This past weekend on Shabbat I spoke a little bit about the challenge of Aaron’s silence. If you recall, in parashat Shemini, the dedication of the mishkan (the portable sanctuary constructed by the Israelites in the wilderness) is interrupted by a terrible calamity when Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu are burnt up in a heavenly fire after offering “strange fire” before God. The response to this traumatic event is interesting:

Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what HaShem meant when God said, ‘Through those near to me I show myself holy, and gain glory before all the people.'” And Aaron was silent. (Leviticus 10:3)

The oddness of this response might be summed up in this way: That Moses seems to be saying too much in this moment, while Aaron seems to be saying too little. In any case, their motivations are obscure. Is Moses trying to comfort his brother in some way over the deaths of his sons, or is he trying to articulate some kind of theological understanding or justification of the event? Does Aaron’s silence indicate shock, displeasure with Moses’ words, or something else entirely?

What I think is that sometimes silence is simply the only real response to something we have experienced. That is a difficult thought to articulate, particularly in a world and at a time when the cultural zeitgeist seems to demand that we speak out at all times, constantly. I think the trouble we have is with the inherent ambiguity of silence, the way that all the things we don’t say invite interpretation while denying the possibility of any definitive interpretation. Silence can have many meanings, but to settle absolutely on any one meaning would be to break the silence.

All of this, of course, applies to the experience we have of the silence of others, the external garment of silence, as it were. But silence also has its internal side, which tends to be very different from the face it presents to the world. The internal face of silence is not a mystery to interpret, but an authentic response to an experience for which we have no words — a lived truth which defies, at least for the moment, our ability to communicate it to others.

If it is hard for us interpret Aaron’s silence, and if that fact makes us uncomfortable, I believe this is because of our own tendency to fill that silence up with whatever words come most naturally to us — words emerging from our own grief, our own losses, our own sense of grievance with God. But in this moment the key thing to understand is that whatever the internal face of Aaron’s silence may be, it is very much his, personal to him in a way that defies our efforts to capture it in language. We fail to do justice to the silence of others when we (like Moses, perhaps) rush too quickly to fill the gap with our own interpretations.

You see, the other important thing about silence is that it marks the boundary of a kind of sacred space different from, and more personal than, the communal sanctuaries we build to connect with God together. Within the walls of this sanctuary of silence, we come face-to-face with the deep, troubling, inscrutable silence of God, and come away changed by that experience.

What emerges from that encounter is hard to predict, and even harder to define, but still it is an essential component of that mysterious process we call healing, or acceptance, or spiritual growth, or whatever other label may be handy at the time to define the ineffable. In time, Aaron may find the words to describe that experience. But for now, we need to recognize that there is also a wisdom in silence, in the honest acknowledgement of those moments when we don’t have the words to frame what has happened to us. Before the light, darkness; and before the words, silence.