On High Holy Days, we search for God’s “kol demama vdaka, still small voice.”
This phrase is taken from the First Book of Kings, when Elijah finds God not in the howling winds, nor in the harrowing earthquakes, nor in the raging fires, but in the quiet.
Here, on Rosh Hashanah, we aspire to turn off the noise, to listen between the shofar blasts, and social media tweets, to what is really important in our lives.
But, what if God’s voice cannot be heard for a different reason? What if we, through our actions, have stopped God’s voice from being emitted into the world?
This is the suggestion the famous 19th Century Hassidic master, Menachem Mendel of Kutz, or the Kutzker Rebbe, alerts us to in his saying, “Ein Davar Shalem Yoter MeLev Shabor V’Zoak Mehademama,” “There is nothing as full as a broken heart and the scream of silence.”
His demama, his silence, is not daka-still, but is screaming.
I first learned the Kutzker Rebbe’s saying while studying in Israel in the year 2000. It was during the outset of the Second Intifada and all of our actions were fraught with danger. The saying so moved me that, together with a classmate, Yaffa Shira Sultan, I wrote the following song:
[Sing: Ein Davar]
In the Torah portions for Rosh Hashanah there are many sounds: the laughter after the birth of Isaac, the playful banter between Ishmael and Isaac, the cries of abandonment from Hagar and Ishmael, the angel’s voice crying out to Abraham, and the imagined shofar blast at the story’s conclusion. But, what I hear most is not a sound at all, but a kol demama vdaka, the still small voice of a child too afraid to voice his concerns.
The child, hayeled, is Isaac, watching as his world implodes around him, powerless in the face of the powerful adults that surround him.
“Help me, Azor Li,” he asks us.
In this age of Me Too and Believe the Victim, I think it’s about time that we do.
All he wants is what all children want and deserve, to be loved and protected, to be safe.
Tomorrow’s story is framed as a test of Abraham and his faith. But, recently, I have come to realize that it is not Abraham alone who is being tested, but us as well.
Can we stop future Isaacs from being hurt? Can we ensure future Abraham’s are held accountable for their crimes? Can we create a world where such things never happen in the first place?
Yes, I believe we can and we should. Every day, we move closer to a world where Isaac no longer has to scream in silence. Finally, we are ready to hear his cry.
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Before explaining why I think this, I want take you back to a different zoak mehademmah, scream of silence, this time not from the Torah, but from my own family and the grave consequences when the cry went unheeded.
All four children of my Great Uncle Jack made Aliyah to Israel in the mid-nineteen- eighties: two brothers and two sisters, each motivated by a deep sense of our people’s historical roots. The sisters settled side-by-side in Beer Sheva, a city whose name is derived from the story of Isaac. The brothers settled further north, one in the territories in the outskirts of Jerusalem, and the other in a religious moshav an hour south of Tel Aviv.
Of all of the four, my cousin Denny is the most imposing. A doctor for the small religious enclave, I remember him as a tall, lanky, and somewhat stern. He and his wife Gail had five children, one boy and four girls.
It is the story of the eldest and the only boy that I would like to share with you today. His name was Yonaton. I believe I met him twice – once in 1989 and the other in 1993. My cousins, all four sets of them, were gracious to host me for Shabbat and holidays during my studies in high school and college and later, rabbinical school. I remember Yonaton being the most joyful of the brood. Smart, inquisitive, and always smiling, he seemed destined for big things.
The event in question happened in the summer of 1999. Yonaton was in the army, fulfilling his duty as a citizen of Israel. He was a spry eighteen-year-old completing basic training. It was during this time that he became very close to his commander. He had a good unit and was happy. But, then everything went terribly wrong.
In the middle of an excursion in the field his commander, the one he loved so much, was killed. Yonatan was devastated.
The commander who replaced the one who died was tough minded and required the boys to get right back to work, and to ignore the sadness they felt at the loss of their former commander. Yonaton, no doubt, tried to be a good soldier and fall in line with the rest of the unit. But, when his request to come home for the High Holy Days was denied, he snapped.
This is where my cousin went missing. As Israel is a small country, the entire country went on red alert to find him. They searched high and low with no result. Erev Rosh Hashanah, on the eve of the holiday, Yonaton’s body was discovered. A few officers went out to the moshav to share the news with Denny and Gail. It was not good. Yonatan had died of self-inflicted wounds.
While I was not there I can imagine my cousins’ faces. Their world had collapsed around them. And, yet, for them, the celebration of holidays, particularly the High Holy Days, takes precedent above all other things, even mourning. They arranged the house as they always did, attended services, and had meals with the family, no doubt in stunned silence.
And, then, my cousin Denny went to read Torah as he did every Rosh Hashanah The portion was Akedat Yitzchak, the Binding of Isaac, a father who just lost a son, reading about a father taking his son off to be sacrificed.
A year later was when I was in Israel for rabbinical school. On Rosh Hashanah that year, I went to Denny and Gail’s, their pain and loss affecting every conversation. They spoke about the prevalence of suicide in the Israeli army, how the government officials often minimized the problem. By then, the spotlight had started to fade on the family, and yet, I could feel Yonatan’s presence everywhere. As good Orthodox Jews, they went through the motions of their Rosh Hashanah obligations once again. The only concession my cousin Denny made was to not read Torah.
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Traumas like the ones in our Torah reading or the one experienced in my family do not simply fade away, their scream resounds throughout the ages like a broken shofar cry. Until they are fully heard, they will continue to cry out.
In the 1840s, Dutch philosopher Soren Kierkegaard attempted to do the impossible, to get inside Abraham’s head, to try to understand what he was really thinking when he brought his son to be sacrificed. In his primary work, “Fear and Trembling,” he dissects the Binding of Isaac, retelling this foundational story not once, not twice, but four times
He is consumed by the story. Delving deeply into each of the characters, trying to figure out exactly what they were thinking at any moment of the narrative. He desperately attempts to help Abraham, Isaac and Sarah find a way out of their predicament, but to no avail. Every time, Isaac is bound. Each time the family is reunited in silence.
The final version is the most painful, as Kierkegaard writes, “then they returned again home, and Sarah hastened to meet them, but Isaac had lost his faith. No word of this had ever been spoken in the world, and Isaac never talked to anyone about what he had seen, and Abraham did not suspect that anyone had seen it.”
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Long before CT scans and MRIs, Kierkegaard understood the human psyche. He understood the deep impact the story in Genesis would have had on all of its participants. Yes, Isaac’s life was spared, but his soul was not.
This is the way of trauma, that it replays and replays in your head. In 2019, we understand the effects of trauma better than at any time in human history. We understand the changes it makes inside our brains, inside our bodies, and inside our very beings. Trauma impacts everything.
Just down the road from us in Cleveland, Ohio, Dr. Rachel Yehudah, an Orthodox psychiatrist, helped prove as much. In studying Holocaust survivors thirty years ago(Cleveland, it turns out has one of the highest percentages in the country), she saw the way the Nazi atrocities had changed their biology. But, not just their behavior, but their very DNA as well.
Epigenetics, the field Dr. Yehudah helped create, tells us that trauma changes us, not only our behavior, but our genes as well – LaDor LaDor LaDor, From One Generation to the Next.
Trauma is the single greatest cause of human suffering in the world today. Recent statistics tell us that in the United States, over sixty percent of men and fifty percent of women experience some sort of traumatic event over the course of their lives. Even scarier, twenty-six percent of children will witness a trauma before they turn four. The effects of traumatic events are all around us, all the time. In any room with large gatherings of people you can hear it. Close your eyes and listen. You can hear it present with us right now.
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How can we combat such a large epidemic? We must work one Isaac at time. We must become what, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kok argues in his excellent book The Body Keeps Score, a “trauma aware society,” a society where the silence can finally be heard.
A particular story from his book stands out. It takes place on September 11th, 2001 and involves a 5-year-old named Noam attending first grade at PS 234, right opposite the World Trade Center, less than fifteen hundred feet from the towers. There he witnesses the horror of that fateful day, fleeing with his parent and older sibling on foot to find safety. The day was harrowing for the child and clearly traumatized him.
The next morning, Noam drew a picture of what he had witnessed the day before. In the picture are the outlines of two large buildings with a squiggly lines around the tops as a way of depicting the smoke. The shape of a darkened plane hovers on the right side of the picture. On the left side are stick figures falling from the sky and graves on the ground right below them. At the bottom center of the picture, right below the buildings is a small ambiguous black circle.
Dr. Van Der Kok interviewed the boy shortly after the event, asking him about the black circle.
‘It’s a trampoline,” Noam replied.
The doctor prodded him further, asking why a trampoline was needed at all.
“So the next time people have to jump they will be safe,” was his answer.
We cannot stop Noam from witnessing the planes from crashing into the towers, or prevent Abraham from taking Isaac off to be sacrificed, or restore Yonaton to this world, but perhaps we can draw in a trampoline in our future pictures so that future Noam’s and Isaac’s and Yonaton’s will be able to find safety.
Shakespeare once wrote in his play Macbeth: “give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it to break.”
Similarly, our Jewish tradition teaches that sadness shared is cut by one-eighteenth.
But, trauma is not so easy to share. As Dr. Van Der Kok writes, “trauma overwhelms listeners as well as speakers.”
Perhaps, words are insufficient. Perhaps, just sitting with the victim in silence is enough.
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[Sing “Ein Davar”]
Why the rabbis chose to include the particular chapters of Genesis on Rosh Hashanah is beyond my understanding. Every year we read them I am mystified. They are hard, troubling texts. But, perhaps, they are meant to force us to look harder at our own systems and own societies. For thousands of years, we have read and reread these stories, promising to do better.
To Isaac, we offer an apology. You bravely confronted your father in the only way that you could. We did not listen. We did not condemn. We allowed abuse to occur. It is not only your soul that was at stake, but our own.
We must listen harder – trauma often lingers just below the surface. We must love deeper – allowing healing to happen. And, we must not allow Isaac’s scream to be silent.
To all of those suffering amongst us, my door is open to you, our door as a community is open to you. And, I offer you the words a good friend of my wife’s so longed for in her childhood: “We hear you, we believe you, we support you.”
When the shofar sounds on Rosh Hashanah it is a reminder of the ram who was sacrificed in Isaac’s place. According to the normal version of the story, Isaac was spared, disaster averted. And, yet we know otherwise.
As the shofar sounds this year listen to its brokenness. And, when we are finally ready for the great Shofar blast, the Tikiah Gedolah, imagine a world where Isaac’s silent cry can be heard, where those who live in pain to not have to do so alone.
Then, at the end, you may hear it – God’s kol demama v’daka, still small voice, whispering a quiet, “todah, thank you” to us all.A Sweet and Joyous New Year – A Shanah Tovah U’Metukah
Last Updated on 11/03/2019 by Marc Slonim