To speak or not to speak--muteness/silence in Biblical, Hasidic, Yiddish, Holocaust, and Hebrew literature.

Muteness/silence appears in Jewish literature to express a variety of ideologies; theological, political, philosophical, spiritual, and religious from antiquity to modern times. Being mute obviously is to refrain from speech or utterance. The condition may result from being incapable of speech or a momentary absence of any sound or membership in a culture in which no response is the norm. Overwhelming silence can also be present in a geographic location. This essay will cite examples from the Hebrew Bible, Hasidic legends, contemporary literature set in Eastern Europe, and modern Israeli writers.

One observes that the power of ancient Biblical narrative is marred by the peculiar voicelessness of women in the Bible, corroborating Ben Sira's statement that "a silent woman is a gift from the Lord." Even though matriarchs are powerful enough to deflect the course of covenantal succession, they are almost never the enactors of narrative. Add to this exclusion the anonymous daughters, the passive wives, the handmaids given to husbands, the breeding contests among women, the females thrust through doors to save the lives of men, the falsifying of the reality of their positions. (1)

The Biblical figure Dinah, only daughter of the patriarch Jacob, sister to the twelve brothers who became the twelve tribes of Israel, is a good example. Dinah's only appearance in the Bible is brief and brutal. As recounted in Genesis 34:131, the young woman is sexually assaulted by the prince of Shechem, a Canaanite. Two of her brothers determine she has been raped and hatch a devious plot to avenge this insult to their sister. They tell the Shechemites that the prince can have Dinah, but they say that to make things fight between the two peoples all of the men of Shechem must allow themselves to be circumcised. After the men are weakened from their circumcisions, Jacob's sons Simeon and Levi go through the town and slay them.

The Bible does not tell us about how Dinah feels about these events. We do know that on his death bed, Jacob curses his sons for their treachery (Genesis 49:5-7). Dinah however is never mentioned again. She is a victim, according to the texts, without a consciousness or a life story to tell. Male authorship is very evident to the modern reader's sensitivity. Her silence speaks volumes. And the author causes the reader to ask many questions.

Dinah's silent sufferance can be juxtaposed to Hannah whose story takes a different turn. For Hannah's story (1 Samuel 2: 18-21) has become both prayer theologically and taunt for many infertile women: she agonizes over her infertility as did the matriarch Rachel, yet her invocations are finally answered. Hannah is the first ordinary person--male or female--to pray at a sanctuary. Ironically, her plea is misinterpreted because, in her fervor, "As she kept on praying before the Lord, Eli (the priest) watched her mouth. Now Hannah was praying in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard." She is perceived to be drunk.

At long last she is blessed with a son, Samuel, (the name meaning God heard) whom she dedicates to Temple service. Hannah's silent woman's prayer, unintentional and accidental as it was, transformed the heart of Judaism: midrashic tradition holds that her fervent utterances became the "Amidah" prayer recited as its name implies standing silently. Hannah has laid the groundwork and has gifted us spiritually with the religious paradigm for silent prayer.

While Dinah's thoughts are essentially unknown to us and Hannah's unspoken words evolve into a lasting legacy; Moses, who demurs to speak out of embarrassment, is bidden by God to be the champion of his people.

"But Moses said to the Lord 'Please O Lord, I have never been a man of words ... I am slow of speech and tongue'" Exodus 4:10

Moses is the role model for all time of overcoming disabilities, his speech impediment counting for naught, not compromising in any way his ability to lead. Clearly his triumphs and place in Jewish history transcend the physical, a testament to the fact that while there are things that can handicap our bodies, the only things that can handicap the human spirit are those which we allow.

When Moses stood at the burning bush, he was not a man of words. And his brother Aaron was to be his intermediary to compensate for Moses' deficiency. However his final legacy to the Jewish people was the speech he left to the Israelites in The Book of Deuteronomy, Sefer Devarim, "the book of words." Even though spoken words plagued Moses in his youth and indeed all of his life; his self-consciousness, his inability to articulate, his greatest and lasting gift to humanity were his devarim, his words.

The Book of Psalms conversely admonishes us to praise God constantly, coupled with the injunction to be overwhelmed by the Divine Presence, thereby struck mute and utterly incapable of finding words (19:2,4). "The heavens declare the glory of God ... Day unto day uttereth speech"; "His praise shall continually be in my mouth" (34:2) one voice and the antithesis "there is no speech, there are no words." The prophet Habakkuk also bids us "Let all the earth keep silence before Him (2:20). Thus we have speech and silence coexisting in beautifully orchestrated poetic texts directed toward the same ideological and religious end. (2)

The Hasidic movement which originated in southern Poland in the eighteenth century was historically primarily concerned with the simple man. How was he to arrive at living his life in fervent joy, simultaneously obtaining a modicum of respect for his lowly station? The men who are the tellers of legends, the "Tzaddikim," (the "righteous ones") were charged to instruct how all of humankind could communicate with the Divine, no matter how humble the individual's position. Silence and ignorance are wedded in the Hasidic tale of the Baal Shem Tov (Master of a Good Name), the founder of modern Hasidism. These characteristics not withstanding, God is accessible to all.

A villager who worshipped in the Baal Shem Tov's House of Prayer during the High Holy Days had a son so dimwitted and slow of speech that he could not even grasp the shapes of the Hebrew letters, let alone the meaning of the holy words. When he was thirteen and of age according to Jewish tradition, his father took him with him on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), fearing if left alone, the boy might desecrate the holy fast day because he did not know any better.

This nameless boy had a small whistle which he always blew when he sat out in the fields to herd the sheep. Perhaps the boy is unnamed to indicate his insignificance and unworthiness. He brought the whistle with him to the synagogue. Hour after hour, the boy sat there silent and detached. As the day wore on, he signaled to his father if he could sing on his whistle. The father, greatly perturbed, denied his request. Later on, the boy importuned his father once again and the father physically restrained him. The Ne'ilah Service (closing prayers) began in which the Gates of Heaven were to be opened. The boy dug into his father's pocket, took out the whistle and blew a loud note. The congregation was frightened and confused, but the Baal Shem Tov went on with the prayers more devoutly than usual. Later he said, "The boy made things easy for me." (3)

A variant of this story is the ignorant Jew whose sole knowledge of Judaism is the Hebrew alphabet, which he recites and asks God to form the letters into prayers. These legends are immensely moving, for they indicate and reinforce the traditional concept that God is available to all, the educated and the uneducated, the verbal and the non-verbal. Spiritually there must be room for all types. What constitutes religious authenticity must be rethought. Words are not the be all and end all.

I. L. Peretz, Polish Yiddish short-story writer, poet, dramatist, and essayist who dominated Jewish letters and thought at the turn of the twentieth century, uses muteness in "Bontzye Schveig" ("Bontshe the Silent") to pose thought provoking questions designed to challenge Diaspora Jews to re-examine their place in the modern world. Exposure to diverse philosophies made Peretz aware of the gulf that existed between Polish Jews' cloistered ghetto life and the larger world.

Peretz's "Bontshe the Silent" describes the life of a poor humble man who lives out his life in mute acceptance of the cruelties of others. Exploited and ultimately abandoned by his family, he nonetheless remains sweet tempered and somewhat unintelligent. The final sentences tell of Bontshe's posthumous recognition in heaven where he is offered his chance of its glories as a reward for his passive endurance on earth. Bontshe's sole request is for a daily roll and butter. (4)

This story has incited much debate about the author's perspective. Is Peretz praising Bontshe's humility and silence, or condemning his quiescent acceptance of his station in life and therefore making a political statement? Modern critics interpret the protagonist's humble demeanor as an attack on quiescent submission, social ills and religious hypocrisy. Can the message be that salvation from earthly misery could be attained only through dedicated preparation for an afterlife and therefore belongs to humanity's lowly?

Bontshe becomes a springboard for social satire and religious irony. The meek porter's life is made a protest against man's abuse of man, an oppressed silent man's cry for human justice. Bontshe appears, messiah-like, to suffer for all mankind. His abject suffering is dramatized to make him crushed, blood-stained and forgiving. Yet Peretz subtly mocks his meekness, suggesting that in order to be heard, it is necessary to shout--especially on earth. As the presiding angel tells Bontshe: "You yourself perhaps did not know that you could cry, and that your cry could have caused the wall of Jericho to tumble and collapse. You yourself did not know of your latent power." Obviously neither Bontshe's biography nor his conduct during the trial has suggested to the presiding angel that the latter's silence was not a freely chosen abstention from self-assertion.

Was Peretz irritated by Bontshe's fatalistic attitude because it symbolized the pious Jew's complete credence in life after death, the belief that suffering on earth could be compensated for by pleasures in Paradise? Peretz knew only too well that meekness and self-abnegation were suicidal in an unconscionable world. Yet Peretz's love for the poor porter is as apparent as is his sympathy with the naive piety, artless mind, wholesomeness and simple power of the poor man.

Deductively, the moral and philosophical message is that man must protest against evil and against the forces that beget it. Man must plead for the victim. Poor Bontshe: he doesn't even know what to yearn for, how to dream of something good, something beautiful. But who is to blame for that? Is it mankind, which has humiliated him too long? God Who did not intervene soon enough? Whatever shame, it is not that of Bontshe's but of the other, all the others. "In that world your silence went unrewarded, but it is the world of life; here in the world of truth, you'll receive your reward," a pietistic statement if there ever was one.

Elie Wiesel, a contemporary expositor of the Holocaust, bemoaning complacency, writes in "Victims of God" "this timeless story also reflects the Jewish condition of today: the generation that is mine could have shouted so loud that it would have shaken tile world. Instead it but whispered, content with its buttered roll." (5)

Bontshe's silence, while it encourages Jewish readers to discover one way of viewing life within the context of traditional Jewish beliefs under even the worst circumstances, gives us pause for reflection.

The horror of the most heinous crime of the twentieth century resorts to muteness as a literary way of expressing the difficulty and near impossibility of saying anything meaningful about the Holocaust. Of course, something exists endemic to the nature of the event itself which defies expression. As the Holocaust ruptures the fabric of history and memory, emptying both narrative and life of meaning, at the heart of Holocaust fiction there lies a tension between the silence of the rupture and the narrative forces that attempt to bridge it. Muteness is the central "trope" functioning as an index of the trauma that both compels and disables testimony. The mute witness of Holocaust fiction stands both in and out of language.

Jerzy Kosinski, Primo Levi, and others utilize muteness as a narrative strategy to explore the struggle of the survivor/writer to devise a vocabulary that conveys atrocity. Fictional characters cease speaking as they negotiate crises in memory and credibility, giving testimony to the inadequacy of language.

In The Painted Bird (1981), Kosinski creates a mute unnamed boy to depict the experience of a self undone by unimaginable atrocity, told from the perspective of the undone self. The namelessness of the protagonist serves to intensify his aloneness, alienation from society, and his absolute vulnerability and pain. These endure as transmitted to the readership fifty plus years after the event. The boy's speechlessness defines a topography different from the muteness of the perpetrators. In limning the boy's speechlessness Kosinski works toward a "poetics of atrocity" (Wiesel's term).

The Painted Bird traces the desperate wanderings from village to village of a six-year-old Eastern European boy during World War II. His parents, fearing that he will be placed in a Nazi Concentration Camp with them, send him to live in the countryside of their native land. The peasants whom the boy encounters demonstrate an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy, and meaningless violence. A miller plucks out the eyeballs of his wife's would-be lover. A gang of hoodlums pushes the boy, a presumed gypsy or Jew, below the ice of a frozen pond. A farmer forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, barely out of the reach of a vicious dog. The boy drops a missal while he is helping serve Mass and is flung by irate parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging from the pit, he realizes that he has lost the power of speech. This loss of speech forms the structural and symbolic core of the novel. The loss is witness to the conditions that imposed it on its deeply scarred survivor. (6)

Even as the boy struggles to interpret meaning from his muteness, the narrator suggests that the foreclosure of speech also forecloses the possibility of finding meaning and interpretation. His muteness facilitates his function as scapegoat, blamed for society's repressed passions, ritually slaughtered to purge the guilty and restore them to innocence. His condition fortifies his relationship to the nameless victims of Nazi brutality, destroyed to perpetuate the racial "purity" of Germany.

Moreover, the restoration of speech and the moment of heating with which the novel doses do not neutralize the rupture symbolized by the muteness. They do not offer a promise of wholeness. All of the challenges expressed through the boy's prior muteness remain unanswered. The boy's sounds exhort the reader to pit himself against the absence of words to try to approximate the boy's truth and to envision its awesome implications. One is reminded of a saying current during the Third Reich: Lieber Cott, mach mich stumm, dos ich nicht nach Dachau kumm (Dear God, make me mute so I don't go to Dachau). (7) Thus, in The Painted Bird, speech used frequently as a political tool loses its power to communicate because the paradigms that signify the boy's universe have been totally shattered. It is not coincidence that muteness occurs after the boy's forced immersion in excrement.

Contemporary Israeli writers also provide us with examples of muteness, symbolic of the religious and spiritual categories. Shulamith HarEven, born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1931 arrived in Israel in 1940 at nine years of age. Educated at Hebrew University, HarEven received the Israeli Prime Minister's Creativity Award for City of Many Days, a novel about a young Sephardic Jew who grew to womanhood during the formative days of pre-state Israel. HarEven has translated stage plays into Hebrew for Habima and Ohel theaters. She has written a collection of children's verses and contributes to Israeli newspapers. She is politically active, but when critics try to read her political convictions into her Biblical novels, she vehemently protests. "Art is art and should not be confused with one's worldly occupation and interests."

The Miracle Hater, based on the book of Exodus and Prophet, based on the ninth chapter of Joshua, are but two of her Biblical novels. HarEven's persona asserts itself in these works. A common denominator is established with her audience. Israeli readers know the Bible intimately and respond to its retelling on multi-levels, the noncognoscenti are able to appreciate successful examples of history reworked and reinvigorated by fiction. (8)

The "land" of Israel though silent, given its present pressing turmoil then as now assumes gigantic proportions, heroic and antiheroic--and is the main character. All is played out in that place from the lonely ecology of the Sinai desert in The Miracle Hater to another kind of wandering in Prophet. HarEven's description of natural phenomena vibrates with a life of its own. She creates enormous emotion out of the desert through which the itinerant Hebrews must pass. To read of the enormity, profundity, and stillness of that sparse and sonorous panorama is to be at one with the silent power of the desert which overwhelmed the men, women, and children of the exodus. This immensity purified them of their prior existence as slaves without a creed into a free people unified under their own God and moral code. Similarly, the description of the grandiose cliffs, the setting for the performance by Moses of a miracle, leads the people to feel that some deity must surely dwell in that place, whether theirs or someone else's. That same wilderness as a place of refuge for solitude, peace, and truth is a theme that runs through Prophet. The pristine retreat and sparkling waters of the Jordan River Valley, located opposite the land of Moab, echo with the simple beauty of HarEven's craft.

Eshkar, the protagonist and the outcast of The Miracle Hater, after experiencing much disillusionment, is a restless wanderer in the desert. He is thwarted in love: his beloved Baita has been promised to another. He has had to endure the murder of his mother, Milka, at the hands of a cruel Canaanite. Seeking justice from the Council of Elders he is ridiculed, rebuffed, ignored, treated by silence and discharged to Moses's tent. There he encounters Joshua, who cannot be annoyed with such mundane matters. Joshua's sole response: "We work miracles, justice is not our concern." (9) Eshkar is a bitter man who wants nothing to do with God or his fellow nomads, whom he feels are kept "purblind and lost" by the "deception of miracles." He is unable to comprehend why if God existed, did He find it necessary to prolong the journey of the main body of Israelites until practically no one remained to see it completed; whereas he, Eshkar, had arrived there directly during one of the numerous times he had traversed the desert alone. The wilderness is the silent buffer between Eshkar and God and men who have no answers for him. The ever silent wilderness is at the very least a comfort to him.

Prophet, a stunning sparse novel, tells the story of Hivai, a seer from war-like Gibeon who is in search of a new God. This rewriting of the book of Joshua is set in the ancient landscape of the Judean hills. The strong Gibeonites are antagonists, invading the inept Israelites.

Hivai, a Gibeonite who once successfully foretold the future, now appears to have lost his prophetic skill. This apparent defect earns him the contempt of his fellows, especially when he is unable to predict what will happen when their city is besieged by roaming tribes.

   Unable to hear the muteness of the heavens any longer,
   Hivai seized a small child with his left hand, carved out his
   bowels with his right hand, and dumped the steaming
   mess in the street to scrutinize. Through the gaseous
   fumes he clearly made out the crenellated wall of Ai. (25)

Hivai cannot provide the people with the information they so desperately seek. Ai had fallen, and this becomes a math Hivai simply cannot speak. He stealthily departs from his city by night with four elders and joins the Hebrews as a "hearer of wood and a drawer of water." (10)

His relationship with the Hebrews is to him at once strange in their worship of an invisible intangible deity and wondrous in their religiously foreign concept of mercy and justice. The family with whom he is attached wants to know what kind of prophecies Hivai has foretold. He tells them about visions of drought, about the great plague. They say he is only a seer: a prophet is a man like Moses who gave the Law and led his people in the desert.

Hivai serves the Hebrew tribe for seven years but never becomes one of them; xenophobic attitudes mitigate against his acceptance. Disillusioned, he leaves after a trial in which he is acquitted of assaulting a Hebrew. He continues his search for a true prophecy, a new God, and a life in isolation. His subsequent adventures, his new ability to show kindness to strangers, his anger at the Amorites who destroyed Ai, stem from what he learned during his time with the Hebrews. Returning home, he discovers Gibeon's fate and indeed his own. Branded "big traitor," he was supposedly executed by the king along with other traitors. Hivai has no city, no people and no God. However, the Jordan River Valley offers Hivai a measure of place and peace.

There he finds a small boy of seven half-naked with a shepherd's pipe in his mouth. Hivai deduces that he has been stealing from his traps. As he grabs him by the throat, he sees that he has no tongue. Hivai assumes that it was cut out in one of the wars. Time passes before additional encounters. Hivai finds the boy ill and nurses him back to health only to have him disappear. At last the boy returns and they make a life together. Hivai names the boy Gosha after his own little brother who had been sacrificed before his eyes in the temple.

Gosha's muteness is not a compelling issue as he has a viable substitute. He uses the flute (an instrument used repeatedly in literature in the absence of speech) to communicate joy, sadness, excitement, greetings of welcome and farewell. What is paramount is that both outsiders have someone to relate to. No longer alone, though without his prophetic skills, Hivai finds redemption in connecting to another lost soul. The lad and the prophet pass their lives tending sheep and goats in silent harmony and solitude. "Perhaps next year, he told the boy Gosha, perhaps even this year, he would take the good reeds and make them both flutes." (11)

For a combination of silence as well as a demonstration of the lack of reaction and literal muteness, we turn to A.B. Yehoshua, Israeli novelist, short story and script writer, essayist, and dramatist's story "Facing the Forests." A sixth generation Jerusalemite, he is one of Israel's foremost contemporary fiction writers. His is the first generation to come of age after Israel was proclaimed an independent state in 1948. Yehoshua's fiction treats the concerns of this generation: the Arab-Israeli conflict, the danger of clinging to the Zionist dream without facing the reality of Palestinian demands, and the issues of the emigration from Israel of the younger generation and its loss of faith in the Zionist ideology which created Israel.

"Facing the Forests" has evoked much critical discussion for its controversial subject matter. The nameless narrator, a frustrated, disaffected Israeli graduate student, takes a job as a forest ranger. Ultimately, he acts as a silent accomplice, standing idly by, even rejoicing, as a mute Arab laborer bums down the forest that had displaced his village. The laborer, caretaker, housekeeper for the student, "takes a firebrand and rushes through the streets like an evil spirit." Critics have suggested a variety of interpretations for this story. From one point of view, the tale can be regarded as philosophically nihilistic. It speaks of obsessive responsibility (fire watching), of fatal and debilitating inadequacy (the failed scholar), of menace and hate (the fire in the eyes of the Arab, compensating for his muteness), the fire in the forest, the lack of a satisfying parent- son relationship (the silence of no communication), the scholar's inability to respond to a romantic situation. Nor is the link between the narrator and the Arab simplistic: through it runs a common madness and pain harking back to the Crusades when both Arab and Jew suffered at the hands of the Christian invaders. The story offers a commentary on humanity's tendency toward unmotivated evil and isolation. The nameless graduate student at once epitomizes contemporary futility, purposelessness and deracination. His world is a world of incompleteness. His character takes on all kinds of projects which he is incapable of seeing to an end: a thesis, a poem, a love affair. He is confirmed in his loneliness, because the instruments of communication seem so pathetically futile. The mute nameless Arab reinforces all of this. As the protagonists are estranged from society, seen as marginal curiosities, so does Yehoshua distance his readers from the story, rendering empathy hard to come by. Nonetheless, the namelessness of the student and the mute Arab opens space for something to happen. Happen it does. (12)

All of the literary works and the ideologies they exemplify are candidly simplistic in their telling. They nonetheless serve as witness to history, to the era in which they were written, even though the literary device of muteness/silence leaves the reader with a multitude of unanswered questions. This motif has been with us from earliest times and in many cultures. In some instances, the mute utilizes compensatory mechanisms for communication as in the Hasidic tales and Prophet. Unnamed protagonists in modern literature heighten the distance between the writer, the reader, and the characters, often times sending a subliminal message. Biblical selections run the gamut from a totally silent text to a spiritually induced legacy, to praise of a verbal disability, to the response concerning man's relationship to the Divine. The black silence of the boy in Kosinski deepens the malevolent brutality of the Holocaust in a way that words cannot do. Contemporary Israeli writers imitating the ancient texts have found enforced muteness/silence to be a powerful tool emphasizing both result and reaction to Israel's present-day problems. Muteness/silence leaves us wondering and thoughtful about the nature of speech, and the diversity of ways in which we communicate or cease to connect with one another. One is struck by how "the people of the word" have created characters though wordless aptly describing the completeness or incompleteness, the wholeness or brokenness of our world.

NOTES:

(1.) Parmet, Harriet, L. "Midrash and the Red Tent," Jewish ,Spectator Review of Books. Volume 65, No. 3, Winter 2001, 5.

(2.) Greenberg, Moshe, et al. translators. Tanakh: A New translation of the Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia; Jewish Publication Society, 1985.

(3.) Bubet, Martin. "The Little Whistle," Tales of the Hassidim: The Early Masters. New York: Schocken Books, 1964.

(4.) Peretz, I.L. "Bontche Shweig," Three Girls and Other Stories. New York: Book League Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order I.W.O., 1947.

(5.) Wiesel, Eli. "Victims of God," The New Republic. Vol 171, No. 12, September 21, 1974,76-7.

(6.) Kosinski, Jerzy. The Painted Bird. New York: Modern Library-Second Edition, 1983.

(7.) Parmet, Harriet L. The Terror of Our Days. Cranbury, NJ. Associated University Presses, 2001, 24, 25.

(8.) Parmet, Harriet L. "An Approach Toward the Inclusion of Women Writers in a Course on the Israeli Short Story," Feminist Teacher. Volume 7, No. 3, Fall 1993, 44.

(9.) Har Even, Shulamith. Prophet. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1990, 25.

(10.) Ibid. 98.

(11.) .... The Miracle Hater. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1988, 33.

(12.) Yehoshua, A.B. "Facing the Forests", in Alter, Robert, Modern Hebrew Literature.

HARRIET L. PARMET is professor emerita in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literature at Lehigh University where she taught Hebrew since 1976. She was co-founder of Lehigh University's Jewish Studies Program. Her specialty is Israeli literature and feminist approaches to all of Jewish literature as exemplified by the above article. Her work has appeared frequently in Midstream.

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Author:	Parmet, Harriet L.
Publication:	Midstream
Article Type:	Report
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Jun 22, 2010
Words:	4788
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Topics:	Hasidism Quietude Analysis Subjectivity Analysis