Rabbi Zvika Krieger, Chochmat HaLev
January 16, 2026

In this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Va’era, Moshe (Moses) is tapped by the God character to liberate the Israelites from their centuries-long enslavement in Egypt. The Jewish mystics teach that our enslavement in Egypt was not just a historical episode in a specific time and place for a specific group of people, but is an archetype of suffering that reverberates across generations. The Hebrew word for Egypt, mitzrayim, means narrowness. It’s a constriction that is as relevant for us today as it was for our forebears in ancient times.

It may be hard for many of us to relate to being slaves when we think of our loinclothed ancestors lugging bricks and building pyramids under the scorching desert sun, whipped by brutal taskmasters. But there is a deeper enslavement that occurred that may perhaps feel more familiar to us today.

In this week’s Torah portion, Moshe follows God’s instructions to tell the Israelites that they will be rescued from their suffering, liberated and brought to a promised land. What was the Israelites’ response?
וְלֹא שָׁמְעוּ אֶל מֹשֶׁה
But they did not listen to Moshe

Our sages hone in on that phrase – Lo Shamu/They did not listen – as the core attribute of their enslavement. It wasn’t the back-breaking labor, the loss of autonomy, or cultural identity, or religious freedom. It was their inability to listen that was the core spiritual malady of their time in Egypt. And so as we experience our mitzrayim, our own time of constriction, listening may be the key to our liberation.

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In our personal lives, so much harm unfolds when so many people are speaking but so few people are truly listening. We listen long enough to interrupt. We listen for keywords rather than meaning, positions rather than people. We listen while already preparing our rebuttal. We listen selectively—hearing the parts that confirm our story and tuning out the parts that challenge it.

As a result, conflicts repeat themselves, misunderstandings harden, and relationships stall in the same arguments, week after week, year after year. Moments that could be tender or reparative pass by unheard. The tragedy is not a lack of speaking, but a breakdown in our capacity to receive what is actually being said.

In our communities, not listening becomes a collective pattern. Feedback becomes threatening rather than informative. Warning signs go unheard until crises erupt. When listening disappears, communities lose their ability to self-correct, to adapt, and to care. The result is fragmentation, burnout, and a quiet unraveling of trust.

And in our national life, the loss of listening has become one of our most destructive forces. We see it in political discourse where no one expects to understand, only to win. We see it in media ecosystems that reward speed and certainty over attention and nuance. We stop listening to facts that unsettle us, to histories that complicate us, to human stories that don’t fit our moral frameworks. It’s that culture that allows an innocent wife and mother to be killed by a rogue ICE agent — and a culture in which our political leaders blame the victim or label her a terrorist rather than expressing grief or remorse or providing any accountability. People have lost hope entirely because no one believes the other side is listening—or capable of listening at all. This is a profound mitzrayim: a narrowing of our collective ear, where noise replaces hearing, and the possibility of shared reality begins to collapse.

 

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So what can we do about it? What is causing our listening muscles to atrophy? To liberate us from this constriction, we have to understand what is enslaving us.

Our sages offer various answers. First let’s turn to the Malbim, Rabbi Meir Leibush, a prolific 19th-century Torah commentator known for his rigorous, word-by-word precision. The Torah attributes the Israelites’ lack of hearing to their מִקֹּצֶר רוּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָה קָשָׁה — their constrained spirit and hard labor. The Malbim teaches that our capacity to listen can survive being overworked, or being under-resourced; but we cannot listen if we are both. When our days are packed wall-to-wall, when our nervous systems are frayed, when we are emotionally exhausted and materially anxious, listening is not a moral failure — it becomes neurologically impossible. Many of us are living exactly there: too busy to pause, too depleted to receive, too stretched to take in anything that doesn’t feel immediately actionable or threatening. Under those conditions, the ear closes — not because we don’t care, but because there is no room left inside.

Hizkuni, the 13th-century Torah commentator from France, posits that the enslaved Israelites couldn’t listen because they were afraid. It was not a failure of attention, but a paralysis — cognitive and existential — born of fear. Fear narrows perception. It collapses curiosity. It trains us to scan for danger rather than meaning. When fear dominates, every new word sounds like a threat, every unfamiliar idea feels destabilizing, and every voice becomes suspect. Fear doesn’t just make us anxious — it makes us unreachable.

Fear also prevents us from imagining a better future; we’re so worried about making it through the day that all we can hope for is that tomorrow will be less painful than today. Life feels so bad right now that “not bad” becomes the highest aspiration. There is no capacity to dream about “good,” let alone “great.” Perhaps the Israelites could hear Moshe’s promise that the slavery would end — but the vision of a promised land flowing with abundance and blessing was simply too much to take in. As articulated by Rabbi Avital Hochstein of Yeshivat Hadar, this kind of oppression creates “a consciousness of an endless present, without exit or horizon.” How many of us recognize that feeling — the sense that history is stuck, that nothing truly new is possible, that all we can do is brace?

The Ramban, the 13th-century Spanish mystic, points out that the inability to hear is not a passive side-effect of slavery; it is something the Egyptian oppressors actively cultivate.

Crushing labor, constant degradation, and repeated disappointment are designed to produce cynicism and disempowerment — a people who no longer believe that change is real, or that their voices matter.

That same dynamic is very much alive today. Forces of tyranny and hatred actively encourage us to turn away from one another, to distrust one another, to assume bad faith, to stop listening altogether. They thrive when we are isolated, when we are numb, when we are convinced that engagement is pointless and relationship is naïve. You might think you’re resisting those forces by shrinking your social world, writing people off, doom-scrolling, or retreating into moral purity and ideological certainty — but in doing so, you are actually helping them succeed. Because a people who no longer listen is a people who can no longer be liberated.

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Over the past two and a half years, we’ve engaged in the spiritual practice of being in community with those who we disagree with. Later tonight, we’re going to practice working those atrophied listening muscles that the world is continually trying to diminish. The work of listening we’ve been talking about is not theoretical. It is about what we do when we are confronted with something that tightens us — a symbol, a story, a person — and our first instinct is to turn away, shut down, or harden.

Later this evening, some of you will choose to witness a conversation between members of this community who wear keffiyehs in our sanctuary, and members who feel activated or even threatened when they see them. I want to be clear: the invitation tonight is not to decide who is right, or to resolve a disagreement, or to come away with a policy or a position. The invitation is to engage in the spiritual practice of this week’s Torah portion: to notice what happens inside us when we hear something we don’t expect, or don’t like, or don’t yet understand — and whether we can stay present long enough to truly listen.

What you will be witnessing tonight is not people speaking for groups or ideologies, but individuals speaking from lived experience — fear, conviction, grief, longing, and love for this community.

Your role is not to fix them, rebut them, or judge them, but to practice what the Israelites could not yet do in Egypt: to receive words without immediately armoring against them. This is not easy work. It asks us to tolerate discomfort, to sit with unresolved tension, and to resist the urge to collapse complexity into certainty. But this is precisely how communities fight back against the forces of mitzrayim. We loosen the constriction not by erasing difference, but by staying in relationship when difference hurts.

You don’t have to attend tonight’s dialogue if it might be too activating for you. There will be future opportunities to do this work in other ways. And if you do attend, you don’t have to feel calm, or open, or generous every moment. All that’s being asked is sincerity: a willingness to listen without interruption, without cross-examination, without immediately translating what you hear into proof of what you already believe. If liberation begins anywhere, it begins there — in the quiet, disciplined act of keeping the ear open even when the heart is racing.

To prepare for our session tonight, and for this spiritual work more broadly, I invite you to close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Think of the people or situations in your life that you have trouble listening to. It’s easy to accuse other people of not listening to us – but take a moment to consider what or who you are not listening to? What shuts you down? What does it feel like to shut you down? In what ways does that support you? In what ways is that holding you back?

Now find a person sitting near to you and share with them: Where in your life are you Lo Shamu, closed to listening? And in what ways might you want to open your ears, and your heart, a little more in 2026?

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The tragedy of Egypt was not only that the Israelites were enslaved, but that they lost the capacity to hear that freedom was possible. Moshe speaks. God promises. And still: Lo Shamu — they could not listen. The Torah is teaching us that liberation does not begin with miracles or power or even courage. It begins with the reopening of the ear.

Before the plagues, before the splitting of seas, before any visible change in reality, something more subtle has to happen: a constricted spirit has to soften just enough to receive a different story. A frightened heart has to widen just enough to hear a future it cannot yet imagine. That is the first act of redemption — not leaving Egypt, but becoming able to listen again.

We are not yet at the sea. We are still in Va’era, in the middle of exhaustion, fear, and noise. But perhaps the work of this moment is not to fix everything or to persuade everyone or to win every argument. Perhaps the work is more basic and more radical: to reclaim the spiritual capacity to listen — to ourselves, to one another, to truths that unsettle us, and to possibilities that feel almost too hopeful to name.

Because as long as we cannot listen, no redemption will make sense to us. But the moment we can — even a little — the story can begin to change. And may we, in our time of mitzrayim, find our way back to hearing.

I’d like to end with a blessing. Mi Sheberach Avoteinu V’Imeinu V’Horeinu, May the sacred oneness that blessed our ancestors in moments of constriction bless us now with softened hearts and opened ears.

May we be blessed with the courage to listen — not only to voices that comfort us, but to truths that challenge us and people who ask something real of us.

May we be blessed with the spaciousness to hear beyond fear, beyond exhaustion, beyond the noise of our time — and in that listening, may we begin to taste liberation for all.

 

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Rabbi Zvika Krieger is the spiritual leader of Chochmat HaLev. You can read more of his teachings here.