Our Silence, Ourselves

Surely it was of contemporary American Jewry that the Psalmist said: "There is no speech, there are no words, their voice is not heard." (19:4)

Exhibit A:

The World Zionist Congress, "the 100-year-old parliament of Diaspora Jewry," determines how the Jewish Agency spends its annual budget of $400 million. According to Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, the WZC "is the most authoritative spokesman for Jewish affairs worldwide." It's pretty important.

In what Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the leader of the Association of Reform Zionists of America (ARZA) hailed as "a great triumph for progressive Judaism in the U.S.," the Reform and Conservative slates in the recent World Zionist Congress elections received a combined 73.7 percent of the American vote. The Orthodox slate, headed by our very own Rabbi Norman Lamm, meekly limped away with 10.8 percent of the ballots. This meager showing resulted despite the backing of men of stature such as Rabbis Zevulun Charlop, Sol Roth, Haskel Lookstein, Hershel Schachter, Walter Wurzburger, Yosef Blau, Michael Rosensweig, Aharon Soloveitchik, Yehuda Parnes . . . (need I go on?) - and despite combining the forces of organizations like the Orthodox Union, Mizrachi, the National Council of Young Israel, the Rabbinical Council of America, B'nei Akiva, Amit, YU/RIETS/Stern Alumni associations, etc. With evident glee, ARZA claimed: "The sheer dimensions of our win are a confirmation and validation of what we have known to be the truth for some time now. We represent the beliefs of the vast majority of American Jewry." In the face of our loss, we remain silent and quite literally speechless, and as the Talmud knows, shtikah k'hoda'a - silence is equivalent to assent.

Let me bring an example of Orthodox indifferent silence from a fairly typical community, one I love dearly. Of the 700 Seattle Jews who registered to vote in the elections, only 57 were members of Orthodox congregations, and not one of the presidents of the Seattle Orthodox synagogues even bothered registering to vote.

Exhibit B:

The General Assembly (GA) of the Council of Jewish Federations, what the Jewish Week calls "the most influential annual convention of North American Jewry," recently drew 4,500 active Jews to Indianapolis. It's also pretty important.

The Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative), and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College all had informational booths and a felt presence at the conference. Yeshiva University/ RIETS had nothing. Excepting some anomalous cases, like Boston or Baltimore, Orthodox Jews are largely foreign to the world of Jewish Federations. We were silent once more.

Exhibit C:

To be sure, Jewish silence is not the monopoly of Orthodoxy. On his most recent visit to the U.S., a visit to address American Jewry at the GA, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was denied a meeting with President Clinton, even though the paths of the two heads of state coincidentally crossed in Los Angeles, and even though (more outrageously), that very week, Clinton met with Shimon Peres and Leah Rabin at the White House. (And they're not even corrupt Asian businessmen or tyrannical Chinese dictators!) But from American Jews, only silence.

This silence, it seems to me, goes far beyond our community's much bemoaned apathy, and it even goes far beyond a systematically pervasive genuine political illiteracy and blind incognizance of the modus operandi of American Jewry. It represents the lamentable fact that, as a community, we have lost the desire, the ambition, the hope of changing the comparatively tiny Jewish world for the better, to say nothing of the larger, non-Jewish universe which we inhabit and visit, but rarely contact meaningfully. Tikkun olam has become for many of us a hollow homiletic and rhetorical device, drained of its life. Orthodoxy, in the eyes of the world, has become synonymous with parochialism; fervent religiosity with insular narrowness.

The Hebrew word dom means both "silent" and "still" (see Joshua 10:12); silence is inactivity. The Hebrew word davar means both "word" and "object" or "event"; to speak is to create - to make things happen. The human being is uniquely and fundamentally defined by our sages as a medaber, a speaking being; to speak is to be human. ("Silence," Francis Bacon once said, "is the virtue of fools.")

To crudely paraphrase the Rav zt"l, a history-making existence is a speaking, communicatory existence. A people which strives to move from the silent periphery of history to its vocal center, which aims to shape its own destiny, must have the ability to lodge protest, to demand justice, and to accuse. A non-historic people has no message to deliver; it is mute and silent.

"There is a time to speak," declares Kohelet, "and a time to keep silent," and now it is time to break our silence with speech.