Among the twelve soul-senses, the sense corresponding to the month of Av is the sense of hearing.
What does a soul-sense of hearing mean? At the most basic level, it refers to active listening. Needless to say, there is a big gap between hearing and listening. The passive hearer does not linger on the words, does not try to internalize and process them, and therefore the common expression to describe this is "it goes in one ear and out the other." The listener, on the other hand, is truly attentive to the words. He absorbs the words or sounds he hears, and then, like a series of puzzle pieces, tries to connect them together and understand what they are trying to tell him.
We can compare the relationship between physical hearing and spiritual hearing to the relationship between hearing someone's voice and hearing what's in their voice, in the literal sense of the expression – hearing what's inside the voice. A person endowed with physical hearing can hear any voice; but only if he sharpens his inner listening can he hear what's hidden within it – what frequency the speaker is transmitting, what sound he's trying to express, what emotional string is vibrating beneath his words.
Listening to the inner content hidden in the speaker's voice allows one to progress to hearing what's in their voice in the simpler sense – following their words. This doesn't mean blindly obeying every speaker, but only this: that true listening, before it criticizes or judges, strives to identify as much as possible with the speaker's words, to grasp where he's aiming and to ‘flow’ with his process.
At an even deeper level, the soul-sense of hearing strives to listen to what is not heard at all – to the simple presence of God that dwells behind all that is said and heard, in the form of the silence beyond the sounds.
… And behold, God passed by, and a great and strong wind… but God was not in the wind;
And after the wind an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake;
And after the earthquake, fire, but God was not in the fire;
And after the fire – a still, small voice. (I Kings 19:11-12)
How to Draw a Circle of Listening
"Who is wise? He who learns from every person" (Pirkei Avot 4:1). A significant component in rectifying the soul-sense of hearing is cultivating the ability to listen and learn from everyone.
The saying is well-known, but who among us can testify that he succeeds in fulfilling it? Indeed, the Midrashim explain that besides physical foreskin, there are three spiritual foreskins that exist in everyone – foreskin of the heart, foreskin of the lips, and foreskin of the ears. Our natural state is that everything said to us "falls on uncircumcised ears," and for us to be able to listen, we need to 'circumcise' them – to open and soften our inner ear until it consents to listen to everyone.
A vision of a reality in which everyone listens to everyone sounds wonderful, but it's clear that we need to think carefully about how to realize it. A pluralistic 'listening circle' where every statement is placed on the same level, and where we nullify ourselves before every speaker, ultimately creates a situation in which nothing is being heard. If everything is of equal value, then everything is valid only within the framework of its own subjective context, and therefore lacks value in the objective space. Even the listening itself is suspect here: what is it worth if a moment before and a moment after it accepts with the same nod opposite and contradictory statements?
In order to precisely define the rectified listening circle, we must add another principle, defined in the books as follows: "Accept the truth from whoever says it." This principle also teaches us to listen to everyone, no matter who, but emphasizes that what we should search for is their words of truth. It doesn't matter if they are old or young, righteous or wicked, Jewish or non-Jewish – if they utter a word of truth, we must accept it.
The addition this principle provides us is that in listening to everyone, we do not completely nullify ourselves to their words, but rather seek to filter – to hear and accept only what is worthy of acceptance, and not to accept what is unworthy. This is called "אֹזן מִלין תבחן" ("the ear tests words") – an acronym for truth (אמת). In other words, the main point here is not the listening itself, but the search for truth; and the value of listening is not derived from a rigid principle of 'listening for the sake of listening', but from a deep recognition that something of the truth is hidden within everyone.
This idea does not contradict the fundamental premise of Judaism that the Torah is "the Torah of truth". The Torah provides the criteria to define what truth is, as well as structures that allow for containing multiple levels and aspects of truth. On the contrary, its being "the Torah of truth" means, among other things, that it seeks truth – that it desires to contain every piece of truth lying outside it, which is nothing but a lost part of itself.
The Renewal of Prophecy
The central event that occurred in Av is, of course, the destruction of both Temples of Israel on the 9th of Av. The destruction of the First Temple and the exile to Babylon mark the beginning of the decline of prophecy in Israel, which is essentially visual ("through the prophets I use similes", "and I saw visions of God"…), and we transitioned to the era of the sages, an era of intellectual and auditory contemplation, where one must listen to all opinions in order to reach a ruling (and even the revelations of prophecy that occasionally penetrate it are auditory – "bat kol", a heavenly voice).
The transition from prophecy to wisdom was a descent, but as is known, every descent is for the purpose of ascent. The fall from visual prophecy to the world of the study hall was intended only to climb back up to prophecy in a way that also includes intellect – both Torah-based and general human wisdom. The connection of prophecy and wisdom is the purpose of Kabbalah (which, by the way, is numerically equivalent to the sum of the words wisdom and prophecy), and indeed the first to begin teaching the hidden Torah was one of the sages: Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the father of the wisdom of the Zohar.
How did Rabbi Shimon pave the way back from auditory wisdom to visual prophecy? On one hand, his teaching, like his name, was auditory and intellectual. But on the other hand, it was a special kind of hearing: Rabbi Shimon doesn't raise his voice in the study hall, but leans to our ear and whispers a secret. Moreover: unlike the sages who address each other with the phrase "ta shma", come and hear, Rabbi Shimon and his companions in the Zohar address each other with the words "ta chazi", come and see. Rabbi Shimon doesn't want us to hear his secret, but to see it. He whispers it in our ear so that it will be translated in our minds into "visions of God", so that we will recreate the spirit of prophecy that rested upon us in the days when we were "seeing the voices".
From Seeing the Voices to Hearing the Visions
But this is not the end. As Rabbi Shimon's name indicates, his true concern is hearing, not seeing; and as the name of the Zohar indicates, its true concern is light, not sound. From this, we understand that the ultimate goal of Rabbi Shimon and the Zohar is not seeing the voices, but something far more surprising, strange, and interesting, which can be defined as hearing the visions.
What does it mean to hear the visions, to hear the revealed things? If seeing the voices is a tangible comprehension of spiritual messages, then hearing the visions must be the opposite: a spiritual comprehension of tangible reality! When we reach the peak of spiritual and prophetic comprehension, to a state where we not only hear the prophetic voice with our cold intellect but actually see it with our spiritual eyes, we should not be content with this. Instead, we must return downwards, to this revealed world, this time with the aim of perceiving it with new senses: instead of seeing it as it is, to hear its inner essence.
In simple words, the purpose of prophecy, and of the Torah in general, is not to bring messages from the World to Come down to this world, but to reveal the depth of this world – to hear the echo rising from the earth.
