Shema: hearing those with whom we disagree
Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 16 August 2025
Last Sunday, I was in the Sunday morning Christian service, at the 57th annual International Jewish-Christian Bibleweek in Germany. At what must have been roughly the same time, a man, let’s call him Fred, was flying three people for a day trip to Calais. Fred had been one of the many bnei mitzvah when I was rabbi at Sha’arei Tsedek, North London Reform Synagogue in Whetstone. I guess he probably became Barmitzvah sometime in the 1990s.
He emailed me a few weeks ago, more or less out of the blue. He told me that he was a qualified pilot, was taking some people for the day to France and would I like to come? Thanks, I emailed back, but I’ll be out of the country then. I ended by asking him what he’s doing.
He replied telling me that he’d been living in East London but sold his flat because of, he said, “antisemitic Moslem neighbours, of the aggravation he’s had with them, the area demographic, Palestinian flags on lampposts all the way down the road.” He’s now moved out of the area.
He teaches music in different schools and makes ends meet as a bus driver. But his real passion is flying – hence his invitation to join him on that day trip to France. On Monday, he emailed me saying that he’d done the flight and added, I quote, “I had two irritating yoks (forgive me) with me who just wouldn’t shut up.”
For those who don’t know, ‘yok’ (I almost hesitate to use the word in this space) is a particularly derogatory Yiddish word to describe non-Jews. Some suggest that it’s back-slang for another pejorative term, ‘goy’ – a bit like ‘yob’ is back-slang for ‘boy.’
He ended “I’d like to make Aliyah…. Would like to join the hilltop youth/serve etc.”.
His use of that derogatory word and the “excuse me” – which he put in brackets – got to me. Perhaps it was because I’d just heard what happened to Rabbis Josh and Charley at last Sunday’s rally.
I emailed back: “Thanks for your emails. Interesting. I don’t imagine you would excuse somebody using words like ‘yids,’ ‘kikes,’ ‘jews’ (I put a word before it suggestive of sexual intercourse.) Excuse me for being obtuse”, I continued, “but why should using ‘irritating yoks’ be excusable?” I also asked what sort of hilltop settlement he had in mind?
He replied: “That’s not a discussion, that’s an attack on a fellow Jew. No compassion, no understanding, no positivity? Horrible.
I think the worst one is equating what I said to yids and kikes etc. We’re not the Nazis, Colin. Would you condemn a Jew in a concentration camp for saying ‘Nazi scum’?….The arab and left-wing cultures are Nazi/antisemitic/anti-capitalist/anti-progressive. I’m going to fight back against that. …I’m not so left-wing/weak as you. I love Israel and the Israelis. And I love Trump and Netanyahu.” He concluded, “seems we disagree on fundamental points.”
Given the opening word of our Torah reading a few minutes ago, this email exchange and, what happened on Sunday are interesting.
That word is shema. The people are on the threshold of the Promised Land. Moses knows he cannot go in with them and this is part of his farewell speech. “Shema” unsurprisingly occurs hundreds of times in various forms in the Tenach. Grammatically, here, as in the Shema itself, it’s an imperative, a command.
A marvellous nun, Sister Sponsalis, a regular at Bibelwoche, gave the sermon last Sunday and spoke, by coincidence, about shema.
Hearing, she reminded us, is already active in the womb. All the foetus’s senses are, as it were, asleep, except for hearing. It can perceive the mother’s heartbeat, the voices of those around her, music and so on. She reminded us that the ear, the hearing organ, allows us to stand without swaying or falling over. And in intensive care units we’re encouraged to talk to patients, play their favourite music, even if they seem unable to respond. “Hearing happens and cannot simply be switched off or controlled at will.”
But just what is it to listen, to hear? Did the crowd last Sunday hear what Josh and Charley were saying? Did Fred hear what I was saying? Did I hear what he was saying? Hearing and listening might be the same but aren’t necessarily always so.
“Dining across the divide” is a section in the weekend Guardian which brings two people, holding very different views on an issue, to talk together over a meal. The issue might be the environment, climate change, education, assisted dying, refugee policy, anything over which people might hold strong, opposing views. The article ends with both of them reflecting on what the experience has been like.
So my question is: do I try and have a conversation with Fred – not by email, which will lead nowhere – but by suggesting we get together, if not for a meal, at least for a drink?
I feel he has so comprehensively misunderstood me, or read into what I emailed. But I hope my thinking of getting together to talk is not simply my bruised ego that’s motivating me, so he can see I’m not the person he seems to believe I am and that I’m really a nice guy.
But it’s that question of how do we talk to those with whom we disagree, how do we bridge the divide, how do we shema, how we hear, really hear, what the other is saying?
Whenever these questions arise for me, I come back to something I first came across some 30 years ago. It was written by Leonard Swidler, then a theologian at Temple University in the States, who had spent his life engaged in Interreligious, Interideological dialogue. He drew up what he called the Dialogue Decalogue, the Ten Commandments of Dialogue.
Some of them are so obvious, which means, of course, that they’re easy to forget. Spelling out, even the obvious, means putting it into sharp focus again.
Dialogue, he suggests, can only take place between equals – where both of us come together to learn. If my intention is to convert you, win you over in some way, that’s no longer dialogue: we’ve stopped hearing and listening to each other. Dialogue can only happen when I can recognise myself in the way you describe me. Hence my problem with Fred’s “I love Israel and the Israelis” with its implicit implication that I do not. In real dialogue, we have to compare our ideals with those of our partner, not their practice. For practice – theirs and ours – inevitably falls short of ideals. Swidler suggests that each of us must come to the dialogue with no hard-and-fast assumptions about the other. That’s very difficult – as our email exchange demonstrated. Real dialogue, he argues, means that each of us must be at least minimally self-critical. Yitz Greenberg, a seriously-Orthodox jew was Guest Speaker at a Reform Movement conference and said something like, “I don’t care what part of the Jewish world you identify with, as long as there’s something in it of which you are ashamed.” For if there’s not, the assumption is that my position is absolutely correct which means that the problem lies elsewhere, with your position. There’s so much more in Swidler’s “Dialogue Decalogue.” Just Google it to see the full version.
Theodore Zeldin, an Oxford historian, wrote a lovely little book called simply ‘Conversation’ (1998) in which he distinguishes between “talking” and “conversation.” Conversation, he suggests, involves a meaningful exchange of ideas and experiences, accepting the possibility that we will be different, think differently, after our conversation from what we did before we spoke. Talking, however, may be little more than a superficial act of communication, an exchange of facts, of accepted unthought-through opinions, where we give little of ourselves, and where there’s little or no openness to anything different.
So what to do about Fred? I think I will contact him and suggest we meet to have a conversation to better understand where we are each coming from. How much are we able to Shema, to hear, what the other is saying?