I happened upon Susan Cain’s TED video “The Power of Introverts” in the most curious of ways. I received an email from a fellow writer that created an animated trailer for her book, so I clicked on it. Then the video was taking time to load, so being versed in the digital age habit of finding something else to do after 2.3 seconds, I noticed a link on the bottom of the animated video website which read “The 5 best presentations ever.” So I hopped over to that section of the site, and saw the Malcolm Gladwell spaghetti sauce video (written about here), and the speech where Steve Jobs first announced the iPhone; a video that left me bawling with tears (written about here).
For those keeping count, that website did a pretty good job thus of interesting at least this visitor with their 5 best list. But instead of sufficing with a 400 batting average, I clicked on Susan Cain’s speech and was immediately inspired to write about it as well.
The Quiet Revolution
The book that Susan was promoting that day at TED is called, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” She calls her book the book that started the “quiet revolution.” So while her speech was also quite interesting, since her talk was delivered to promote the book (not the other way around), the subject of this essay will be to explain some of what it means to hold a “quiet revolution.”
Susan is making use of very clear and definite imagery. Before us is a noisy world, but introverts are more likely to step back from it all. To brew a hot cup of coffee or mint tea, look at the world from a distance, and think about how to make it better.
Our question though is where do we find this concept in the Torah? This search for silence, for a quiet and tranquil place from whence we can subsequently change the world?
Remember the silence and quietude is also for the eventual sake of becoming a leader. As Susan mentions in her speech, and extensively in her book, introverts are typically more thoughtful, careful, considerate leaders. This is probably the most important point Susan wants to make with her “silent revolution” terminology—that the world should listen to the carefully considered thoughts of introverts.
Leading with Silence
The fourth of the Five Books of Moses is commonly called Numbers (due to the census that begins it), but in Hebrew this book is known as Bamidbar, which literally means “in the desert.” It is fascinating to note that the root of the word for “desert” (midbar) is daber, which means “speech,” and that one of the recurring themes of the Book of Bamidbar is the ongoing leadership struggle—the dialogues and debates—which took place throughout the forty years the Jews wandered in the desert.
And yet, paradoxically, when envisioning a desert, one usually thinks of a great barren expanse and penetrating silence. Jacob, Moses, and David were all leaders of the Jewish people who cultivated their innate potential for leadership while tending their flocks in the meditative quiet of the desert. Many of the prophets, as well, found the desert silence the perfect environment for prophetic experience.
An allusion to the silence which precedes, and leads to, the potent speech of a leader is contained in the most mysterious word of the Torah—chashmal—used by the prophet Ezekiel to describe his astounding vision of the chariot:
And I looked, and behold, a storm wind came out of the north, a great cloud and a fire flaring up and a brightness was about it, like chashmal, out of the midst of the fire.