Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove  
April 21, 2007

By Thursday, the coverage of horrors of Monday’s tragedy at Virginia Tech had taken an expected turn. Interviews with the parents and classmates of the dead, portraits of a psychopath, debates on gun control, the deficiencies in our mental health system and law enforcement. The effort to find heroism in the midst of tragedy, which as the Jewish community knows, came in the form of Liviu Lebrescu, the 76 years old Holocaust survivor who blocked the doorway to the killer, telling his students to flee, with everyone in the class, except him being saved.

And so Thursday, the coverage, turned to, who was good, and who was not. One article caught my attention, it was about one of the many news anchors, Charles Gibson, and how his coverage was different than the others. While every other talking head sought to be national grief counselors, with excruciatingly close and continuous coverage, Gibson, acted, well, like a newsman – poised, but even keeled, seeking facts, not emotion. The article gave Gibson a fulsome review, because he did what nobody else did, he was restrained. In the face of tragedy, Gibson held his tongue, he kept quiet and you know what, more people listened to him listening than anyone else talking. In this case, less – was more.

As a general rule, human beings are uncomfortable with silence. It is awkward; it can be misunderstood to signal ignorance. As Jews we have no shortage of texts on the importance of speech. The world after all was created with God’s word, Moses found himself when he found speech. And as Jews we know that to stand by silently as wrong is being perpetrated is unto itself a sin, an admission of guilt.

But sometimes, less is more. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a time to speak and time to be silent, sometimes in our fumbling for words, we forget that just as a stunning sunset can leave us breathless, sometime the enormity of tragedy can and should leave us speechless, and sometimes that is not just OK, sometimes that is the appropriate response. You will recall last week’s torah reading that described the senseless death of Aaron’s sons. Aaron’s response to devastating loss was silence. Was it anger and outrage or sorrow and pain? In all likelihood, I suspect a mixture of everything. Like Edward Munch’s famous painting “The Scream,” the very power of Aaron’s response, is in the fact that we are not given access into Aaron’s tragedy, it remains his own, his silence speaking volumes, unopened volumes.

Our rabbis were keen to the debilitating effects of misused or overused words. When Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan observed in 19th century Lithuania how private and social life was disintegrating as a result of slander, he wrote a book, called the Hafetz Hayim, a detailed list of rules on Lashon Hara, wicked tongue. The book title coming from the biblical verse that is the one who is Hafetz Hayim, loves life, namely, the one who keeps their tongue from evil, and lips from speaking guile.” And the book not only legislates against obvious infractions like slander or malicious rumor mongering, but less obvious misdeeds of speech, like careless gossip, or what seems to be the case today, the commodification of information, where we pass on the particulars of other people’s lives in order to advance our own status and deprecate theirs.

Imagine what Kagan would say today, seeing our national conversation. The line between investigative journalism and entertainment has been totally blurred. The information age has brought with it confusion between accountability and intrusion, responsibility and witch hunt, ethics and character assassination. The old maxim that sunlight is the best disinfectant is passé in a world of twenty-four hour news cycles. What was most fascinating and most disturbing about last week’s cause célèbre concerning a radio personality’s use of racial and misogynist remarks, is the speed by which such a ruckus was raised, a media personality was fired, and the conversation was dropped. To the best of my knowledge the national conversation on race and gender has not moved foreword one iota. One person lost his job, others had their moment in the media, but is anyone actually better off? Did anyone, ourselves included, actually learn a lesson?

Tomorrow, if you were in Israel, you would see and feel the power of silence. These seven days between Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron, are days of deep sadness and reflection. We remember those who died al kiddush hashem, who died in the horrors of the shoah, and we remember those who died al Kiddush hashem, in defense of Israel. And on Yom Hazikaron itself, Sunday Night and Monday in Israel, the Sirens will go off, and in an act that you can only understand if you have been to Israel at this time of year, an entire nation literally comes to a halt. Cars stop, people get out standing at attention on the highway, everything pauses for those minutes. And in that moment, as the immortal poem Alterman wrote: “Only the fallen soldiers speak.” If you want to know the proper response, or at least the Jewish response to tragedy, death and irreparable loss, spend this week in Israel and you will discover that sometimes the best and most unifying national conversation can, ironically, be silence.

So at this moment before kaddish, I am going to ask us to rise. We stand collectively as Americans and as mourners. We stand to honor the legacy of those lives lost in the shoah. We stand as lovers of Israel who mourn those who gave their lives. Some of us may be prompted to say kaddish over the dead, some of us may not, but for a minute we can stand silently together. A silence that honors the dead, which reflects our grief, our humility in the face of unspeakable evil and silence that may in fact bring with it the possibility of introspection, of healing. Sometimes as Rabbi Shimon of pirkei avot taught, the best thing for a body is silence.