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!