THE SPEAKING SOUL AND THE SILENT SOUL
This past week, The Mussar Institute held its annual Retreat in Connecticut. This is an edited version of one of the talks I gave.
When my wife and I were in our late 20s, we were among the founders of an organization called Seva Foundation that is still going strong today providing an enormous amount of service and leadership in the area of blindness treatment and prevention.
One of Seva’s other founders was an ophthalmologist from Michigan, who, when she turned 50, joined an order of Catholic nuns that maintains constant silence. As far as I know, and if she has been true to her vows, our old friend has not uttered a single word since she entered her convent over 25 years ago.
There is no such practice in Judaism. From a Mussar perspective, anything that aligns us with an extreme pole in our behaviour is seen as unbalanced and a distortion of our human natures. That’s not to say that the Jewish tradition does not recognize and value silence. Elie Weisel affirms: “Judaism is full of silences … but we don’t talk about them.”
But even more deeply than that, one of the things I have observed in my years of study and teaching is that Judaism has been sustained not by a king or a pope or a high priest or even a single dogma but by dynamic tensions built into the structure of the tradition.
One principle pulls against another and the point is not to have our gevurah [strength] defeat our chesed[lovingkindness] or our chesed win out over our gevurah, nor for our spontaneous prayer to be our sole form at the expense of formal, fixed prayer, nor vice versa, nor for religious practice to take precedence over spirituality, or spirituality to rule over religion, but for the two opposed forces to pull against one another within us, and instead of canceling each other out, their interaction actually creates movement, growth, balance and long term stability.
This principle applies to speech and silence.
In our generation, our inner realm is flooded with a tsunami of speech that leaves no room whatsoever for silence. That speech is often loud, bombastic, deceitful, offensive and corrupt, and we are challenged time and again to know how to respond, whether with more speech or with silence.
This then becomes an issue in the bein adam l’atzmo sphere – that is, between you and yourself.
There is obviously a difference between own capacity to speak and to be silent, but we should wonder whether that difference holds any significance. Maybe these two modalities are just two alternating aspects of one process, no different than seeing darkness as an absence of light. Is it maybe just like seeing dryness as an absence of wetness?
What triggered my thought about this issue is something that Onkelos said when he translated the Torah into Aramaic, where he does not give what seems the most literal translation to the verse in the Torah that refers to the creation of Primordial Adam. The verse (Genesis 2:7) says:
And the Lord God formed the human from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the human became a living soul.
Onkelos translates “and the human became a living soul” as “and the human became a speaking spirit.”
The implication of Onkelos’s translation is that the words we generate come out of and represent our origins as a creature brought to life by the breath of God, and since we are the only creature that practices sophisticated speech, speech becomes the defining feature of our species, and that seems to make a silence no more than the shadow of speech.
Or is it? As I said earlier, Judaism has been sustained not by political leadership or a single dogma but by dynamic tensions. Speech may define us but at the same time, we need to search for the ways in which we are also defined by silence.
About speech, we know how important that is because the story of Creation says over and over that God created this and that by speaking it into existence. Creation was generated by speech. From that perspective, speech is generative, in the sense that it has the power to generate an impact in the world.
It’s interesting that modern linguistics also finds language to be generative. We know that some other animals do communicate verbally, but linguists point out that only human language is highly complex and infinitely expressive, and those characteristics are what allows us to produce and understand sentences we have never heard before.
Without this power of generativity, it would be impossible to build cities, send humans to the moon, develop mRNA vaccines, and find soothing meaning in lullabies.
Calling speech creative or generative expresses no value judgment about whether what comes out of our mouths has benefit or does harm. Jewish tradition explicitly recognizes that the great generative power of speech can be applied to doing great good but equally, to the cause of enormous destruction.
In the Book of Proverbs (18:21), we read: “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.” Words possess this dual power; they can heal, encourage, and create and, at the same time, they can wound, kill and destroy.
Judaism deals with this dual power in a typically Jewish way, which is by establishing a code of conduct. In the 19th century, Rabbi Yisrael Meir haKohen Kagan, known as the Chofetz Chaim, produced a book called Shmirat HaLashon, literally, “Guarding the Tongue,” in which he codified the Jewish laws of speech.
There are grounds for saying that speech defines us as human beings, but silence is also a defining feature of humanity. We find many references to silence in our sources, though not so many as to speech. In Pirkei Avot 1:17, for example, Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel says:
All my days I grew up among the sages and did not find anything better for the body than silence.
And in Pirkei Avot (3:13) we find “Silence is a protective fence for wisdom.”
And there are more.
We can look around and see that human speech far exceeds the capacity of any other type of animal and so can be given the status of being a defining feature of our species. But when it comes to silence, every species has this capability. What makes it an especially human quality?
Rav Kook, (1865–1935; the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel) points out that “Some silence means cessation of speech.” That’s the dimension of silence we share with other species. A human can stop talking and a rooster stops crowing and a dog does not bark all the time. We have no special claim in that area.
But Rav Kook goes on to say: “Another silence means cessation of thought” and with that comment he is pointing out the ability we humans have to make free-will choices about what goes on in our minds.
Mostly, we don’t. Mostly, we let the choo-choo train of thought roar down the tracks with green lights flashing and our inner awareness filled with an unrelenting babbling of words, ideas and judgments.
But it is not necessarily so. To demonstrate, if you hold yourself perfectly still, you can call a halt to the flow of thoughts, and you can direct your inner awareness to be filled with direct sensory perceptions, if only momentarily. Even if the experience is fleeting, it informs you that it is possible to be present, awake and aware without any thinking taking place.
Great. So now you have had a glimpse of what it is like to be in a coma. But no, that’s not it at all.
Rav Kook keeps going, “That silence,” he says, referring to cessation of thought, “arrives together with the most hidden, beautiful, and exalted thought.”
Cessation of thought, or inner silence, is not just a blank space. My teacher, Rabbi Perr, zt”l, said something similar. “If you are never silent,” he said, “you will never hear the thoughts that come min ha’shomayim – from heaven.”
We learn from this that a stream of exalted wisdom is flowing in our direction. But we will only be able to pick up what is being broadcast by opening the inner receiver, which we do by interrupting the inner discourse and becoming silent within.
Having a direct connection between our inner beings and the divine wisdom is also a defining feature of our humanity. In one way, it may be even more defining than speech. How so? Because not every human being can speak, maybe because they are an infant, or injured, or disabled, or demented. But everyone can be silent.
And if silence is a capability of every human being, then each of us has the ability to tap into the constant flow of divine wisdom that permeates the universe. All we need to do is to stop filling our inner receiver with our own noise, to quiet to the point of stillness, and to listen.
If my contention is correct, that the dynamic pull between opposite forces is a deep structure of Judaism, then silence and speech and the tension between them is not something we should seek to resolve. Neither is the defining feature of our species and we need them both.
And the central challenge that we face in this area is knowing when to let each of these forces exert just the right pull on our thought, words and deeds, so that the tension in the cables holds up the bridge, rather than pulling it down.
By way of conclusion, I want to point to the fact that the first recorded usage of the term “mussar” shows up at the very beginning of the biblical Book of Proverbs, which opens with the words:
The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel; to know chochma u’mussar [wisdom and Mussar].
Why both? Why did King Solomon, who is known as “the wisest of all people,” not just come to teach us wisdom? And the answer is that you cannot teach wisdom. Wisdom is something you can develop, but no one can teach it to you.
As a result, we need something in addition to wisdom that will serve as a path that leads to wisdom, and for that, Shlomo says, we have Mussar.
Following the path of Mussar brings about the development of wisdom.
And wisdom is what tells us when to speak and when to remain silent
How does speech or silence emerge in your spiritual curriculum?