The Still Small Voice

The still small voice, the chilling echo that can only be heard in the subsiding (tzimtzum) of voice, is the locus in which we come to realize that the nothing is not nothing. The still small voice is the voice of conscience in us, as well as in the divine. And it is also the voice of history, which can be heard whining beneath the piles of destruction. The still small voice is the sound of the nothing nothinging. It is the disturbing sound of the silence which hopes to be left undisturbed. Traditionally, people have attributed the power to tear down walls and to awaken souls to the blast of the shofar. But really, the alarm clock of the universe, the idol-smashing instrument of the divine is not the ram’s horn, an arbitrary and only figurative ritual object, but the still small voice that hovers in the suspension of the tekiah gedolah. The still small voice is the only voice of God. Everything that was uttered at Sinai was only preliminary, symbolic, like the ram’s horn. The real reason God spoke at Sinai was so that people could hear the reverberation of His voice when he ceased speaking.