Last weekend,Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina were murdered en-route to a hiking trail in the Jordan Valley. They were all shot and killed. Their surviving father and husband, Rabbi Leo Dee said in response that we need ‘to bring up our children with strong moral values: helping others, caring for others and building community’. I am in awe of his response to the loss he experienced. But that’s what he came up with. I imagine he came up with that response in the silence of his own experience.
Halachically that’s the way it goes too. When we enter a house of mourning, we wait to be spoken to first by the mourner. We follow their lead. We listen. We say the prescribed words of comfort and we don’t rush in there and impose our own stuff on them. It’s like we can’t stand their pain and we want it to go away so we say things when the better thing to do is to listen in silence. Seeing someone’s pain makes us uncomfortable and we want to explain it away. It can be difficult to be there in silence and mostly still thinking of ourselves. We’re chirping away in our head preoccupied with our own anxieties - Am I being comforting enough? Am I doing enough? Have I said the right thing? We want to be the people who say the thing that makes the difference. To explain why bad things happen to good people.
We’re not just saying it to out of a desire to comfort the mourner, we’re saying it to comfort ourselves too. We want to know we are safe and sound and protected from death because we keep shabbat or we live in the right country or in the right place in the right country. Or we join interfaith groups or we say 100 Berakhot a day. We want to imagine we have some sort of control. It’s easier than accepting that for some questions there are no answers, and there is so much that is not in our control.
Elie Wiesel who survived the Holocaust but lost his family, was once asked, “Is there a tradition of silence in Judaism?” “Yes,” he answered. “But we don’t talk about it.” The epicentre of the Jewish tradition of silence as a response to death is in the parasha today. Aaron’s two sons are killed by God in the line of duty in front of Moses and Aaron. Moses then says some words to Aaron where he tries to provide an answer about why Aaron’s sons were killed. Rashi comments that Moses was telling Aaron, ‘I knew that this Mishkan was going to be sanctified by those closest to God, and I thought it would be me or you. Now I see that they, your sons, are greater than both of us.’
And then comes the next line in the parasha that has generated a thousand words of explanation… וַיִּדֹּ֖ם אַֽהֲרֹֽן Va Yidom Aha’aron. Aaron was silent. Va Yidom means to be silent, be still, to grow dumb, to be mute along with the word Ve-shatik which is the Aramaic word often used in the Talmud. Like the word sheket.
And just like there are many words for silence, there are also many different kinds of silences. There’s the cold, empty uncomfortable silence. And there’s also the wordless place which holds enormous potential from which something unexpected and transcendent can emerge. The kol dmamah daka place. קוֹל דְּמָמָה דַקָּה the voice of silence thin which we only hear when we stop listening to the voices in our heads for a microsecond.
We don’t know which version of silence Aaron was experiencing or why he was silent. Commentators theorise that his silence means he was rejecting Moses’ words of explanation. Or that he was accepting them. Or that he had total faith in God’s actions. Or that he was in shock. I recently read another interesting exploration of Aaron’s silence from the Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Halberstam. He was a camp survivor who experienced horrific grief when his wife, all his 11 children and his entire extended family were murdered by the Nazis. His response was to, in his own words ‘build a hospital in Eretz Yisrael where every human being would be cared for with dignity’
And so with no resources or experience, he took it upon himself to build that sort of hospital in Netanya. Today it has two medical centres, a children’s hospital, a geriatric hospital and a nursing school. And it has saved more lives than he had lost. He was once asked why so many of survivors like himself found the strength to rebuild, to re-start families, and to have faith in humanity after what they have experienced.
He answered with a phrase from Ezekiel 16:6 ‘b’damayich chayi’ which means you will live in your blood. We’ve just said it at our Pesach seders where we are redeemed with the blood of the Passover sacrifice. We also say it at a bris because of the blood of circumcision. Rabbi Halberstam made it very clear he wasn’t saying that through their bloody sacrifice they had earned the ability to go on. It wasn’t transactional. He was saying that the source of the ability of the survivors to continue was through silence. He rewrote the verse in Ezekiel as ‘we live in our silence.’ That is the power of silence.
Rabbi Halberstam says that Aaron’s silence in our parasha today allowed him to continue to do the work that he was given to do.
The challenge for us is to listen to someone grieving with love, with the faith that they know what they need and want. They don’t need our theories. They need our loving, comforting presence and also occasionally, they need a cup of tea and a sandwich.
