecting themselves into the mix just to make the same point over and over?) And then, just when I thought I had had enough and would just read about the last hour in the paper on Wednesday morning, I was taken entirely off-guard by the sight of King Kohelet—ghostly, but otherwise in full royal regalia—striding confidently up to the invisible thirteenth podium and taking his spectral place among the others.

No one else seemed to notice him there. Even I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t having some sort of tele-hallucination, but there he was for all (or at least for me) to see, his famous book tucked securely under his arm and his ability to take in what was unfolding around him more than obvious. (How an ancient king of Israel could speak English, I didn’t pause to ask myself; he was, after all, the wisest of men—as Scripture says specifically and unambiguously. Maybe he took English in high school!) Mostly, of course, he’s known as Solomon. He reigned as Solomon. He published his other works—and foremost among them the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs—under that name too, but this work—the product of his old age, when his wisdom was at its fullest flower—he brought out as King Kohelet, a mysterious name cited several times in the book itself but always left unexplained. Perhaps he used a pseudonym to suggest the universal nature of the lessons he wished to teach. Or perhaps Kohelet really was an actual nickname of some sort, perhaps a name one of his seven hundred wives made up as a term of endearment. But our custom of reading Kohelet’s book—called by the ten-dollar name Ecclesiastes in most Western circles but almost always by its author’s name in Jewish ones—our custom of reading Kohelet during Sukkot made his presence almost logical: having come up from Sheol on his annual author’s tour of the world as his book is read and debated in countless thousands of sukkot in the course of the festival, why not stop by an actual debate and see what he could add to the discussion? So what if they weren’t actually holding it in a sukkah? Surely, he must have thought, that really is just a detail! And, as we would naturally expect from the wisest of all men, it turned out that he had a lot to say.

The basic givens on Wednesday night were obvious. Everyone present on that stage wishes to be elected President. All have plans! Senator Warren has become known for saying that almost as a personal mantra, but they all have strategies for fixing what ails our land (or at least for what they perceive to be ailing our nation) and none showed any reticence about touting his or her proposals as the very best. And, although each would-be nominee has shortcomings of various sorts (including, at least for two, a complete lack of experience in government) and none has yet emerged as the ideal candidate that the others will eventually have no choice but to support, the setting seemed to require that each candidate vaunt him or herself maximally, responding to whatever question was formally asked with some version of that candidate’s standard stump speech. As a result, what was supposed to be a thoughtful debate about principles, policies, and platforms turned into a long infomercial that differed from “real” infomercials merely with respect to the time spent tearing down other candidates either overtly or by clever (or not so clever) innuendo.

The king listened carefully, as did I. And then, when the din subsided somewhat, he offered the would-be nominees some thoughtful advice that, if you ask me, they could all do well to take to heart. Kohelet wasn’t the wisest of men for nothing!

First, he noted clearly there is no virtue more becoming to a true leader than humility. The clearest way to establish your right to lead, therefore, is to stop bragging about your accomplishments…both because there will always be someone whose accomplishments are even more impressive than yours and also because nothing is less suggestive of the ability to govern than arrogance. As a result, the more you beat your own drum, the more it feels as though your real interest is in denying your listeners the possibility of appraising your worth frankly and honestly. True leaders, says the king, always seek to self-improve…and self-improvement must unavoidably be born of frank self-analysis. And that was the king’s first point.

Secondly, he went on to note that the sign of a true leader is the willingness to work far more intently on the actual work of governance than on the portrait of oneself destined for the history books. Knowing everything would be a useful skill to bring to the office of President. But since no one actually knows everything, those who would lead should instead demonstrate their commitment to the pursuit of wisdom itself—through study with learned teachers, through the contemplation of the works of intelligent authors, through the taking of counsel with people more experienced and more knowledgeable than themselves are, and through the repudiation of negative character traits they have somehow inadvertently (or not so inadvertently) acquired. Those who would lead should therefore present themselves as students of the wise, as people who desire to listen far more intensely than to lecture others. Accepting that others could do as good as job as they themselves is key, as is then trying to transcend that thought by seeking to attain a heart of wisdom that truly does set them apart from the rest. Self-knowledge is key; the nation, says Kohelet, led by a king who only knows of himself what the sycophants and yes-men who surround him tell him is hardly being led at all.

Thirdly, the king noted that true leaders blame no one for their own errors of judgment. If they admit to having occasionally acted poorly in a given situation, they never blame the situation as though it, rather than they themselves, was at fault. In fact, true leaders always accept responsibility for their own mistakes and move forward humbled and chastened by them: what the people need in their leaders is specifically not braggarts who can’t imagine ever having done anything wrong, but rather the kind of people who learn from their errors and consistently strive to become better and more virtuous as they move forward through life.

Fourthly, the king noted—and clearly—that people worthy to lead invariably listen very carefully to others…including to their opponents in debate and dialogue. King Kohelet said this repeatedly too, noting that it is always better to hear a wise person chastise you than to listen to a fool singing your praises…and that instead of responding instantly to any hint of criticism with a thousand different explanations intended to defang the critique, it shows greater leadership potential gratefully to embrace the criticism and to be willing to learn from it. No one enjoys being critiqued, he admitted freely, much less harshly. But whereas fools run from criticism, the wise run toward the thoughtful individual prepared to evaluate their work honestly and thoughtfully. Those worthy of the charism of leadership are therefore those who are constantly striving to improve, to become more virtuous, to become wiser and more insightful. The king couldn’t have been more clear that no one who wants to become a national leader should be unable to imagine learning something from the thoughtful comments of others…even when those others are one’s direct competitors.

Finally, the king noted that those who would lead their nation forward need to demonstrate an ability to take the long view. Eventually, he correctly noted, every single voter alive today will pass from the scene. The would-be candidates themselves will pass from the scene. But instead of taking that as license to ignore the consequences of their actions now (or their inaction), they need to consider future generations as pre-constituents, as people whose interests they must have at heart now even if they are unable to vote in our national elections right now. And this point too the King stressed repeatedly: the mantle of leadership can only be legitimately worn by someone willing to respond to the interconnectedness of the generations personally and viscerally, and who is willing to accept the responsibility for the kind of earth we bequeath to our grandchildren’s grandchildren. And to their grandchildren as well because, in the end, a willingness to look deeply into the future is a prerequisite for leading in the present.

Seeing with Your Ears

One of the great challenges of the High Holiday season has to do with the undertaking to transform thoughts into deeds, plans into actions, and resolve into actual behavior. It sounds like a no-brainer: what could be simpler than deciding to do something and then doing it? But, as anyone who has ever tried already knows, it’s actually a lot harder than it sounds.

The set-up is known to all, or at least to anyone who has ever spent time in a traditional synagogue service on the High Holidays. The liturgy, both by virtue of the actual text—the specific words of our prayers—and the feeling the various melodies used only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur elicit almost automatically from worshipers who have been hearing them since childhood, the liturgy itself  is meant to prompt worshipers to revisit the past year, to rethink its decisions, to regret its errors of judgment and its instances of flawed ethical reasoning…and, at least ideally, to respond by resolving to live differently and better in the course of the year now beginning. The key concept—that introspective rumination with respect to the past can lead to renewed moral resolve with respect to the future—is simple enough to summarize in just a few words. But the actual act of translating resolve into deed—of thinking about the past and then charting a new path into the future—is distinctly more difficult for most of us that it sounds as though it should be.

There are many reasons that this is so, but—at least for me personally—the major part of the challenge derives from the simple fact that we are asking ourselves to look at one thing and to see something else. Even in less fraught contexts, this is not that easy. Sometimes, true, it really is just a matter of training. A talented cook, for example, can look at a recipe in a cookbook that consists merely of words on a page and somehow “see” the finished dish as it will look set out on the dinner table. A talented musician can browse through a book of musical notation and “hear” what the piece will sound like when played on an actual piano or on a flute or an oboe. A talented architect can look at a blueprint rolled out on a draftsperson’s table and somehow know what it will be like—what it will actually feel like—to step inside the structure once it is eventually built. All these abilities are functions of mere training that some people have and others don’t…but which, given the opportunity to train properly, all can at least theoretically acquire.

One step further along the path we seek to travel during the holiday season is the skill to imagine the cooked dish, the played sonata, or the built palace without having anything in front of our eyes to “tell” us what they will taste like or sound like or look like, but solely to imagine the finished product by constructing it within the matrices of our own imaginative consciousness and then, if we are able, to translate the resultant image into something that actually exists in real space. In other words, the holidays challenge us to be composer and musician, architect and resident, recipe writer and cook—in other words, specifically not to read someone else’s work and then imagine what it would feel like in real life to do that thing or to be that person, but to start from ground zero, from nothing at all…and then, somehow, to imagine a world in which we ourselves play a different role than the one we have played up to this point in our lives and then, if we have the courage and the stamina, to find a way to make that vision part of our ongoing reality.

I never tire of telling our Nursery School parents how important it is to read to their children at bedtime, but I don’t always explain why that is so: because it is precisely when children are listening in the dark and cannot see anything at all that they have no choice but to imagine an entire world. And it is that specific ability to construct a world through the sheer imaginative force of a focused mind that has the ability to make children grow up to be the kind of creative individuals who can invent things that don’t exist, write music that only they can hear before they find a way to write it out in musical notation, and produce all sorts of new things merely by imagining them first and then finding a way to make real the image they “see” before their eyes.

The work of the High Holidays, at least in a certain sense, is merely the grown-up version of that challenge. Is it possible to sit in synagogue, to hear the words of the prayers sung out, and to see them transformed from poetry into a real version of the world? Since people do it, it must be doable…but the real question isn’t whether it can done at all, but the whether it can be done by regular people possessed of no more powerful tools than the moral force of their own will to improve the world through the agency of their own will.

I was encouraged to think hopefully about the whole concept by a piece of fascinating research I read last summer about, of all things, fruit bats.

I’m not usually a huge fan of bats, but I almost changed my mind this last summer after reading an article in the Times of Israel about scientists at Tel Aviv University who have convincingly demonstrated that bats, or at least Egyptian fruit bats, have the strange ability to see things merely by hearing them. (To read the whole article, click here.)

The basic principle has to do with the concept of echolocation, the specific method bats use to navigate the world in the dark—which, since they are nocturnal animals, is the world in which all bats live. The process is simple enough: bats emit high-pitched squeals and squeaks that then hit objects in the vicinity and produce an echo which comes back to the bat’s ears and make it possible for the bat to map out the local landscape and thus to fly around safely without crashing into things. That much is basic science, but the researchers on whose work the article reported took the whole concept one step further. First, they allowed some fruit bats to fly around in absolute darkness using echolocation to keep themselves from crashing into some large objects in their immediate vicinity. Then, after having enclosed the objects in plastic containers specifically designed to make it impossible for echolocation to work, they flooded the area with light. To their amazement, the bats uniformly seemed able to recognize the objects even though they could now specifically not use echolocation and appeared to be recognizing them by somehow “seeing” what they had previously only heard.

And that was the detail that fascinated me, this ability to see something merely by hearing it. It sounds like it should be impossible. But the researchers felt confident that they had demonstrated conclusively that bats can indeed hear something and then translate the sound heard into a kind of image seen…and then recognize that thing when all they can do is see. How cool would it be to see with your ears? Perhaps not cool enough for me to want to be a fruit bat. But even so, pretty cool indeed!

And that is the experience I’m going to try to emulate on Yom Kippur: hearing the words sung aloud, both by the cantor and by us all, and then seeing with my ears to view—at least in my mind’s eye—a world made better and finer through my personal effort to improve morally and ethically in the course of the year now almost suddenly upon us. If bats can do it, perhaps I can too!

Or perhaps we could approach the challenge on a simpler level simply asking yourself this one question: when you hear the cantor sing out that some heady combination of prayer, charitable acts, and sincere resolve to live better lives can materially alter the course of human history…what exactly do you see before your eyes? If it’s primarily the back of the head of the person sitting in front of you, perhaps you should consider taking a cue from the Egyptian fruit bats of Tel Aviv and attempting to see what you hear!