If I Can't See It, Is It There?

Donkeys seeing angels, gorillas dancing, dogs hearing thunder, cats chasing (running from?) imaginary creatures. We see what we're looking for and what we expect, but what happens when others point out things we haven't noticed before?

Parashat Balak

Who here has a cat? Does your cat ever start chasing things that don’t exist or batting at air or running from nonexistent threats? Mind does. Periodically, and completely out of nowhere, she’ll tear down the stairs, her tail puffed out and running as fast as she can, as though she’s about to be attacked. Or she’ll jump up to bat something with her paw but, I promise you, there’s nothing there. I have friends who say that their house has a ghost, because their cats do similar things. I’ll admit, I haven’t lived with other animals consistently enough to know if they also behave like this. I know that dogs are attuned to sounds that we can’t hear, so they often react before we can identify what they’re responding to. But I don’t know if they also chase imaginary prey or if other animals do. I know we have some folks with other types of pets - yes? no?

I bring this up, because, in our parashah this week, Balak, we actually have a story of a donkey who reacts to a threat that her owner Bilaam can’t see. First a recap: The Israelites have traversed a large region despite being prohibited from entering by that territory’s king. God came to the Israelites’ aid and gave them the power to conquer that land. Now Balak, the King of Moab, is terrified that the Israelites will attack him and his people, so he hires a seer, Bilaam, to curse the Israelites. God does not want Bilaam to take on this commission, but Balak is not willing to take no for an answer and promises Bilaam tons of gold and jewels in exchange for a curse. So Bilaam saddles up his donkey and heads out to Moab. On the journey, an angel with a sword blocks Bilaam’s path. The donkey sees the angel and is terrified; Bilaam the seer can’t see the angel and beats the donkey. Finally, the donkey speaks, “Why are you beating me? In all the years you’ve ridden me, have I ever given you trouble? Why would you assume that I’m making trouble now?”

It’s amazing to me how often a group of people can be part of the same situation and yet experience it so differently---everything from noticing small details that others didn’t see or hear to coming away with vastly different conclusions. It comes from our prior experience, which shapes us and, in turn, shapes what we’re primed to notice in the future. It’s like the experiment done by Harvard University, in which people watch a group of people passing basketballs back and forth. They are tasked with counting the number of passes made by the people wearing white shirts. Since they weren’t asked in advance to look for the person in a gorilla suit, about half of the study participants didn’t notice the gorilla’s presence, even though it walked across the screen and through the middle of the game.

As ridiculous as the experiment sounds, selective attention, as it’s called, is not a game. It’s critical for our day-to-day functioning, so we can actually focus on what’s important. But it also serves to blind us to other people’s realities. It can lead us to assume that, since we didn’t have that experience in a particular situation, no one else did. Alternatively, we might grant that someone else’s experience made them particularly sensitive to certain cues, such that they would think they noticed something that didn’t really happen.

Back to the pets for a minute, my dad is much more attuned to the sound of thunder and fireworks than I am, because they terrify his dog. Sometimes I don’t notice the rumbling of thunder, but he does. It would be easy for me to say that he’s hearing things, that there isn’t any thunder, especially when it’s not raining and there’s no lightning. And I’d be wrong. The thunder is there, I just didn’t notice it.

Now not hearing thunder is pretty minor, but the same sorts of comments are made when people raise issues of offensive language or outright discrimination. A few months ago, when a prominent scholar died, there were dozens of comments about how wonderful and supportive a professor he was. And then a woman chimed in to share how dismissive he had been of her, that he had invited her male classmates to social gatherings and helped them network but had specifically left her out. All I can say is that it was appalling to read how these men, colleagues in her field, decried her for speaking ill of the dead and causing pain to the scholar’s family. Occasionally someone acknowledged that she was hurt by the experience, and then went on to explain how she had misunderstood what had happened. These men were part of the system that pushed her down decades ago, and they did it again through these comments on social media. Not maliciously---these are caring men---but they were blind to the possibility that someone else had a different experience, especially one that didn’t square with their view of him.

Similarly, there were significant rumblings in one of my moms’ groups. Over the past year, a number of Black and Brown women shared that they had experienced numerous microaggressions that come along with systemic racism as well as some very painful instances of outright discrimination. This space that was supposed to be supportive for new moms was, instead, alienating. A few weeks ago, I met with some of the mostly white moms who had been part of that group as part of a different discussion. At one point, a mom expressed her frustration with these complaints. “I never noticed any of what they were talking about,” she said. Of course she didn’t! They weren’t her issues and she wasn’t primed to notice them. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, just that she was blind to these other moms’ experiences.

We can’t take in everything. We will always be blind to some of what others go through. We will, in some ways and at different points in our lives, be like Bilaam, unaware of what’s right in front of us. And that’s OK. But we have to be open to the possibility, even the likelihood, that our experience is not the full story, that someone else has had a totally different experience. Even if we are blind like Bilaam, we cannot use our experience and frustration to beat down those who bring forth the things we didn’t see. Instead, we have to honor the differences and, most importantly, learn from them.

When you go home and look up the gorilla experiment, you will probably see the gorilla. Now you know to look for it. Hopefully Bilaam would pay more attention if his donkey acted strangely. I (mostly) trust my dad when he says he hears thunder. I wish my cat would tell me what she’s responding to, because there has to be something. When we truly listen to people who tell us what they’ve experienced and learn from them, then we can move forward and create environments that support and sustain healthy, whole communities.