Silence

79.

1:27:
Silence

How is a wholeness shaped from all the attractions, directions, words, outlooks, attitudes, and inner propensities that together constitutes a single identity with so many facets?

The Torah needs not only words. It is a secret language of holiness, where all existence and reflections of life hide among the letters and the spaces. Torah teaches a person to seek out not only words, but the space between the words as well—that while silence in which there are no forms, no choices to make, nothing subtracted, a silence that comprises a broad and open quietude in which the colors settle alongside one another and become one, through a permitted sparsity.

Silence is an expression of faith, containing the doubt that softens all convictions and kneads all possibilities int one. A ralm of quiet is necessary for the journey of Torah and for the journey of the individual through life.It creates an opening to sense some great container to which things slowly are reconciled, in a manner beyond intellectual acuity, beyond cognition, and it finds res and wholeness.

The quiet is an open space that is always present within, as Nahman of Bratzlav taught, “When a question about God comes upon you, be silent, and through that silence your thoughts themselves will provide you with the answer to your problem: (Sefer Hamiddot, Faith, &15). Like any other precious thing to the world, silence too can be used for unsavory purposes. It is not a safe haven from reality. Silence is not a spiritual program of inactivity, of randomness, of justifying everything. Silence is a power plant fo the souls suffering from the work of attempting to contain all that one has experienced, a station that seeks rest to enable the mind to feel at one with itself and then take action in the world. A person should speak little: and out of the multiplicity that lies in confusion and doubt, within that silence, the which needs to be will rise to improve the world.