Speech and Silence

June 19

There are two settings in which I feel especially comfortable. One revolves around conversation, the other involves silence. T he first occurs any time someone is up for a conversation about God. The second is when there is an open-ended silence.

I like participating in a conversation about God because, almost always, I learn something. At the start of such a conversation, I never know if I am bound for deep water or a peaceful twirl around the lake; but the chance of adventure improves when my partner in talk has a seriously different a view of God from mine. Often, as our talk pulls away from shore, I feel a frisson of excitement, aware that I may be offered an insight which never occurred to me, or be gifted with an anecdote that touches the place inside me where my faith dwells. In sharing perspectives, in exchanging views, I often find nourishment for my own–or a brand new way to turn the kaleidoscope. A good rolling conversation may make me stronger or softer or braver.

Sometimes, if I bring up the subject of God, I am asked to “define my terms.” End of conversation. God entered my life on February 2, 1962 and hasn’t left since. But I cannot define what or, more accurately (to me) Who I mean when I say “God.” I love God. I revere God. I am grateful to God. I am nosy about what God may think or feel about a great many particular situations. I listen for God’s laughter. But I don’t know how to define God.

This post is the leftover of a big mistake I made today in synagogue during the “summary”last session of a Melton class about “The Purposes of Judaism” I swallowed hard and said how much easier it is for me to find non-Jews who’re willing to talk about God than it is to engage my fellow Jews in such a conversation. Then I–stupidly–specifically included the Jews with whom I share membership in my synagogue. I should have better bitten my tongue–right through. Many years ago, Michael Kogan, a local professor and member of my synagogue, told me that it’s impossible to write about God, so it was foolishness to try. I am not, after all these years of trying–having perhaps eked out a paltry few sentences with accessible content–willing to give up trying to write about God. But this morning I should have kept my mouth shut.

But the fact remains: when I have an opportunity to speak with members of other religious persuasions, such discussions more often than not carry me a step or two or even three forward toward a clearer understanding of why I choose to be a synagogue-going Jew. A Jew by daily choice.

Now, to my second favored setting. For a person whose talkativeness is locally on the cusp of notorious, I am strangely drawn to sitting in silence. Anywhere, but preferably in any house of worship. Even a “room of worship” will do: I never pass the chapel at New York Hospital without going inside to sit in that nearly always empty room, and savor the silence. But my favorite place to meet up with silence is my synagogue. Sometimes, there, I sit up straight and reflect on the words over the ark: Know before Whom you stand. Sometimes I am smitten by the reflection of a stained glass window on its adjacent wall as the day’s light mutes to serenity. At other times, the clutter in my mind keeps interrupting the silence, but I persevere, and occasionally win. I love most the times when I can let go of words and images and tune in to the music of the silence itself.

Nobody's God and my Ongoing Exodus

All those commandments! In Judaism, no fewer than 613 line up to be responded to one way or another. For, as all of us know, "No" is an answer, too.

Even the famous first ten are a hefty challenge. When I most feel that, I remind myself of how God sets them--and us--up, right at the outset, with a not-especially-subtle reminder that He earned the right to issue them by leading us out of Egypt.

(When I picture that event, I sometimes imagine a whole lot of folks kicking and screaming internally. After all, what a slave knows is slavery, and it is a bleak fact of human nature that most of us–nearly all of us--prefer the known, however grim, to the unknown. Isn’t that why so many folks in unhappy marriages stay married?)

Yet the language we use, when we talk about the exodus from Egypt, is that, in bringing us out of Egypt, God made free men of slaves. I see that famous trek through a dry path in the Sea of Reeds as only the first steps to our freedom.

Bigger steps toward freedom, it seems to me, are the commandments. I realize that there are people who see any commandment, let alone half a dozen hundred of them, as diminishing our freedom. But in my opinion the end result of the commandments is to offer us 613 chances to be truly free people. Together, the commandments are like a mikvah, a ritual bath, cleansing us of our sand-clogged nature.

A memory from years ago used a diffrent image that, to me, says much the same thing. It appeared in an interview in Time magazine with Jean Kerr, then at the height of her playwrighting fame. I remember the exact words of neither the question nor of Kerr's answer, but the exchange has stayed with me. Kerr was asked something like: How can as brilliant a woman as you possibly be a serious Roman Catholic? The gist of her response: Within that box, I am totally free. To her, the rigorous teachings of the Church
formed the requisite box within which freedom lay.

I believe that. Without the strictures of Catholicism or the commandments central to Judaism, there is no freedom. Only an illusion of freedom, closer to chaos than to the real thing.

That’s why I am very thankful for God’s commandments. For the currently feasible ones I obey with a whole heart and mind, which have given me more than a taste of freedom. And, also, for the ones I continue to wrestle with, in hopes of surrendering yet another inch of my will and thereby finding still more abundant freedom.