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White Fire and Silence - April 21, 2006

As we let go of Pesach until next year, I still hear the echoes of last Shabbat’s Torah reading of Shirat Hayam. “Mi chamocha ba’elim Adonai, mi kamocha ne’dar bakodesh? Nora tehillot oseh feleh! Who is like You, Eternal One, among the gods people worship? Who is like You, glorious in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?” (Ex 15:11) It’s hard not to break out in song as we recite these familiar words, which our rabbis chose to read yearly at Pesach time, but also daily and on Shabbat in our liturgy. In the midst of the poetic and celebratory rendering of the crossing of the sea, the speaker breaks off to affirm with utter conviction and categorical praise, God’s incomparability. The response to his rhetorical question is obvious- there can’t possibly be any other being whose power is equal to the might and awesomeness of God. And that is certainly the intent of these verses when we recite them in the context of worship.

In the rubric of the Shema and its blessings called the Geula, our prayer for redemption, these words of Mi Chamocha are preceded and followed by a solicitation for God to be a redeemer now, as God was when we were freed from Egyptian bondage. There are times when the music of these verses reflects their triumphant and uplifting quality, but there are also settings of Mi Chamocha that are full of yearning and unfulfilled hopes. Could it be that the intent of the question is not always to be read as rhetorical? Perhaps it is equally possible to read Mi Chamocha as a real question, which asks whether there is still a God who is like God was at the Sea of Reeds, who will part waves, shatter our foes, and deliver us to redemption?

In the Mechilta of Rabbi Ishmael, one of the earliest collections of Midrashim, there is a commentary on these verses of the Shirah which suggests this understanding. Instead of reading “Mi chamocha ba’ELIM Adonai, Who is like you among THE GODS,” the commentator deliberately repunctuates the word ba’elim as ba’ilmim, to ask, “Who is like You, Eternal One, among the mute?” The Midrash then continues in this somewhat chutzpadik way in the form of a rebuke to God.

“You hear the suffering of Your children and yet you are silent, as it is written in Isaiah (42:14) "For a long time I have held my peace, have kept still and restrained myself...." One might think that the idea that God stands by, mute, permitting the suffering of His people would have been suppressed by our early sages. However, the Talmud develops the concept of this Midrash even further in a lament to God, saying “Who is like You, mighty in SELF RESTRAINT. You heard the blaspheming and insults of Titus who desecrated Your Temple, but You kept silent.” (Gittin 56b) Even the Rabbis’ faith was challenged by a similar doubt as we might grapple with: great MAY HAVE BEEN God’s intervention in the course of human events in the past, but we are provided with no assurance of similar interventions for the future. And perhaps this Midrash and the Talmud piece that flows from it are texts which link the fact that no sooner do we, Jews, leave the spiritual high of Pesach and its celebration of redemption, that just one short week later we commemorate Yom Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. God’s silence and self restraint in the face of the ghettos, the concentration camps, the mass murdering is a subject with which scholars and theologians have long wrestled.

So-called “answers” were formulated that God’s presence had somehow been hidden from humanity, that God’s voice had been muted by the cacophony of evil and the inversion of all moral values. And there were other silences; the silence of the bystanders; the silence of the dead; the silence and indifference of the world when it became known what was happening; the silence of those who survived who couldn’t speak of their experiences until decades later; and the silence of those of us who didn’t ask them to speak to us for fear that the scars were too raw. Some of those silences have been broken in our lifetimes, and for the good. And if you think about it, some of those seeming silences were never really silences at all. The silence of our dead has been to the Jewish people like the sensation of an amputated limb. We feel their presence in their conspicuous absence, in the diminished numbers of our people, and in the strength we’ve had to muster to reconstitute our communities in the face of such utter devastation. One can think of this kind of audible silence as the mystics did of the white fire with which Torah was written. What we naturally see when we peer inside of a Torah scroll is the black outlines of the letters that form words. The mystics called this the black fire that gives us the literal level of meaning in our sacred texts.

They also taught the Torah was also written by God with white fire, which we can see in the negative, white space between and around the letters, and brings other, more hidden voices to our understanding of Torah. As David Wolpe has written, “Even in the silence, there is a message of faith. The paradox is listening for that which cannot be heard.” (In Speech and In Silence)

In this week’s Torah portion, Shemini, Aaron’s silence confounds us and, if we are listening teaches us. The Tabernacle was about to be inaugurated as God's earthly residence. Divine fire had just issued from inside the Tent of Meeting to consume Aaron's burnt offering on the altar, signaling not only God's favor but also the fact that the cult's fire was not of human origin. Even though instructions were clearly given, Nadav and Avihu, two of Aaron's four sons mistakenly concocted a fire of their own making. But this time the fire from the Tent shot forth to annihilate them both, turning triumph into tragedy. A sharp reprimand by Moses must surely have aggravated Aaron's state of shock. Facing such a calamity, Aaron's response was silence: "VaYidom Aaharon"—perhaps the most pregnant silence in all of Scripture.

Was his the silence of submission or of an anguish too great to voice? When David's vain and rebellious son, Absalom, was killed in flight, his father fully vented his grief: "My son Absalom! O my son, my son Absalom. If only I had died instead of you!" (2 Samuel 19:1). But from Aaron not a shriek, not a even a whimper, though his loss was twice as grievous. Ismar Schorsch once likened Aaron’s silence standing over his fallen sons, appalled and petrified by the chaos that had engulfed the Tabernacle to Edvard Munch's signature painting of 1893, "The Scream.” “A gaunt figure on a bridge with his face contorted in horror and hands clasped to his ears trembles in the midst of a cosmic scream, suggested by a wavy landscape in deep colors. Munch wrote of the experience that lay behind the art: I walked one evening on a road—on the one side was the town and the fjord below me. I was tired and ill — I stood looking out across the fjord — the sun was setting — the clouds were colored red — like blood — I felt as though a scream went through nature — I thought I heard a scream. I painted this picture — painted the clouds like real blood. The colors were screaming.” (JTS Commentary on Shemini, 5762)

While we react with incredulousness at the fact that one could witness the deaths of two children and be silent, the Midrash reads Aaron’s silence as honorable. That God speaks to Aaron after his silence, directly rather than through or with Moses, is seen as a reward for that silence. Certainly our tradition teaches us there is a dialectic- in the words of Ecclesiastes, “Et lachashot v’et l’dabeir, a time to keep silent and a time to speak.” On the one hand, according to the Talmud, one’s observance of silence at another’s shiva earns the home merit. (Talmud Berachot 6b) Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, a great Chassidic master taught that silence is a trait to be cultivated. He said, “In youth, one learns to talk; in maturity one learns to be silent. This is humanity’s challenge: that we learn to talk before we learn to be silent.” And another Chassidic teacher, Menachem Mendel of Kotske wrote, “The cry one holds back is the most powerful of all.” But on the other hand, we are taught in Leviticus, that we shall not stand by while our neighbor bleeds. While we might respond at times to loss and suffering with silence, we are equally commanded to expose, to speak out and not be indifferent to unjust suffering. If Job had chosen to be silent, there would be no book in his name.

The entire body of the book of Job is comprised of the fact that Job claims that he was suffering unjustly, teaching us not to easily submit to our pain and punishment. This response is at the heart of the role of the Biblical prophet. As described by Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority, and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words. Had the purpose been to express great ideas, prophecy would have had to be acclaimed as a triumph. Yet the purpose of prophecy was to conquer callousness, to change the inner heart as well as to revolutionize history.” Sometimes our voices must be raised like the prophets’, to speak out against injustice, to take out from anonymity the falsehoods and crimes perpetrated in our society.

And so the place I return to in this collage of thoughts on speech and silence is where I began: in prayer. Rabbi Heschel also wrote, “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.” There is an aspect of prayer that is to be filled up with words that give us direction on how to live in a world we’d like to be different.

But in order to do that, we must seek the white fire of prayer, the silence, which teaches us to see the world around us, the people around us, as they are. For all the beauty we could so easily miss, for all the warts we might choose to overlook. May we find the strength to speak out and raise our voices in prayer. And may we find the courage to be silent and listen.

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri