{Originally posted to Rabbi Weinberg’s website, The Foundation Stone}
The subway took me from Brooklyn to Middlemarch: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” The clattering trains stirred my hearing and I would fall asleep listening, not to the elevated just outside the window, but to the other side of silence, the gentler sounds of creaky pipes and the cockroaches skittering across the floor.
The load roar helped me hear the softer sounds I usually missed. We describe this in the High Holiday prayers, “A great Shofar is sounded, and a soft whispering sound is heard,” the same Shofar that blasted at Sinai so that the people could hear the voice of God muffled by, “the thick cloud (Exodus 19:9),” whispering to Moses.
It is the same sound as that of the family crisis that forces parents to hear the roar of previously ignored whimpers of an unhappy child. It is the bang of a student’s tantrum that calls to the teacher to listen for the soft cries for help that were drowned out by dragged desks and the give and take of the classroom.
“He called to Moses, and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting (Leviticus 1:1).” God called to Moses with the “Voice that shatters cedars (Psalms 29:5),” but only Moses heard the call. Vayikra, “He called,” ends with a miniature Aleph, teaching us that Moses was able to hear the Call because he learned at Sinai to listen to the other side of silence, the smaller sounds of the world and the people he led.
It was Moses’ ability to listen to voices large and small that earned the people’s trust. The sages learn from the small Aleph that we begin a child’s education with Vayikra and its miniature Aleph so that the child too will learn to hear the other side of silence, the small voices hidden in each verse calling to them so that they will eventually learn to hear the gentle sounds inside themselves. The students learn that knowledge ends up making you hungrier than when you began. It was this that earned Moses the title of Rabbeinu, the ultimate teacher.
It is the parent who knows how to listen to the subtle message behind questions who will know which of the Four Children is asking, and who can use the Seder to make the children thirsty for answers.
I may need to take a subway car to meet George Eliot and her Middlemarch, but I only need the sounds of the Seder to take me to Egypt and Jerusalem. I don’t “die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” I hear a symphony that makes me thirsty to hear more.
Shabbat Shalom