A Place Beyond Noise
At the rally in Washington Square Park last Friday
Dear parents,
Imagine you had the ability to put the world on mute. You could keep watching it, moving through it, taking it in. But it is less noisy, less erratic and intrusive, less demanding of your attention. Imagine your world had fewer words: words, these miraculous entities, carriers of our heart’s intentions, relievers of our loneliness, diamonds of our mind: how many worthless words do you hear yourself or others utter in a day? How many degradations of the miraculous capacity per hour? Imagine there were less as you moved about through your muted world. Imagine that for half an hour, or ten minutes or one, you tried less to find the right words and instead you looked for the right lack of words, or noises, or even thoughts.
There is a famous moment of silence in Exodus. Moses’ two nephews have just died in the tabernacle for offering “a strange fire to YHVH,” and he attempts to comfort his brother with words. בקרובי אקדש, Moses says, “I am sanctified through those near to me.” God’s love, like ours, burns. We don’t know whether Aaron hears his brother. It’s possible that his world has already been muted by grief. All the Torah tells us is this: וידום אהרון
"and Aaron went silent."
At the moment when words made the least sense, be they true words or false, Aaron went silent.
Our world can go mute. It does. It will.
Our mind can go mute. It also will.
But it doesn’t have to happen only in moments of profound grief.
The psalmist describes the early morning as a time when we can mute our world.
בוקר אערוך לך ואצפה.
In the morning I prepare myself for You, and anticipate.
Another Psalm expresses it differently:
דום ליהוה והתחולל לו.
Be still in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him;
The word here translated as "wait patiently", Hitcholel, comes from the root חלל, denoting empty space. It might more accurately be translated: "empty yourself." The Kabbalists understood God's creation taking place through the act of self-contraction. By making space new things naturally come. In a similar way, our day, the time of our creation, might begin with Hitcholel - emptying ourselves.
At Kabbalat Shabbat this year we have been singing the medieval piyyut, Shachar Avakeshcha, I seek You at Dawn. Solomon Ibn Gabirol, who wrote the poem centuries ago in Spain must have understood that seeking god, seeking silence, seeking peace, are types of waiting, emptying, sitting around. Who is he seeking at dawn? צורי ומשגבי, "My rock, who raises me up" above and over the noise to a place of muted watching, of stillness, of peace.
Psalm 27 describes such a transcendence that is available to each of us even in the midst of that busy internal strife we might call War. It is a psalm that we traditionally read daily during the month of Elul, when we are in war with ourselves as we prepare for the High Holidays. But this past week my internal battles led me to it time and again. I worked on memorizing the Hebrew text, studying it, translating it, translating it again, thinking about it on the train and in the streets and at home. When on Friday morning we got the news about the Supreme Court I immediately turned in my brokenness to Psalm 27. I took my Shofar down to Washington Square Park. With the transcendent, prayerful vibe of hordes of protesters around me, and the ancient lines running through my mind I blew that wordless prayer through the ram's horn, and felt its steady sound drain the moment of all of it.
Next week I will offer you two versions of Psalm 27. One that stays very close to the Hebrew, clinging to it like a mother, and another that sets itself free and swims away into the open ocean. In the meantime I wish you a Shabbat of rising above the noise inside and out.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha