As you will likely have noticed, there has been a proliferation of courses in public speaking. Perhaps, as the high-tech market recedes, we are returning to the lowest tech of all, speech. I have no reason to object, although I sometimes wonder how the single most important attribute of a public speaker — that he or she care about the audience — can be “taught.” But be that as it may, I do wish that a comparable set of courses in the art of listening would emerge.
John DiIulio, who resigned the other day from his post as director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, would be my first choice to direct a program in listening, since it was his extravagant capacity for listening and his desire to hear others out that doomed him in Washington. Here was a man who insisted on learning what others thought and why, and was capable of taking the views of others into serious consideration.
The result? His own views changed over time, becoming more subtle, richer. In Washington, such change is too often taken as an indication of fickleness rather than attentiveness, the more so if there’s a group such as the religious right that’s gunning for you, looking for signs of infidelity.
It is no secret that the Jewish “establishment” is opposed to the president’s faith-based initiative. It ought not be a secret that DiIulio sought real time with representatives of that establishment, engaged in genuine dialogue with them. One hopes he will continue to help shape our civic culture.
As it happens, I heard two more tales of prodigious listening last week. My brother Rashi, a distinguished medical economist, tells of a meeting some years ago with Sen. Edward Kennedy. The subject was national health insurance, long before the Clinton disaster. Several scholars were invited to an evening in the Kennedy living room to make the case for national health insurance. My brother was convinced that through much of the evening, as the scholars droned on, the senator slept. But when the scholars had had their say, the senator took over: “I want to go back to what I heard as a disagreement among you.” And then he proceeded, in detail, to clarify what had been merely implied in the presentations, adding nuance to their generalizations, revealing not only a capacity for listening but an agility of mind none had anticipated.
As interesting, though substantially less surprising, is the story I heard from a visitor who was a member of Israel’s negotiating team at Camp David last summer. The Palestinians and Israelis were broken into teams, and each team in due course reported to President Clinton. My guest tells me that when each side had concluded its presentation, the president took over. “I heard six points of agreement and four of disagreement.” And he then went through each point, enabling the team members to understand aspects of their negotiation that they themselves had not hitherto understood.
Alas, the footnote to that story is not uplifting. The president asked the team to render the points of agreement and of disagreement in writing, so that they might be used as a platform for still more detailed negotiation, and also so that the Americans might be able to offer suggestions on how to reconcile the outstanding differences. But there were no such documents generated at Camp David. Neither the president nor his aides followed up on the presidential request. No deadline was set, no document forthcoming. My visitor is quite confident that as a result, there was no sense that some progress had been made. A complex negotiation requires a sense of momentum to carry the adversaries over the rough spots. At Camp David, while the ingredients for such a sense of momentum were available, they were never put into play.
Evidently, then, good listening alone is not sufficient; one has to know what to do with what one has heard. As hokey as they can often seem and sometimes be, facilitators — who most often know little or nothing of the subject at hand, but who are professional listeners — can make all the difference. Facilitation is evidently the role the Americans at Camp David saw themselves playing, but either they did not play it well enough or that role was compromised when they began to offer “bridging” proposals.
In theory, Jews are raised to listen. Is not the single most peremptory command in our tradition “Listen!” (Sh’ma Yisrael)? Yet too often, our theoretical embrace of listening remains theoretical only. Instead, we are given to shouting at one another, or to living within our own tiny enclaves, avoiding contact with those with whom we might disagree, or dismissing all critical others as anti-Semitic. Perhaps it is time for us to listen, truly listen, to what we ourselves have proudly recited all these many centuries — and then, of course, to put the instruction to practice, among ourselves and with others.