April 8, 2023
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Shabbat Chol Hamoed Pesach
April 8, 2023 — 17 Nissan 5783
Make Space or Take Up Space?
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
I recently heard a teaching that I experienced as an epiphany. The context was the Spark mission to Israel to celebrate its 75th anniversary leaving in a few weeks. Three hundred people from Greater Jewish Boston are going on nine buses. Marc Baker, the CEO of CJP, was speaking to the folks who were leading each of these buses.
He shared that when he was still at Gann Academy, he was hired by CJP to lead a mission of young Jewish leaders from Boston called Acharai. The first thing he did was to change his title. He was hired to be a scholar. He did not want to be a scholar. He wanted to be a Jewish journey facilitator. The purpose of a scholar is to share facts. The purpose of a Jewish journey facilitator is to work with, to walk with, the people in your group to help them make meaning of the experience that they are in the middle of.
He shared that on one very hard day the group went to one of the Nazi concentration camps. After confronting this unimaginable inhumanity, they were on the grounds outside the camp. All they wanted was space and silence to process the enormity of what they had just seen. But there was a concentration camp tour guide who started talking at them. Facts and factoids and figures about the camp. This talking head went over very badly.
Marc cautioned us not to be that kind of talking head, who does not read the room, who sees their job as a one-way path of transmitting content and not as a two-way relationship of making sense of complexity. Then Marc shared a question that I have been turning over in my head ever since: do you make space, or do you take up space?
This distinction resonates for leading a tour. We have all been on tours where the tour guide takes up all the space, going through their pre-programmed shpiel, not knowing or caring if, or how, it lands.
But this distinction between making space, and taking up space, does not apply only to tour guides. It applies to all our lives every day. Here is why the distinction matters. It ultimately affects how good we are with other human beings. It ultimately shapes the quality of our relationships. If we take up space, if we take up most or all of the oxygen in the room, people might tolerate us, if they have to, but they won’t want to. On the other hand, if we make space, other people will feel seen, heard, valued by us, and they will want to spend time with us. The good news is that all of us can train ourselves to make space and thereby to have better relationships. Here are three simple moves that can help us make space.
One of the most powerful questions in the world is: what do you think, especially when you really mean it. People love being asked what they think, when the person asking the question values what they have to say. When Andy Stanley was working with his staff at his church in Atlanta on the question of what is a keystone habit that could transform their church if every staff person got behind it, he asked all the church professionals: what do you think? And he meant it. His staff rose to the occasion. They said our mission is to build a church that unchurched people would love to attend. If a church employee strikes up a conversation with somebody not in the church, and in the course of that conversation the other person says one of the “three nots”—not doing well, not prepared, not from here—the new keystone habit will be that the church staffer will offer please come to church with me, sit with me next Sunday. That keystone habit took hold, and now a lot more people are coming to church. The system worked because people were asked for their input, and their wisdom was genuinely valued.
What is our posture with other people? Do we say, let me tell you what I think—or do we say, what do you think? Of course a conversation has to be both ways, and there is a time and place to share our thinking as well. But is our first instinct to talk or to listen?
The second move is to ask the question: how are you, and really mean it. It is easy to ask the question perfunctorily. But it makes a huge difference if we ask that question and mean it.
When my mother in love passed away in December, 2016, and I would call my father in love, he would talk about how hard it was for him to share how he was really doing with most people that he would encounter over the course of a day. He would say laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone. At the shiva, he could be sad. But when the shiva was over, he felt that the social convention demanded that he project that he was fine. Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, people can connect with us when we are upbeat and positive. Cry and you cry alone, we have to be limited and careful to whom we show vulnerability.
Which means that if you can handle somebody telling you they are not doing well, you can make room in a way that is helpful. After he was widowed, my father in love had this one friend who called him from the States every Tuesday afternoon at 4:00 his time to ask him: how are you really, and he made space for my father in love to share his honest self.
What a gift we can give other people when we can do our version of that Tuesday call. When we ask the question how are you really, and we want the truth, that makes space for the other person in a way that is rare, precious and helpful.
And the third move for not taking up space, but making space, is being comfortable with uncomfortable silence: not rushing in with words. One of the best examples of this comes from a great television series called Friday Night Lights, about high school football in rural Texas. The second string quarterback, Matt Saracen, known as QB2, was catapulted to first string when the star quarterback had a life-altering injury. Saracen lives with his aging grandmother, who has active dementia, and he has to manage her care, go to school, and try to become the starting quarterback in football-crazed Texas. He has no family to support him. In one particularly wrenching scene, he cries out: his mother abandoned him, his father abandoned him, he has nobody except his grandma, he is taking care of her, she cannot take of him, and he is only 17. He is crying. Coach Taylor listens and says nothing. He resists the urge to rush in with words. His silence makes space for his tormented player. His presence means that player is less alone.
Can we resist the urge to rush in with words? Can we be okay with an uncomfortable silence?
If we can do these three things, ask what do you think, and mean it; ask how are you doing, really, and mean it; and just accompany another person with silent presence, we make space, not take up space. From a Jewish point of view, being able to make space is of cosmic importance.
Jewish mystics have this concept called tzimtzum, which means contraction. Since God is everywhere, since God’s presence fills the world, God has to engage in tzimtzum, God has to contract Godself, to make room for human beings and for relationship with human beings. The fact that the ultimate self-shrinker, the ultimate self-contractor, is God, suggests a paradox for us all. The more we contract, the more we make space for others, the bigger our impact. The more space we take up, the more we become the talking head who drones on, the smaller our impact.
To make space, or to take up space, that is the question. For tour guides. And for all human beings. Shabbat shalom and moadim l’simcha!