RABBI DONIEL FRANK | Director, M.A.P. Seminars, Inc., Marriage and Family Therapist

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The Torah compares Hashem to an eagle, and Rashi explains this to mean that Hashem has the compassion of an eagle, who makes sure to flap and shake his wings before entering his nest so that that his children will have the chance to wake up and get the strength to receive him.

This compassionate quality, not to thrust or impose yourself on others before making sure they have the strength receive you, is very pervasive. There are so many applications.

One is in the area of communication, that when talk to people and try to influence them, we must make sure that the other person is ready to hear it. A good communicator knows that he has a responsibility to see if the other has, as Rashi says, the strength to receive. And if he sees or even suspects that he doesn’t, he does whatever he can to prime and to ready the receiver to hear. That’s because if we are too strong, the other one will never hear what we have to say and it’ll be wasted. Or it might even create contention. And in that case, all we would have done is get the message off our chest, but it will not have landed well. Venting is not communicating. And we can’t be surprised when, after we’ve blown off our steam, we find that the other person really didn’t hear anything we said… or even got turned off by it.

So here’s the rule to keep in mind: Just because we can send something, doesn’t mean the other person can receive it. He might be too tired, upset, or overwhelmed to be present for what you have to say to him at that time. And therefore there’s a responsibility on the speaker to make sure that what and how he is about to communicate – whether it has to do with the intensity of what he has to say, whether it’s with the choice of his words, or the time that he chooses to say them – conforms to the way the other can hear it. In some cases, you have to “flap and shake your wings†like an eagle as a way to build up to your message.

In fact, that’s what Hashem was doing when He chose to engage Adam in small talk – asking him where he was – before telling him his punishment for sinning. Adam would not have been ready for that devastating message had Hashem gotten straight down to business.

It could also be that Hashem lands like an eagle every year on Rosh Hashanah, the day of judgment, by first giving us a month of Elul which is characterized by “I am to my Beloved and my Beloved is to me,†that He offers us an intimate connection before engaging in judgment upon us.

Hashem treated us like the eagle that approaches his children with sensitivity. Good communicators and educators do the same. When they have something important to say, they don’t just thrust themselves recklessly on others, disregarding their capacity to receive. Instead, they make sure they calibrate their message based on the needs of the receivers, doing all they can to make sure their messages effectively land like an eagle.

DEDICATED TO A REFUAH SHELAIMA FOR YITZCHAK ben DEVORAH

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