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Meditative silence in Judaism

Judaism has much to teach us about the idea of silence. At the heart of Jewish tradition is the statement of faith found in the Shema, ..

If we make time to answer our cell phones a dozen times a day and to check our email five times an hour, surely we can find 10 minutes to contemplate sacred words that nourish the soul." -- Rabbi Eric Yoffie, November 8, 2003, 13 Cheshvan 5764 quoted in 10 Minutes of Torah at Rabbi Shmuel Afek starts minyan with ‘5 minutes of silence’ during which each one of us can engage in his/her own personal preparation for tefillah. We daven together from Barchu through the silent Amida

Silence practice in Reform Judaism

In "Ten Minutes of Torah" published on the website of the Union for Reform Judaism, o offering “News and Views of Reform Jews”, Rabbi Marc Rosenstein of Hebrew Union College describes how in the twenties Siegfried Lehman, founder of Ben Shemen youth village, embraced silence.

“Students would learn to value silence, and to listen – to nature, to music, to others.”

Rabbi Rosenstein reflects how this contrasts with modern day Israel, which he describes as “raucous”.

By contrast, “no traffic, no voices, no media, no leaves to rustle in the wind. A lone bird twittering on a fence post - and its echo returning across the wadi. The desert impresses with its vastness, its power, its timelessness, its esthetic beauty, its cruelty. But for me, this time at least, it was the silence that affected me most.”

The notion of silence as a deep spiritual category in Orthodox Judaism is similarly explored by Rabbi Hillel Goldberg

Contemplative silence in Orthodox Judaism

In his eulogy Silence and Greatness: The Late Professor Isadore Twersky originally published in Jewish Action in 1998. The Chassidic Talner Rebbe Twersky was the son-in-law of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Rebbe Twersky, known as The Rav and described as “one of the Talmudist’s literary representatives and dedicated caretakers… arguably the leading figure in academic Jewish studies in his generation”, is quoted as stating in his monumental Introduction to the Code of Maimonides: "One must be attuned to the silences as well as to the sounds of Maimonides’ writing Through the lens of Rabbi Goldberg we see that silence was not a category reserved solely for profundities of exegesis but also for the most intimate of interpersonal interaction. “At the end of his preface to Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, he wrote of his wife that any attempt to articulate his indebtedness to her would inevitably ring hollow; yet, "inasmuch as she is attuned to my silences she will understand every nuance and hear every resonance."2 The Soloveitchik lineage nevertheless leaned toward lawfulness rather than religious interiority This is however consistent with Jewish existentialist critique of Heideggerian existentialism as articulated by sages such as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel which contrasted … In Who Is Man?, Heschel also constructs a famous dichotomy between “biblical man” and “ontological man”. Heschel’s concept of the “ontological man” is an explicit response to Heidegger’s ideas about Dasein,[39] which for Heschel is a human who merely exists (is) passively, rather than lives actively as human in the world. Contemplation of silence then is barren and empty if it is not dedicated to making room for God: ‘ontological’ man is stuck on basic questions of ontology (the study of the nature of being and existence) and only “seeks to relate the human being to transcendence called being”[40] whereas the ‘biblical man’ “realizing that human being is more than being…seeks to relate man to a diving living, to a transcendence called the living God.” Heschel expressed an enigmatic relationship with silence. In his translation of Heschel’s poem “God Pursues Me Everywhere”, Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi states “God pursues me like a silent shudder/I wish for tranquility and rest- He urges; come!” And in The Word Most Precious, also translated by Schacter-Shalomi, “Silent raindrops echo true/What all creation echoes…Father [God]” "There are three ways in which a man expresses his deep sorrow: the man on the lowest level cries; the man on the next level is silent; the man on the highest level knows how to turn his sorrow into a song." Kimelman himself remarked about Heschel: “He did not have to speak to communicate his faith, his convictions, his nobility. His very presence communicated a vision. His outwardness conveyed something of his indwelling greatness. His very being radiated a sacred meaning.”

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God in the Silence- Beliefnet.com Elijah learns that God is found in the still, small voice, not the impressive special effects. www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Judaism/.../God-In-The-Silence.aspx - Cached - Similar

Contrasting view: an Orthodox literature of silence as complicity

The secondary literature contemplating Heshel provides a link to a completely different perspective on religious or Judaic contemplation of the category of silence . In 1983 Reuven Kimelman , Associate Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University had this to say: What pained Heschel most of all was the relative silence of the Jews… What grieved Heschel was that for twenty years we had been condemning the good, but silent Germans. And now within only one generation there were Jews who were satisfied being good, silent Americans.” Kimmelman preserves for future generations the historical fact that Heschel had a “his rallying cry of "Some are guilty, but all are responsible,"adding his own comment that that cry “ simmered with the question of "Where art Thou?"” Thus, the call to commitment underscores the mandate to break silence.

And injustice, generally: "To speak about God," he proclaimed, "and remain silent on Vietnam, is blasphemous."

In a January 2011 Op Ed in Jewish Ledger ” For the Sin of Silence During the Holocaust” Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, describes the emergence of rabbinic recognition of a sin of silence on the order of the litany of confessions known as Al Chet.

“Some years ago, one of the most prominent rabbis in America made a startling suggestion-that American Jews should add an Al Chet to acknowledge the community’s failure to respond adequately to news of the mass killing of European Jews during the Holocaust.” He traces this concept to a taped1973 lecture at Yeshiva University by the prominent rabbi being Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993), longtime head of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school and a key figure in the shaping of Modern Orthodox Judaism. to the list of Al Chets of the chatayim [sins] we enumerate on Yom Kippur, we should add another Al Chet. Perhaps it would be the worst, the most horrible one – Al chet shechatanu lefanecha bera’inu tzoras nafshoseihem shel acheinu bais Yisroel shehischananu eileinu v’lo shamanu ['For the sin that we have sinned before You by seeing the suffering of our Jewish brethren who called to us and we did not listen

Avram Finkelstein, a member of the Silence=Death Project, talks about AIDS, ACT-UP, institutional silence, Holocaust imagery, street art, and the making of an iconic political image. The pink triangle, silence=death poster became representative of AIDS activism during a period when literally, a deathly silence was imposed upon the AIDS crisis… Silence is death” implies action, action of resistance and action of oppression. On the other hand, institutional democracy establishes an equivalency between silence and death that ensures that we are perpetually, all, silent and dead

Breaking the Silence | Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals There is no place for denial, silence, or inaction in any community—certainly not in any Jewish community. In a Healing Community, of any faith, ...

Irving Abella and Harold Troper, in their landmark book None is Too Many, claimed that Canadian churches practised silence as Canada callously closed its doors to Jewish refugees during the 1930s and 1940s. How true is this accusation? In How Silent were the Churches? Canadian Protestantism and the Jewish Plight During the Nazi Era (Wilfred Laurier University Press), Alan Davies and Marilyn Nefsky sift through the evid

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And above all remember to build a life as if it were a work of art. Heschel