On the Value of Curiosity

Kol Nidre Sermon, Friday, October 11, 2024
By Rabbi Glickman

Let me tell you about an evening you had not too long ago. It was that night when you got together with a friend of yours for dinner. When you first saw your friend, he greeted you warmly, you sat down at the table, you asked him how he was doing, he rolled his eyes, and he told you about a hassle he had had at the pharmacy that day. He then told you about how things were going at work, about what his kids were up to, about his family’s recent trip to Quebec, and about some trips to Quebec his parents took him on when he was a kid, and about an argument he had with an American friend who insisted upon calling that province “Kwi-beck,” and about how that American friend didn’t even know the meanings of simple and obvious words like toque and parkade. You laughed, and your friend told you that he was going to the Folkfest in a couple of months, that he was working on getting Taylor Swift tickets in LA for his daughter, and that if you hadn’t yet seen the TV show The Bear, you absolutely needed to go home and watch it starting tonight. He told you a good joke or two, glanced at his watch, and apologized because he had to go. You split the check, and both headed to your cars.

Driving away, you realized that it was a pleasant enough evening, but there was something missing. You couldn’t quite put your finger on what it was, but whatever it was, it left you feeling kind of exhausted. Depleted, even. What was it? Your friend was certainly pleasant, and his stories were mildly entertaining, it was nice to hear about what was going on in his life.

So, what was it that had you feeling so empty when dinner is supposed to leave you feeling so full.

Then, you realized what it was. During the entire meal – all 93 minutes of it – your friend didn’t ask you a single question about yourself. Instead, he spent the entire time holding forth about himself. He was entertaining enough, and he certainly didn’t act in any way that was unkind or even unpleasant. It’s just that…he didn’t seem very interested in you. You never would have wanted to be the only center of focus in that conversation, but a little give-and-take would have been nice. And after an hour and a half, one-sided discussions like that can get kind of tiring.

Of course, unlike in the story as I told it, maybe your friend was a woman rather than a man because women can fall into this trap just as easily as men can. Or maybe I got the genders right, only I told it backwards, and you were the one who carried on at such length.

Whatever the details, I think you’ll agree that the kind of conversation I just described is a common one in our world, and it probably always has been. When we’re the ones drawing such exclusive attention to ourselves, maybe it’s because we feel a need for affirmation, and we think that a good, amusing zinger of a story or an anecdote will make us more entertaining and likeable. To an extent, that’s sometimes true, of course. But sometimes, when one of those zingers follows another and another and another, the stories can get exhausting.

It seems to me that our world could benefit from an increased dose of curiosity these days.

Conversations at their best provide the participants with opportunities to learn about one another, but so often we converse not to truly engage with others, but only to give those other people the honor of knowing us, with the give and take of meaningful interaction falling away in favour of serial sharing rather than true conversation. So often, instead of engaging in real dialogue with others, we talk, and then we simply wait our turn until we can talk again. In the media, particularly in politics, TV interviewers often fail to show genuine curiosity, too, with their interviews becoming not occasions to learn the stories and motivations of their subjects, but simply opportunities to find that “gotcha moment,” catching their subject in some sort of embarrassing or trouble-making gaffe.

But my guess is that you’ve also experienced the opposite. There have been times when you’ve really engaged in conversation with another individual or group – when there’s been true give-and-take, when you’ve listened to one another, making sure you understood one another’s perspectives, and they’ve done the same for you. I would also hazard a guess that you know some people who are genuinely curious about you: who ask you questions, real questions – not just “Where are you from?” and “What do you do?” but questions that help them get to know you as a person. “What do you think about this situation in the news?” “What is it that you find meaningful and enjoyable about your job?” “How have you been doing lately? And please don’t just say ‘Fine, thank you,’ because I really want to know.” And if your experience is anything like mine, there is something you love about spending time with these people, because people like these – simply by expressing interest in who you are as a person – are affirming, vitalizing, and energizing beyond words. Compare how you feel after having spent an hour with one of these genuinely interested people with how you feel after having spent an hour or two with the self-absorbed friend I described a few minutes ago – my guess is that those feelings are as different as night and day.

So, my message to you tonight is one that you probably already know, but it’s one that bears repeating because we forget it. Curiosity – especially curiosity about other people – especially curiosity about other people with whom we interact – is one of the most important human traits of all.

Judaism has taught the value of curiosity for centuries. Our tradition, of course, values wisdom as one of the greatest of all human traits. Soldiers, kings, and philanthropists – they’re all important at times in Judaism. But for many centuries, we Jews have attributed the primacy of place in our culture to the chacham – the wise person, the sage, the scholar. Being wise is the most important trait of all. And how do you get wise? The Talmud teaches us explicitly: V’eizehu chacham? Halomeid mikol adam. “Who is truly wise?” the Talmud asks. “The one who learns from all people.”

Think about that. Every person has something to teach us. And if we have any aspirations of true wisdom, it’s important that we learn their lessons. It’s so tempting to just tell others our own stories sometimes, and sometimes our stories can be fun or even helpful to the people with whom we share them. But as you hold forth, it might be a good idea to remember that that person you’re telling them to has inside them truths that you need to learn. And the longer you hold forth, the longer it will be until you can learn from them.

Instead of just talking at them, instead of just telling your stories, maybe it would behoove you to express some interest in the stories that they have to tell, in the wisdom that have to teach. That wisdom might not always be readily evident – some people do a really good job of hiding it – but it’s there, and it’s waiting for you to uncover it.

That’s why I love studying Torah with you. Those of you who don’t come to Saturday morning services at Temple… you should come to Saturday morning services at Temple.  And that’s because not only do we have meaningful worship experiences every week, but also because each week, we study Torah together. Theoretically, I guess, since I’m the rabbi, I’m supposed to be the one doing the teaching. But usually, I find myself doing far more learning than teaching in these Torah discussions. I’ve been in this business for more than 34 years now. I’ve studied every one of these weekly Torah portion hundreds of times, I think. And every week, the people with whom I worship and study right here in this room teach me things that I hadn’t known or hadn’t seen before. Mikol m’lamdai hiskalti, the Psalmist remarks – from all of my students I have learned. Learning your wisdom has been one of the greatest blessings of my rabbinate.

But I’m not the only one who has such learning opportunities. The people sitting around you – indeed everyone you know – have so much to teach. What a shame it would be to let their lessons go unlearned.

One group of people with whom I like to do this outside of Temple are Uber drivers. There I am on those rides, spending several minutes or more with a person I’ve never met, and it’s usually a person whose background and life story are very different from my own (there aren’t too many 61-year-old rabbis working as Uber drivers). From Uber drivers, I’ve learned what it’s like to grow up on a canola farm in Southern Alberta, and what the significance can be for an African American to attend a historically black college or university in the United States. I’ve learned about Sikh practices in Punjab, and heard tales of surviving the horrors of genocide in Rwanda. I’ve learned why people move to Calgary from all over the world, and been inspired by fascinating life stories of all kinds. It can drive Caron crazy, and sometimes she needs to rein me in because admittedly I can get a little too …enthusiastic in my questioning from time to time. But still, asking people to tell you their stories can yield awesome and transformative results. And the more you do it, the more transformed as a person you can become.

“Why did God create the world?” the rabbis asked. “Because God loves stories.” And if human stories are good enough for God, then I humbly suggest they can be good enough for us, too.

To the rabbis, the ultimate source of wisdom is the Torah. God created the Torah, they taught, with fifty gates – fifty entry-points through which we can get to its truths. To the rabbis, the wisest man ever was Moshe Rabbeinu – Moses our teacher. He could access the Torah more effectively than any of us. And how many gates of the Torah were open to Moses? Forty-nine were. Moses was great enough to get at a lot of the truth, but even a person as wise as he was couldn’t get at it all. To learn fully, even someone as wise as Moses needs help. And that’s where other people come in. Only together, can we learn all that we need to know.

But this, my friends, is only half the story. Because it’s not just that listening to others can help us. Taking an active interest in other people, and asking to hear their stories, is one of the greatest gifts we can give them. You know this. When someone takes an interest in you; it feels affirming; it makes you feel seen, it elevates you.

I have a friend named Matthew who I love spending time with. And one of the many reasons I love spending time with Matthew is that he’s a great interviewer. Matthew, you see, was trained as a journalist, and even though he’s not working in that field now, he is still such a … journalist. In fact, Matthew cut his journalistic teeth as a reporter for small-town newspapers in the rural American hinterland. There, he’d go to a City Planning Commission meeting, and listen to an hourlong discussion about whether to put a left-turn lane into the intersection between Rt. 42 and Elm St., and then he’d have to write an interesting article about it. Matthew became an expert in talking to people about why these things mattered to them. He got them to tell their stories, to share what it was that made them tick. And now, all these years later, it’s a skill he still has. He asks questions, and he does so in a way that reminds people how interesting they are, and how fascinating their stories can be.

Our congregation is a member of the Calgary Alliance for the Common Good, an organization in our city that is committed to just this – listening to people’s stories, finding out what matters to them, and acting upon it.  And in the process, they’ve enriched the life of our city – back in the old days, they advocated for the expansion of the Green Line, for support to Calgarians with mental health needs, and for net-zero carbon emissions, and much more. They listen to people’s stories, they translate those stories into policy agendas, and they gather together in grass roots efforts to advocate for those agendas – often successfully. Such can be the power of simply listening to one another’s stories.

But you know how important listening to other people’s stories can be because you know what it’s like when people take an interest in you. One of the greatest gifts that you can give another individual is the simple gift of taking an interest in them as human beings. Ask questions. Have them teach you what you don’t know. Probe them for their thoughts. And through it all, make it genuine. Because when you do that, you help humanize them, and you lift them up.

And if you doubt the value of it, all I’ll say is that those Uber drivers have given me a rating of 4.94 out of five. Beat that!

We all can be so self-centred at times. It’s understandable because holding it all together can be difficult, and when things get hard, we tend to turn toward our own, individual needs. But our tradition invites us to be more than that and to engage in what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described as acts of self-transcendence – to look beyond ourselves and into the eyes of others.

It’s so simple and so powerful. Just ask people about their lives. Ask for their opinions. Ask for their perspectives. It can help you. It can transform them. And the fact that it can make for a pretty good Uber rating doesn’t hurt, either.

True curiosity, and genuine interest in other people and what they can teach you, can benefit you, affirm them, and, when practiced widely enough, help bring us to genuine redemption.

Shanah Tovah.