In the daily Amidah and also many times during the Yamim Noraim, we recite a prayer:
Shema koleinu Adonai eloheinu, chus verachem aleinu, vekabel berachamim uvratzon et tefilateinu שמע קולינו יהוה אלוהינו, חוס ורחם עלינו, וקבל ברחמים וברצון את תפילתינו.
Hear our voice, O Eternal our God; spare us and have mercy upon us, and accept our prayers in mercy and favour.
It is based on a passage in the book of Psalms (65) where we call God the “shomei’ah tefillah” – the one who hears prayers.
Yet this psalm begins with a phrase that is hard to understand and so is often mistranslated:
לְךָ֤ דֻֽמִיָּ֬ה תְהִלָּ֓ה אֱלֹ֘הִ֥ים בְּצִיּ֑וֹן וּ֝לְךָ֗ יְשֻׁלַּם־נֶֽדֶר׃
“To You, silence is praise, God in Zion, and to you vows are paid”
Followed by the verse which informs our prayer שֹׁמֵ֥עַ תְּפִלָּ֑ה עָ֝דֶ֗יךָ כׇּל־בָּשָׂ֥ר יָבֹֽאוּ׃
“Hearer of prayer, all human beings come to you”
The psalmist begins with silent praise, and with the completion of vows made to God, and only then says that God is the one who hears prayer – the prayers of all human beings.
The Talmud tells us that “Devarim she’balev einam Devarim” – words not formed out loud are not halachically valid – in the case of promises, just having an intention is not enough. (Kiddushin 49b) – and yet the psalmist understands – the feelings in our hearts, the ideas in our minds – these too form part of our connection to God. We do not HAVE to verbalise them for God to hear them.
We Jews are – par excellence – a people who exist within words. We have always relied on them to make sense of what is happening to us, to communicate with others, to create and to transmit meaning. We read our texts and examine every letter, every word, to draw meaning in every generation. We protect the language of those texts, turning the object that holds the narrative into a holy item, a sefer torah. From the moment Moses tells the Children of Israel to write his words into a sefer that will travel with them for all time, we are bound to the integrity and extraordinary elasticity of the Hebrew language.
Two of the most frequent verbs in torah are “Amar” and “Diber” – to say and to speak. Between them they appear almost seven thousand times in Tanakh – far outstripping any other verbal root. We are the people of the book. Words are our currency. Just as God brought the universe into being through the power of speech, so do we create meaning and develop understanding through words.
Yet since 7th October 2023, we find ourselves heartbroken and lost. The phrase that is most often heard in Israel and in Jewish communities is “Ein milim – there are no words”.
It feels like there is no vocabulary for what we have experienced and what we continue to live through. The medium that has sustained us and provided for us – language – has suddenly shattered and we are left feeling adrift and powerless in a hostile environment.
Unable to use words to describe or to make sense of our reality, we are like Noah – famously silent in the face of the destruction of the world by flood. Or like Aaron who was silenced by his grief when two of his sons died after having offered strange fire before God. We are overwhelmed, voiceless, unable to know what we can possibly say or do to make sense of what is happening, or to be able to act in order to change it.
In the book of Psalms there are many pleas for God to hear our prayer, to listen to us and to act. And there are even more petitions that God not be silent but that God responds to us. It is a regular theme, the lack of words between us and God and the ensuing fear of abandonment.
But silence does not have to be a negative thing. Silence can express our feelings even beyond the ability of words to do so.
In Pirkei d’Rav Eliezer, a medieval midrashic text, we read that “The voices of five objects of creation go from one end of the world to the other, and their voices are inaudible. When people cut down the wood of a fruit tree, its cry goes from one end of the world to the other, and the voice is inaudible. When the serpent sloughs its skin, its cry goes from one end of the world to the other, and its voice is not heard. When a woman is divorced from her husband, her cry goes from one end of the world of the world to the other, but the voice is inaudible, when the infant comes out from the mother’s womb and when the soul departs from the body, the cry goes forth from one end of the world to the other, and the voice is not heard.” Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer 34:4
The midrash is describing moments of existential trauma – and the accompanying sound of the inaudible voice.
The sound of silence reverberates through Jewish tradition. Possibly the most well known is the story of Elijah and his encounter with God.
“There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the Eternal; but the Eternal was not in the wind. After the wind—an earthquake; but the Eternal was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake—fire; but the Eternal was not in the fire. And after the fire—the voice of slender silence [kol d’mamah dakah].” (I Kings 19:11-12)
Kol d’mamah dakah. When Elijah heard this, he wrapped his mantle about his face and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold a voice was with him and said to him: “Why are you here, Elijah?”
God here is a sound, or paradoxically we might say that God here is the silence within the sound. And somehow the communication is complete. With this one question, Elijah is comforted and challenged and given back his life’s meaning. Having fled Jezebel in fear for his life, having begged God to take his life, having reached the depths of despair and stayed in his cave alone and paralysed with sadness – it is the sound of the silent question that returns him to life.
After the seventh of October, we have no words. Like Elijah we are fearful and we are angry and we feel ourselves to be so very alone. It is almost as if we cannot begin to imagine a future, because imagining something usually requires language and we have no words. But while language may structure imagination and help us to communicate it to others, there is another, visceral, sensory, intuitive human faculty that allows us to imagine without words. We can dream, perceive, feel, pray – all without words.
Elijah is reminded by God that ultimately the connection between us and God does not require words. The overarching sound of Elul and of the Yamim Noraim is not all the words spoken in prayer, but the cry of the Shofar. It is a sound that takes us back to Mt Sinai, to our first meeting with God as a people, to the creation of a covenant that cannot be broken.
The word shofar itself comes from the root shin-peh-reish which has the basic meaning of “to be hollow”, though it has a secondary meaning of “beauty”. Again, there is the curious and paradoxical connection here – instead of silence and communication, we have emptiness and beauty. It seems that always in our tradition the idea of there being “nothing” is challenged and juxtaposed with the idea of there being “ something” that is very special. What seems to be silent is in fact full of communication, what seems to be empty turns out to be full – nowhere more clear than the wilderness in which the Jewish people were formed – Midbar – a word which connotes empty wilderness, and yet which is formed from the root “davar” which as a noun means “a thing” or “a word” and as a verb means “to speak”.
While we may feel ourselves to be empty and hollow, with no words with which to imagine a different future or to create a new idea, our tradition comes to remind us that we are not alone, not abandoned. As the psalmist writes, even silence is praise of God, and God hears even what we do not speak or even form into words.
While we are a people of words, living in a world which our tradition tells us was created by the speaking of God – “God said…. And there was….” We are also a people of commandment, of covenant and of action. While the verbs for speech are the most frequent in bible, the verbs “to be” and “to do, to make” are the next numerous in our texts. In a world where words feel inadequate or wrong, we are still able to act in order to fulfil our purpose and meaning. Our actions at this time may indeed speak much louder than words ever could.
I’d like to conclude with a story by Loren Eiseley, (The star thrower, an essay published in 1969 in The Unexpected Universe)
One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a child picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the child, he asked, “What are you doing?” The child replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.” “Child,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!”
After listening politely, the child bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, said…” I made a difference for that one.”
At the moment we may have few or no words. We may be hurting and filled with fear and pain and anger. We may feel less safe, and less certain of what the future will bring than ever before. But even so, we are Jews. We must bring our whole selves to living our lives. We will petition God to hear our prayers, blow the shofar to call both our attention and God’s attention. And each of us, in our own way, will find our way forward. We will find beauty in the emptiness, praise in the silence, and through our actions our voices will be heard.
rabbisylviarothschild 