Few words can describe the experience encapsulated in two simple words in this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Shemini. Upon hearing that his two older sons had been killed in a fire while attempting to perform service to God, Aaron is distraught. His brother Moses offers him comfort. And the Torah comments, powerfully and succinctly, Vayidom Aharon, “And Aaron was silent” (Leviticus 10:3). 

Some commentaries assert that Aaron’s silence was a mark of acceptance, a concession of God’s supreme authority and an acknowledgement of faith in God’s actions, no matter the circumstances and no matter the results. 

  Yet, it is difficult not to feel the anguish of Aaron seeping through in between those two words. His distress. His utter helplessness. 

In his essay “Redemption, Prayer, Talmud Torah,” Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, a major American Orthodox rabbi and leading modern Jewish philosopher of the past generation, describes three levels of speech that characterize human existence. The highest level, the Rav describes, is prayer. It is the speech of a free person, the speech of the redeemed. Below that is groaning — the sound of pain, the cries of a person who is oppressed, who is suffering but who recognizes that suffering and realizes that a better life could be possible.

The lowest level of speech is silence. Silence is the speech of one who is in such despair that she does not even realize that sound is possible. It is the language of a suffering that is so complete, so overwhelming, so foundational, that one cannot even fathom a world that could look different. 

Vayidom Aharon, “And Aaron was silent.”

On Passover, we celebrated our evolution through each of these levels of speech. We began as slaves, so oppressed, so downtrodden, so abused that we were incapable of even making a sound. The very first noise that we hear uttered by the Israelites in the book of Exodus is the cry that they manage to emit as their bondage grows worse, the groaning that emerges from the voice they finally find. And it is only when they make this noise, when they cry out to God, that God hears their cries and remembers the promises made to our ancestors, and sends Moses to lead the Israelites to redemption. 

Once this redemption is realized, the Israelites burst forth in prayer with the Song of the Sea, the song of freedom, the song of a people who watched their enemies drown and their sorrows drown with them. 

We tell the story each year. But it is only because we are free that we can tell the story of suffering, only because we have been redeemed that we have the speech to speak of our slavery. 

Yet, there still exists so much suffering in our world. 

As Rabbi Soloveitchik writes: “Suffering … is a spiritual reality … encountered by man whenever he stands to lose either his sense of existential security (as in the case of an incurable disease) or his existential dignity (as in the case of public humiliation). Whenever a merciless reality clashes with the human existential awareness, man suffers and finds himself in distress.”

We live in a world in which we witness this merciless reality each day. We are bombarded with news reports of parents losing children – at the hands of drugs, at the hands of gun violence and even at the hands of the police. 

Vayidom Aharon. And we remain silent. God commands us, “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). Later, God repeats the commandment: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).

We are commanded not to oppress the stranger, and we are commanded to love the stranger. We are not commanded to listen to the cries of the stranger. Because those in our midst who are suffering are not always capable of producing cries. 

The inability to give voice to suffering should never be confused with the acceptance of suffering. 

Instead, we must help find that voice. Not only must we listen to the silence in order to hear the groaning, but we, too, must cry out. Because it is only when we cry out, when we voice the sound of suffering, that we can start the process of redemption. 

We do not simply pray for freedom. In fact, it is the contrary. It is only after we are all redeemed, after we are all free, that we can finally and truly speak the language of freedom, and pray. 

Maharat Rori Picker Neiss is Director of Programming, Education and Community Engagement at Bais Abraham Congregation.