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by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
Here is the D’var Torah (teaching of Torah) I offered this past Friday night, as a prelude to a gorgeous teaching from our semi-annual Scholar in Residence series, this time with Rabbi Michael Cohen on Overcoming the Asymmetry of the Sensational: A Better Future for Israelis and Palestinians:
When I heard the title of Rabbi Cohen’s teaching, “The Asymmetry of the Sensational,” I had a hunch about what he might be teaching, though I didn’t know for sure. In reflecting upon it, my mind was drawn to one of my favorite passages in all of Tanakh, in all of the Hebrew Bible, which evokes, for me, a similar notion as “the asymmetry of the sensational.”
This passage comes in the stories of Eliyahu HaNavi, Elijah the Prophet. Elijah has just seemingly won a victory against prophets from the oppressive regime of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, and Jezebel has sworn to track him down and take revenge. So Elijah flees for his life, into the wilderness, arriving exhausted, hungry, alone, and distraught. “Rav!” he cries out. “Enough!” then going so far as to say, “Now, O ETERNAL One, take my life, for I am no better than my forebears” (I Kings 19:4).
“I thought I had won a victory against my enemies,” he seems to be saying, “against the oppressive forces in my life, the oppressive forces swirling within and without, but I have not. I have failed. I have done no better than those who came before me. Therefore, I have lived long enough. Take my life.”
Exhausted, Elijah falls asleep in the wilderness, under a bush. But, lo and behold, suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “arise and eat” and, like Hagar in the portion we read on Rosh Hashanah, Elijah looked about, and there, beside his head, was a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down (I Kings 19:5-6).
The same happens again: he is awoken by an angel who helps him find food, giving him the strength to continue on his journey, which he does for 40 days and 40 nights. His journey to where? To, it turns out, Mt. Sinai, the first and only biblical figure since Moses to reach this destination. Presumably, Elijah arrives, like Moses, to experience a theophany, a divine revelation, seeking, like Moses — like all of us, in a sense — to discern God’s will, to find God, to find out how to heal the brokenness inside him, and in the world. To find out what he should do.
And yet here the similarities with Moses end: there is no grand revelation, at least not like the one Moses received. God does not present God’s Self as God did to Moses at Sinai, amidst booms of thunder that could be seen and flashes of lighting that could be heard. God does not appear, one might say, in the sensational. There is no sensory experience, for Elijah, of God.
In fact, quite the opposite. In the Book of Kings, we read, “there was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks… but God was not in the wind. And after the wind — an earthquake… but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake — fire… but God was not in the fire” (19:11-12).
Now, after the fire… we read, there was a קוֹל דְמָמָה דַקָה/kol d’mamah dakah, literally a sound of slender silence — more famously, a still, small voice (19:12).
God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire: instead, Elijah heard the sound of slender silence, the still, small voice calling out to him, responding to his pain, beckoning Elijah to fulfill his mission; his purpose; his calling.
“The asymmetry of the sensational.” We expect our life’s work to be found in the headlines. “There go my people,” one of the politicians of the French Revolution is said to have said. “I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”
We are drawn to the sensational — to the wind, to the fire, to the earthquake, and Lord knows there is much to be done in response to such events. But there is a lot happening in the quiet, too.
As a rabbi, year after year I work myself up for the Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The Sanctuary is packed to the rafters; never do I have such a captive audience. There is an earthquake of energy present; I am drawn to these moments.
And yet my year, I am blessed to say, is filled with moments equally as Godly — if not more so: a class with four or five students, one person’s insight prompting another’s; a board or a staff meeting, if you can believe it, minds melding around an agreed upon response to an unforeseen challenge; a hospital bedside — a family making sense of a moment that will change their lives forever.
Our days are littered with quiet moments, sounds of slender silence, moments where the kol d’mamah dakah, the still, small voice, is present.
If a tree falls in the forest, with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I’ve lived my life, in some respects, yearning for public acclaim, acknowledgment, appreciation. And yet, there is so much pregnant potential in those quiet moments, that no one is there to see, no one is there to hear, at least not a public audience of any sort, and these moments can be filled with transcendent sacredness.
Rabbi Cohen will be talking about this in the context of Israelis and Palestinians. There is plenty of wind, earthquake, and fire in that part of the world, and surely that calls for attention, for the healing and the protection that is necessary in response.
But the invitation is to tune our hearts and listen in for the kol d’mamah dakah, the sound of slender silence, the still, small voice, that is happening there, too: moments of quiet holiness, quiet connection, next to the rubble of the earthquakes, which are important for us to hear.
Silence, Jewish tradition tells us, is something to listen for. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks translates kol d’mamah dakah, the still, small voice, as “the sound you can only hear if you are listening.” I’ve shared before my teacher Barbara Breitman’s insight that the Sh’ma, the central call of Jewish prayer life, calls upon us to listen for Adonai, for Y-H-V-H. But, she points out, “Paradoxically, the name for God used in the Sh’ma is precisely the one name that cannot be spoken, that is ineffable — there is no pronunciation for Y-H-V-H — exhorting Jews to listen,” she writes, “precisely to that which cannot be spoken, to hear in the living silence that which unites us all.”
Judaism calls upon us to be attuned to quiet, to a level beneath the noise, beneath the sensational. May we all be able to hear it.
Wishing you a quiet Shabbat, a Shabbat of holiness.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi K.
