It’s Not Either/Or: Following the Model of Quiet Resistance

Morgan Tobey, Rabbinic Intern

Erev Rosh Hashanah October 2, 5785/2024

Shana Tova. For those of you whom I haven’t had the chance to meet yet, my name is Morgan and I’m the new rabbinic intern. I’m looking forward to getting to know you, and it's truly an honor to welcome in the new year with all of you.

Some of you know that last year, I was interning at Cornell Hillel, where I would spend a weekend each month. Pretty quickly, I fell into a routine. I’d spend 2-3 weeks preparing for the visit and reading all of the headlines about college campuses that I’m sure many of you read. I’d receive occasional internal updates about graffiti or a protest, and I’d feel an uneasiness growing in the pit of my stomach. Then the weekend visit would come around. 

I’d set out early Friday morning, and I’d spend the four hour drive filled with dread. The headlines of what was happening on campus would swirl in my head, and I’d imagine that I was hurtling at 60 mph into some kind of disaster zone. And I’d get stuck on these thoughts of “What if I can’t handle the chaos that I think is waiting for me there? Do I have to continue heading towards campus? Is it too late to turn around?”

As a rabbinical student, I tend to look to our Jewish texts for parallels and guidance on how I’m feeling. The Rosh Hashanah Torah portions were a gold mine for my campus-related anxiety. Listen to this excerpt of Hagar’s story, which Orthodox and Conservative congregations read in their two day observance of Rosh Hashanah:

Va-yashkem Avraham Ba’Boker, Abraham got up early in the morning, he took some bread and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He placed them over her shoulder, together with the child, and sent her away. And she wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.  

Just some bread and one skin of water to get through the whole wilderness. I can just imagine Ishmael thinking to himself, “What are we doing here!? The whole desert before us and only one skin of water! We won’t make it! I won’t make it. Is it too late to turn around?”

Or how about an excerpt of what we’ll hear tomorrow: Va-yashkem Avraham Ba’Boker, Abraham got up early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him. 

Off they go, up the mountain, to kill Isaac. I can imagine Isaac saying to himself, “What are we doing here!? That’s a lot more altar wood than usual and there’s no ram! I have a bad feeling about this. I don’t know if I’m going to make it. Is it too late to turn back?”

Of course, this is all just me imagining what they were thinking. When we turn to the text in the Torah itself, we’ll find that Ishmael and Isaac actually don’t say anything as the action unfolds. They are silent throughout their ordeals. Surely they were thinking all kinds of thoughts, but the Torah doesn’t tell us what those thoughts were. As readers and listeners, we’re left sitting in Ishmael and Isaac’s silence.

Silence can be uncomfortable. How many of you have struck up a conversation about the weather just to fill a silence? For me, one of the hardest parts of my pastoral care training was learning to embrace silence in conversation with hospital patients. I would feel the urge to just keep talking or my imagination would start to run wild, just like it did imagining Isaac and Ishmael’s panic. Our early rabbis were also uncomfortable with the Torah’s depiction of Isaac as silent. They filled Isaac’s silence with an imagined monologue in which Isaac is a willing participant in this attempted sacrifice. He even insists that his father bind him tightly. The rabbis created a version of the story in which Isaac is empowered and given agency in this situation. That’s a lot less anxiety- inducing than a child being dragged unwittingly to his death.

Using our imaginations and creating new stories to fill the silence is normal and natural. And the particular ways in which we fill the silence usually reveals something important about our own state of mind. I filled Ishmael and Isaac’s silence with imagined panic and fear that mirrored my own feelings as I drove to the university. The rabbis used creativity to erase the silence and empower the disempowered to lower their own doubts and anxieties around this story.

But are we any closer to really understanding Ishmael and Isaac? Of understanding anyone whose silence we’re filling? To really understand them, we have to honor their silence and quiet ourselves. Of course, Ishamel and Isaac aren’t here to speak for themselves, so we have no choice but to rely on context and imagination for them. But members of our community, members of the many communities that we belong to, are here to speak for themselves. 

Honoring their silence means approaching them with genuine curiosity. We have to ask questions like: How are you feeling right now? What have the last few months been like for you? What do you need? And then, we have to quiet ourselves to allow space for whatever answer might come in reply. Those answers might surprise us and maybe even challenge the answers we would come up with for them if we instead try to fill their silence. This was my experience at Cornell last year.

Each month, I arrived on a campus that looked nothing like a disaster zone. There had been some isolated protests, but each month, I found a campus that was beautiful and serene. I’d wander over to the bagel shop which was always packed with a diverse array of students collaborating on group projects and giggling over stories of meeting someone cute. I’d sit down for coffee with our Reform freshmen and sophomores, voices we usually don’t hear from, and I’d listen as they shared their thoughts with me. Each month, I’d drive home on Sunday feeling confident. Despite their silence in the face of terrifying headlines: the kids are alright.

There are a myriad of ways to react to feelings of fear, anxiety, and grief. We can make statements and march and raise money. Those are all very valid and important forms of resistance. We need people to do these things. I have a lot of admiration for those who use their voices and feet to advocate. But let’s not be too quick to judge those who respond to fear, anxiety, and grief differently- quietly or even silently. That, too, can be a valid and important form of resistance.

Psychologist Dr. Madelyn Blair describes silence as, “the space—between reading and writing, between listening and understanding, between distraction and presence, between fear and complicity, between surprise and laughter, between acknowledgement and transformation.

Silence is the space where we retreat when we need time. Silence is where we allow our minds to consider possibilities, where we integrate the new into the old, where we give credence to our feelings.”

Our Jewish tradition understands this too. Psalm 65:2 states: Silence is praise to You, O God. In reflecting on this verse, the Gemara relates a story of Rav Dimi bringing a piece of wisdom from Eretz Yisrael back to his adopted land of Babylonia, “If a word is worth one coin, silence is worth two.”  

Taking the time to give space to silence is a lot easier said than done in this day and age. In so many ways, social media and digital news has been a blessing- connecting us to people and stories that we never would have encountered- but it has devalued silence. We carry the entirety of available information in our pockets. The influx of ceaseless information is overwhelming. Even when I manage to put my phone away, I’m usually still thinking about all of the news and updates I might be missing. And that’s just when we’re the receivers. We also have the ability to share our own thoughts to thousands of people in an instant. I often find myself fighting a fear that the thoughts in my head have no merit if I don’t publish them. And I catch myself filling someone’s social media silence on issues of the day with an assumption that they don’t care. 

We haven’t read any articles about Jewish students on campus who are demonstrating quiet resistance, those who, despite the protests, have continued to go about their lives and are even still enjoying their college experience. And so, it is easy to surmise there must not be any. 

But when I let our students fill their own silence, that wasn’t what many of them shared. Of course, there were students who were very upset and scared. There were students staging counter-protests, vigils, and posting regularly on social media. That mode of resistance was valid, and all of us on the Hillel staff worked to walk with those students in their particular process. But many of the Reform students were handling the moment very differently. They told me that protests are a bummer, but they choose to stay away from all of that. Their classes are interesting. Their evenings are filled with wrestling club, acappella, salsa dancing. They’ve made friends from all over the world. They love Hillel, but they wish that Hillel events would be a little more of a reprieve of the campus chaos conversation. I want to validate their mode of resistance too.

On my last visit, there was a very small encampment, made up exclusively of students, on the quad. I grabbed coffee with an Israeli-American student. We spent a long time chatting about his interest in exploring Judaism through a queer lens, the video game his computer science class was developing, and his excitement about studying abroad in Asia next year. Unable to stand the silence, I turned the conversation to the protest. He assured me that it’s less-than-ideal, but it wasn’t all-consuming for him. But the media that had been all-consuming for me for weeks had told me that that couldn’t be the true answer, so I pushed him some more. He looked at me exasperated and said that yes, the encampment is upsetting to him so he’s avoiding the quad right now. In the meantime, he was taking that energy and throwing it into building, of all things, the campus’ Jewish-Muslim Alliance. Can you believe it!? He asked me, “Can we talk about something else now?” He asked me to honor his silence. 

That student brings me back to Isaac and Ishmael. There were lingering scars from their traumatic episodes- neither boy is shown speaking to Abraham ever again, and Isaac loses his mother, Sarah, who is said to have died as soon as she heard that he had been taken up the mountain. And yet, both boys manage to not only survive these traumatic episodes, but to thrive. They go on to marry, grow families, and become the founding fathers of great nations, just as God promised. How did they go from trauma to thriving? The Torah tells us that Isaac found comfort in his wife Rebekah, though they don’t exchange a single word.

Throughout the last 12 months, our young people have been employing this sacred Jewish model of quiet resistance- going on and comforting one another with few words. Can we give them the space to continue to do so? Can we honor their silence by asking them, rather than telling them what their experience has been? Can we silence our minds enough to be open to surprise? The choice of loud or quiet resistance is not either/or. There will be times in this new year for speaking loudly and times for sitting in silence. Can we follow our children’s lead and give ourselves permission to find those moments of silence?

As the psalmist declares: Silence is praise, to You, O God.

Shana Tova

1. Gen. 21:14

2. Bereshit Rabbah 56

3. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resilient-leadership/201806/is-silence-silent

4. BT Megillah 18a