In the era of dial-up telephones [in pre-historical times:-)], the caller's identity was often unknown, which encouraged humility, curiosity, openness, and anticipation for the telephone encounter. The listener felt less closed off and suspicious, so he didn't hesitate to cup his ear, even at the "price" of entering the mystery that surrounded that event. And when he heard the other voice through the earpiece, his senses were heightened with great attention. From the "empty space" he had cleared within himself, he was able to receive and nurture the seeds of the unknown coming to him. The conversation then took on the character of higher quality listening, a subject of fruitful interaction. But as the years passed, things changed, and the "new" modern man, a devotee of his four cubits, felt increasingly threatened by the "unknown" and was less eager to surprise his soul lest it be forced to "strip off its tunic" and "dirty its feet" as it approached the door to enter and be admitted into the hall of the unknown of others... And so his wisdom provided him with a solution, and he invented the "caller ID".
From now on, everything would be under control, and he would no longer be surprised, nor would his rest be disturbed by the need to shed one form and adopt another: to slightly shed his private form and adopt a more general form that emerges from the flow into a world of attention, which has the power to soften unnecessary boundaries that separate one person from another.
R' Yoav Malka
