The Sound Of Silence
By Yochanan Gordon
Word spread Wednesday afternoon of my uncle Binyomin’s passing after about half a year of battling illness. It was the second funeral in just a few months, and I remember saying to a few people that it felt like we’d been doing this too often. Someone in the shivah house later told my father it was his third visit in as many days. It’s just too much.
We loved our uncle Binyomin very much. He had an unassuming demeanor but loved a good time, the quiet glue that held our extended family together through his annual July 4th barbecues, which he hosted for decades. During the summers, we’d often end up at his pool on Friday afternoons, sitting and chatting about everything and nothing while our kids played before Shabbos. All those memories came flooding back as we stood by his graveside, paying final respects to the senior member of the Gordon family.
With my father sitting shivah alongside his siblings, I’ve had time to reflect on shivah itself—on the mechanism of comfort that allows us to begin emerging from loss.
Earlier this evening, I reminded my sixteen-year-old Yehuda to visit his grandfather. “I’m charging my scooter and my phone,” he said, “but I’ll be there soon.” Then, almost to himself, he added, “We just sit quietly and let the mourners open up about the one who passed, right?” His words captured the strange etiquette of nichum aveilim—that instinct to hold space, to resist filling the silence.
There’s something so unsettling about the quiet of a shivah house. The purpose, of course, is to create an atmosphere where the mourner speaks, where memory itself becomes a kind of balm. But the stillness—the locked eyes, the unspoken grief—can feel almost unbearable. We search for words, any words, just to break it. Sometimes that leads to small talk, sometimes to thoughtless comments, and sometimes to profound silence.
In moments like that, I think of a story my late cousin Josh once told about the Lubavitcher Rebbe visiting my great-grandfather after his wife’s passing. The Rebbe told him that when a loved one departs, they remain very near, like someone standing on the floor above you. “When you want to speak to someone upstairs,” the Rebbe said, “you just call a little louder.” In his own way, the Rebbe was redefining loss—teaching that death doesn’t silence a relationship; it only changes the tone of the conversation.
And maybe that’s the key to understanding the nature of silence itself.
Chazal teach that the first Luchos were engraved—charus—and they interpret that word to mean cheirus, freedom: freedom from the Angel of Death. Somehow, death itself is seen as a kind of enslavement, a constriction that true life transcends. And the word cheirus appears again at the Seder table, hidden in the initials of the four sons—chacham, rasha, tam, v’she’eino yodea lish’ol. Ironically, one of those sons cannot speak. Our redemption, it seems, depends on opening the mouth of the child who doesn’t know how to ask.
Moshe, too, described himself as “lo ish devarim anochi”—“I am not a man of words.” Yet by Sefer Devarim, he cannot stop speaking. The man of silence becomes the voice of freedom.
“At psach lo”—“open to him”—the Torah gives us the instruction for awakening the she’eino yodea lish’ol, the one who cannot yet speak. The key is not to fill the silence, but to open within it—to draw sound from the hollow itself.
It’s like drawing water from a stone. There are vast reservoirs that hold all the water the world could ever need—yet G-d desires that even the stone should yield water, and even silence should give birth to sound.
Because true cheirus—true freedom—isn’t just escape from death. It’s the discovery of voice after loss. It’s learning to speak again—softly, haltingly—from the heart of silence itself.
Yochanan Gordon can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.
