Intimacy through Communication There are two basic ways of communicating—the male way and the female way. In You Just Don’t Understand, Dr. Deborah Tannen explains that when men speak, it is generally for the purpose of communicating information. Therefore, if they don’t have any information to communicate, they don’t speak. Women, however, speak even when they have no information to impart because they innately sense that speaking creates connection and intimacy. As a male I can relate to this distinction. When I come home after a full day of teaching, I am generally quiet. But my wife doesn’t understand this. She asks me, “You speak all day, and with me you have nothing to share?” I tell her, “But you’ve heard all my classes. When I develop some new material, I’ll try it out on you first.” Of course, my wife is not asking me for a Torah lecture. She wants me to connect with her through conversation. Women communicate to create intimacy. For women the content of a conversation is not the only reason for speaking. One can imagine a man listening to a discussion between two women on a bus and hearing what sounds to him like small-talk. To a man, a casual conversation between women doesn’t seem substantive. But for the women, it is very meaningful and may even be transformational because they are connecting and intensifying their relationship. When it comes to communication with God, women definitely have something over men. In fact, we learn many of the laws of tefillah from Chana, a woman who successfully prayed to conceive a child, who then became the prophet Samuel. Now I must stress that tefillah is not casual small-talk with God. Tefillah is very rich in content. However, the value of the content is for our sake not for God’s. We are the ones who need to hear and be transformed by what we are saying to God. We are the ones who need to intensify our awareness of our loving relationship to God who is ever-present.