Aaron's silent scream

Aaron’s silence

This week, I think we all were stunned by the disappearance of a Boeing 777 with 269 passengers onboard. After the pilots turned off their location radar, and saying goodnight, the plane flew off in silence through the night. It is an eerie silence, an absent cry, a mystery begging to be solved.

Scene: aaron’s silence
In this week’s Torah portion, Shemini, Aaron’s silence too confounds us. The Tabernacle just inaugurated, divine fire had miraculously issued from inside the Tent of Meeting to consume Aaron's burnt offering on the altar, and then Nadav and Avihu, Aaron's two elder sons, mess up. Maybe they were disrespectful, maybe they were drunk, it is unclear.

This time the fire came from the tent and burned them, turning triumph to tragedy. Moses’ response was sharp, and it’s unclear what he meant: “that’s what God said he’d do”—was he trying to be comforting? Waqs he being an “I told you so?” Aaron's response was silence: "VaYidom Aaharon"—one of the only instances where Torah says someone stayed silent.

Did he stop crying?
Did he stop himself from replying?
What did he want to say?
Why the silence? Why no scream?
Aaron’s response is striking. Personally, I find it troubling: is it really better to be stoic in the face of tragedy, to swallow my sorrow and put on a cheerful face, not to make even a whimper?

When David's vain and rebellious son, Absalom, who rebelled against his own father, was killed in flight, his father fully vented his grief: "My son Absalom! O my son, my son Absalom. If only I had died instead of you!" (2 Samuel 19:1).

We are taught in Leviticus, that we shall not stand by while our neighbor bleeds. While we might be inclined to respond to someone else’s suffering with silence, we are commanded to expose, to speak out and not be indifferent to unjust suffering.

In fact, the Zohar blames Noah for the flood, because when he was told about the divine decree to wipe out everyone else, he didn’t argue with God. As a result, the flood is called mei Noah, the waters of Noah, because when I keep silent, when I do not protest, I am responsible for what happens. I am accountable for keeping silent.

Abraham Joshua Heschel describes the prophet’s job as follows:
The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority, and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words. Had the purpose been to express great ideas, prophecy would have had to be acclaimed as a triumph. Yet the purpose of prophecy was to conquer callousness, to change the inner heart as well as to revolutionize history.

Sometimes our voices must be raised like the prophets’, to speak out against injustice, to take out from anonymity the falsehoods and crimes perpetrated in our society.

And psychologically it is extremely dangerous not to speak out after tragedy, to let grief fester inside of us. When we speak we process feelings, we make extreme intolerable feelings more tolerable, we can integrate our experience and move on. This is I think why we have a tradition of shiva, of a mourner sitting for a week surrounded by friends and family who allow the mourner to speak. It is by talking about our loved ones, processing our loss, that we can move on.

We see this now with many returning veterans, who cannot talk openly about the horrors they have witnessed, and who constantly relive those war experiences in their imagination, in their dreams. And the treatment for them is to make their memories more tolerable to enable them to speak about their experiences without reliving the trauma. In this case, that which is silent must be articulated, or it will destroy us.


Silence as positive
I have talked up to now about the power, the value, of us speaking out, and our need for the world to speak out for God to speak out. But in our parsha, Aaron is silent, which I find very troubling.

The midrash sees Aaron’s silence as a positive thing. God speaks to Aaron after his silence directly, rather than through or with Moses, as a reward for that silence.

3 types of silence
1. There is the silence of the unknown, of the absent voice
This is the silence of the missing flight 370, a boeing 777 with 269 people
Where are they?
How can their families grieve and move on not knowing what’s happened to them?

This kind of silence begs to be articulated, it points to a mystery begging to be solved, of unspoken suffering begging to be recognized

Elie Wiesel, who broke the silence of Holocaust survivors and his own 10-year vow of silence, when he wrote Night, said:
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
The original version of Night was a 900-page memoir entitled Un die welt hot geshvign (And the world kept silent). This is a silence begging to be given voice.

2. Silence of the unspeakable
There are also times when we hold ourselves back because what we say would be hurtful, or because we know we wouldn’t be heard

Shimon & Levi’s massacre in shechem
Jacob confronts them: 'You have brought trouble on me by making me odious to the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites; my numbers are few, and if they gather themselves against me and attack me, I shall be destroyed, both I and my household.'
But they said (Genesis 34:31), 'Should he treat our sister as a harlot?
Jacob was silent—but not because he agreed with them
On his deathbed, finally speaks up:
Simeon and Levi are brothers;
Instruments of cruelty are in their dwelling place.
Let not my soul enter their council;
Let not my honor be united to their assembly;
For in their anger they slew a man,
And in their self-will they hamstrung an ox.
Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce;
And their wrath, for it is cruel!
I will divide them in Jacob
And scatter them in Israel

When Jacob was silent, it was because he knew they wouldn’t listen. His words would have fallen on deaf ears, so he wisely didn’t bother.

Sometimes: to speak would be hurtful
Maybe aaron wanted to say “you jerk, what an insensitive thing to say”
Moses’ mistake: speaking first, offering explanation
When we visit a mourner, let them do the talking, we do the listening
Never say things like “it’s for the best,” which true or not are insensitive and unhelpful

3. The silent scream
3rd type: Silence of the awesome, of that which is beyond language, which defies language

Ismar Schorsch compared Aaron’s silence to Edvard Munch's painting of 1893, "The Scream.”
“A gaunt figure on a bridge with his face contorted in horror and hands clasped to his ears trembles in the midst of a cosmic scream, suggested by a wavy landscape in deep colors. Munch wrote of the experience that lay behind the art: I walked one evening on a road—on the one side was the town and the fjord below me. I was tired and ill — I stood looking out across the fjord — the sun was setting — the clouds were colored red — like blood — I felt as though a scream went through nature — I thought I heard a scream. I painted this picture — painted the clouds like real blood. The colors were screaming.” (JTS Commentary on Shemini, 5762)

These silences are not really silences at—they just speak a truth too massive, too powerful to be articulated in human language.

White fire
One can think of this kind of audible silence as the mystics did of the white fire with which Torah was written. What we naturally see when we peer inside of a Torah scroll is the black forms of letters that form words, and give the meaning of the Torah in human language.

The midrash says that torah was written with black fire on white fire. Right now when we read torah, we only read from the black. But in the messianic era, the white fire, too, the apparently empty spaces, the silence, will be revealed as Torah. We will encounter the inexpressible, silent torah, embodying a higher level of consciousness, a deeper mode of feeling & experiencing reality. As David Wolpe (In Speech and In Silence) has written, “Even in the silence, there is a message of faith. The paradox is listening for that which cannot be heard.” Psalms says, “to you silence is praise.” There is a type of silence which expresses that which is above expression, that which is awesome—being awe struck, being flooded by the white spaces in reality.

Perhaps Moses tried to relate to Aaron in words, and fell short, because words could not express what he felt. Perhaps Aaron was so overwhelmed by his emotions that only silence could express the depth of his feelings. And perhaps Moses and the community held him lovingly as he went through that experience.