Finding Power in Speech and Silence
D’var Torah delivered on the second morning of Rosh HaShanah at Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley, September 24th 2025 (5786)
In today’s Torah reading, the Akeidah, or the Binding of Yitzchak, our ancestor Avraham is unsettlingly silent. God tells him to sacrifice his long-awaited, beloved son Yitzchak – and Avraham wakes up early, saddles his donkey, and sets out without a word of protest. He and Yitzchak trudge up Mt. Moriyah, the Mountain of Awe – or of Fear – in thunderous silence. Evading Yitzchak’s innocence question about where the sacrificial lamb will be found, Avraham utters a single word, “Hineini” – I am present – when the angel addresses him at the moment of crisis. This is a very different Avraham from the man who argued fearlessly with Hashem just four chapters back, bargaining God down from fury, trying to save the city of S’dom. Why does Avraham choose silence in this time, when God might expect him – perhaps does expect him – to protest, to rail, to rebuke the Holy One for asking Avraham to kill his child?
Was this silence borne of fear? Zealotry? Shock? Denial? Grief? Hope? We don’t know. But I find in Avraham’s silence an invitation to consider our own modern Jewish choices about when and whether to speak.
In our first year of cantorial school, my dear colleague Cantor Julie Newman shared a strategy. “Every time I get ready to speak or raise my hand in class,” she said, “I think: WAIT. Why Am I Talking?” This instantly memorable acronym felt at once encouraging and daunting. It takes a lot of emotional and critical energy to assess, each time, does this conversation that I’m in really need me to share this thing that’s on the tip of my tongue? Do I need me to share this? Will I benefit more from speaking up or listening to someone else right now? And my conversational partners – what are their needs? Am I taking up more time than I should, asserting what Methuen politician Eunice Delice Zeigler once called “conversational dominance”? How might others respond? In short: what are the risks, and what are the rewards, of speech and of silence?
Speech is powerful. It creates realities, just as surely as God shapes the world with words in our Torah. The WAIT acronym whispers to me to check myself in tension, or situations where there are power dynamics or identity dynamics. I think about it in small group conversations with members of ICB Wayland, for example, or when I go with other Beth El-ers to pack groceries at the primarily Black Greater Framingham Community Church. Sometimes it arises in more intimate settings: an argument with my husband or son, or in pastoral conversations. Sometimes it comes sharply into focus when I am considering public speech. I ask myself: am I right? Who needs to hear this? Who needs to hear it from me? Frightening, often federal, retribution against many kinds of public speech, from Rümeysa Öztürk to Mahmoud Khalil to Charlie Kirk to Jimmy Kimmel, has violently reshaped our American landscape this year. Immigrants are frequently threatened by their bosses now: “You don’t like the way things are being conducted at work? You will be reported and you will be deported.”
So what’s at stake for me when I speak? What could my words do?
In mid-August, I organized for a rally in downtown Boston planned by several Jewish groups: T’ruah (of whose Massachusetts chapter I’m a co-chair) and other groups further left, including If Not Now. The rally was called “Jews Say No” and its topline messages were: Stop Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza, Stop Starving Gaza, Ceasefire Now.
I had been asked to make a short video stating my reasons for participating and urging others to join me. If Not Now would then share the video on its social media platforms. I was all in on this rally. I felt really clear about my reasons: I am less safe, not more, when Gazans are starved, bombed and displaced by two governments (Israeli and American) that claim to be acting in pursuit of my Jewish safety. I am less safe, not safer, when advocacy for Palestinian rights is on its face deemed antisemitic, grounds for censorship, detention, even deportation. I felt all of this in my bones. And yet, asked to make this little video for public internet consumption, I hesitated. We have a wide spectrum of perspectives here at Beth El. Would members feel hurt or betrayed by my public support of this cause, or my video’s connection with If Not Now? Friends and colleagues have had job offers rescinded because of their criticism, however gently stated, of the government of Israel, or for their advocacy for an end to this war. What might the personal, social, or professional consequences of my speech be?
Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, addressed exactly this kind of dilemma – lucky me! -nearly 500 years ago. In his work N’tivot Olam [(Ways of the World), N’tivot HaToch’chah (Ways of Rebuke, 2:6)], he wrote that each person with the power to admonish others to turn away from evil has the responsibility to do so, because the moral character of the whole community can depend on such rebukes. “While a person may be individually righteous, such good will pale in the face of the sin of not protesting against an emerging communal evil,” Loew wrote. “Such a righteous person will be accountable for having been able to prevent it and not having done so … a righteous person who remains quiet and passive is ultimately responsible for the communal evil which she could have and should have prevented.”
I’m not Avraham at S’dom. I don’t imagine that my lone voice can stop Israel’s pummeling of Gaza and violent repression of the West Bank. I can’t, by myself, stop other injustices in this world. But I am responsible to my Jewish kin, here and there, and to my Palestinian human kin, here and there. I am responsible for my own protest or silent acquiescence, and I know that my voice matters because each voice matters. One person speaking up can inspire others to do so: to speak, to act, to promote healing.
Speaking up about something that matters to us, after self- or other-imposed silence, is also a spiritual relief! Psalm 32 puts it eloquently:
כִּֽי־הֶ֭חֱרַשְׁתִּי בָּל֣וּ עֲצָמָ֑י בְּ֝שַׁאֲגָתִ֗י כׇּל־הַיּֽוֹם׃
“When I was silent, my limbs were worn out – when I roared all day long.”
(Psalm 32:3, Robert Alter transl.)
When we choke down our words, our beliefs, when we are afraid to bring them into the world where others can hear and acknowledge them, our bodies roar at us. Letting our speech out lets us breathe again.
This Elul, we’ve seen a watershed in public Jewish discourse. Some prominent Israeli Jews, for instance, are, for the first time, publicly protesting their government’s abandonment of the hostages in service of annexing the West Bank and destroying Gaza. These folks, in their own words, are not not speaking out because they are less fearful or less emotionally conflicted, between their love for their country and their horror at what it is doing. They are speaking out because they can no longer bear to stay silent. Israeli political scientist Lihi Ben Shitrit wrote in an article published by The Forward in early August,
“Another emotion that prevents us from speaking honestly about this question is fear. Only two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined experiencing such fear around free speech in the U.S. When my colleague said I should ask myself why I wanted to believe it wasn’t genocide, I didn’t have a clear answer. I now know that I was confused, ignorant and ashamed. Now I am afraid. I worry about the personal, professional and communal consequences of speaking honestly. But the answer to fear cannot be silence.”
I made my video for the big-tent Jewish rally. I sent it off to If Not Now, and they shared it on their Instagram account. About 500 people came out to the rally, including more than a minyan of Beth El-ers, and most stayed through a downpour of truly Biblical proportions. It was a deeply moving opportunity to join a broad cross-section of the local Jewish community in protesting and raising our voices against what, to me, clearly were and are devastatingly immoral actions by the Israeli government.
Speech is powerful.
So is silence.
The psalm verse that concludes the traditional liturgy of the Sh’ma al HaMitah, the Bedtime Sh’ma says:
רִגְז֗וּ וְֽאַל־תֶּ֫חֱטָ֥אוּ אִמְר֣וּ בִ֭לְבַבְכֶם עַֽל־מִשְׁכַּבְכֶ֗ם וְדֹ֣מּוּ סֶֽלָה
“Quake, and do not offend;
speak in your hearts on your beds, and be still, selah.”
(Psalm 4:5, Robert Alter transl.)
To choose stillness and silence freely – not under threat or fear – offers us different possibilities than speech does. It helps us assimilate and integrate previous experiences. It lets us listen carefully to the world around us, to one another, to God if we so desire. In silence we can listen carefully to ourselves, and attend to thoughts and feelings otherwise that would otherwise stay buried by the torrent of information with which we are daily bombarded.
This summer I spent most of four days in social silence at my Institute for Jewish Spirituality clergy cohort retreat. We always had choice, but we were asked to not speak with one another from after Ma’ariv evening prayers until after lunch each day. My cohort-mate Rabbi Benjamin Ross shared an image from one of his teachers. He likened what happens in chosen social silence to an active stream of water suddenly stilling: the sediment falls to the bottom and the water clears. You can see what’s really there, or perhaps what has been there all along. In silence, I cultivated awareness of some of the mental pathways I tend to go down, the stories I tell myself in every moment. This silence was so nourishing, so healing, that since the retreat, for the first time in my life I have been able to maintain a more or less regular meditation practice.
Was Avraham silent as he trudged up Mt. Moriyah in an effort to truly hear himself? To truly hear God? And when he heard that angel’s voice, was that his success?
Midrashic commentary on the book of Exodus tells us that part of the Torah God gave us at Sinai was the Torah of silence. “In the hour when the Holy One gave Torah, no bird chirped, no fowl fluttered, no ox lowed, the angels did not [sing], the sea did not roar, the creatures did not speak; the universe was silent and mute. And the voice came forth, ‘I am Adonai, Your God.’” (Sh’mot Rabbah 29:9, transl. Sefaria)
There is a silence that shimmers after a song finishes. You know about this, Beth El. This silence is not absence: it’s presence, attention being paid to what is happening moment to moment. What we feel, what we create, what we witness. So too when we pray our silent Amidah, as we do every day of the year except Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. That silence, when we choose it, is a gift for ourselves and for others: it allows the noise to fall away and what is in us to emerge, with clarity. It’s like Shabbat at the end of the week, at the end of Creation.
The video I made for the protest had an echo, a resonance that I could not have predicted either in my fear or in my hope. Someone I’d never met before saw it online and reached out to me after, straight from their eloquent, hurting heart. They said it meant a lot to them to see a Jewish leader from a community that they knew of, share this kind of a message grounded in Jewish beliefs – and to do it publicly and “on the record,” because they themselves had been punished before, for sharing that kind of a message in Jewish spaces. It gave them a sense of reconnection and of possibility for engagement in a sphere that had felt difficult.
We can never predict what impact our choices will have on others – or on ourselves. We never know what echo, what bat kol, will come from our speech or our silence. So may we mindfully identify, in 5786, this New Year, why we talk and why we remain silent. May we choose when we speak, and how we speak, and may our silence never stem from fear or emotional overload. May we find the power that we need in our speech and in our silence, to know ourselves and our personal and communal capabilities: to breathe more justice and more compassion into our hurting world. Shanah tovah.
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Sources Consulted:
Alter, Robert The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary W.W. Norton & Company, New York: 2007. Psalm 4:5 p. 11; Psalm 32:3 p. 110
Ben Shitrit, Lihi “As an Israeli political scientist, I resisted thinking this war was a genocide. Here’s what changed my mind.” Published online in The Forward, August 2nd, 2025. Accessed 9/12/25.
Loew, Rabbi Judah “N’tivot HaToch’chah (Ways of Rebuke)” section 2:6 in N’tivot Olam (Ways of the World), translated in Kimelman, Reuven “The Rabbinic Ethics of Protest”, Judaism 19/1 (Winter 1970), pp. 38-58; p. 41
Sh’mot Rabbah 29:9, transl. Sefaria & GoogleTranslate (with VB’s edits)
Vera Broekhuysen 