David Wolpe: The Secret and the Mystery
On the signal in silence and the static of noise.
Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific idea.
Today, Rabbi David Wolpe: officially, he is the author of a number of compelling, learned, and wise books on Judaism and faith; was once named The Most Influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek and one of the 50 Most Influential Jews in the World; and he’s debated (compellingly) everyone from Christopher Hitchens to Sam Harris to Richard Dawkins.
To me personally, he was the still small voice of faith that reached me even in the midst of my youthful infatuation with the New Atheists, and he is the writer who’s brought me the most peace and clarity about my own sense of faith.
I once lived in an apartment in Mexico that looked down across Guanajuato City. From there, I could smell wood smoke, incense, lime, street food (spicy tamales or elote, depending on the direction of the breeze), and various garden scents of herbs and flowers. At the same time, which was always, I could hear everything — cars driving, horns honking, children playing, neighbours talking, Spanish everywhere, the buzz of orange wasps zipping in and out of the window, music, water running somewhere, birds on the roof, and the unending cacophony of dogs. There was a dog that slept outside our bedroom window in the day and barked his heart out at night.
However much I thrilled at the vibrancy of life around me, there was also that dog barking and the noise and chaos it represented. So, before the day bloomed into its bright, loud, busy fullness, I would get up early to cut a slice out of the world just for myself. It was brief and tenuous and holy. I’d put on three layers, because even Mexico at sunrise and in the shade could be cold. I’d make a mug of coffee and take it, with my notebook, out of the apartment I rented and down a narrow set of stone stairs, into the coolness and quiet of the small garden below.
To say there was no sound or distraction here would be true only in relative terms — if New York is the city that never sleeps, Guanajuato is the city that never stops talking — but I always felt calm here at this early hour. I felt as though this square of dewy grass and the table in the shade of a lemon tree was something I wanted to keep hidden for myself. In the opening pages of Why Be Jewish? Rabbi David Wolpe captures this serenity when he writes, about his own Eden on a quiet porch in Jerusalem, “I felt as though the sun, the city, and I were secret companions.”
I’ve revisited those first pages of Wolpe’s book many times. They make up a short section titled “The Secret and the Mystery”, which I want to look more closely at here. Wolpe describes the porch in Jerusalem where he used to sit before the sun had risen, while the city was still, in which the “moment was exquisitely quiet.” The silence, of course, cannot last:
“As the light stretched through the streets, striking windows and rooftops and doors, it began to coax people from their homes. Cars pulled onto the streets, and the sounds of the city, harsh and insistent, made the rose-glow silence of an hour before seem like a dream.”
However, the loudness of the world cannot obliterate the stillness of the morning, nor drown out the still small voice of that sacred solitude:
“Yet the silence and the stones and the soft gleam of the sun were real, and indeed they still lay beneath the bustle of the city. I had seen them; I had been there. They left a gentle mark on my memory.”
In the bustle of the day and the hustle of my work, the memory of such simple, plain beauty remains like an afterglow burned into my eyes: it sits within the vision of the present moment, largely ignorable yet reclaimable if I just turn my attention back to seeing it. What distinguishes these moments of serenity is that they feel like a reprieve of the accumulating burden of things that matter far less but demand much more of me. I’m worrying about an unpaid bill, attempting to organise my week, regretting a sharp retort or a lapse in memory, and then I recall — as if by some act of grace — how I felt this morning while I read a novel in the sun before my street had woken up.
I realise also, again and again, that I can do the same tomorrow, or that when I finish this awful meeting, my wife will still be my wife and she and I will eat dinner together and home will still be the haven it always has been. The kaleidoscope of life resolves into a unified image, and it isn’t only that it’s beautiful and soothing — it also feels true. Truer, somehow, than the bills and the meetings and the hundred or so transgressions of the self that the world demands of me every day. Perhaps my subconscious is a kind of Neoplatonist: it believes the numinous speaks more authentically than the booming din of the mundane.
Given this, the goal of my mind seems to be consistently bringing itself back to that simplicity and peace. As Wolpe puts it:
“The question for me that day — and in a different form every day — is whether I can retain that moment of magic as I go about my work, when the sun is bright, the stones are bleached from the heat of the day, and all the harsh sounds of the city surround me.”
A question that might rise up to greet us here, reasonably enough, is what precisely it is that we’re trying to hold onto during the day? What is the magic in those quiet moments that we lose when the world drowns it out?
What We Lose in the Noise & Find in the Silence
“Inside each of us is a secret searching for a mystery. The secret we carry is uniquely our own. We can share it with others, but we never lose it, like the candle whose light kindles a new flame without being itself diminished.”1
This is the idea with which Rabbi Wolpe opens this short section from his book. That secret is the human soul, unique and individual yet common to us all. “Out of the billions who live, who have lived, no one has shared exactly our secret; no one will ever be as close to it or understand it as we do.” And, in addition to the secret of our souls, there is a mystery:
“The mystery is what to do with our secret. When we are young, the secret seems both wonderful and trivial; we play at it, expand it, and dream that it will one day matter. But it is only as we grow older that we are captured by the force of the mystery: for the secret is the soul, and the mystery is how to tend it and help it grow.”
If the task is to cultivate our souls like flowers in a garden, then quietude is the sunshine in which the soul flourishes. And it’s in silence that we can listen most attentively to the urgent messages of the soul, the reports on the state of the self from the centre of what matters. When we listen carefully to it, we thrive; when we ignore or drown it out, we become disconnected from a true sense of self. “That early-morning moment,” Wolpe tells us, “represents for me the time when I can hear the notes of my soul and feel its connection to its Source.” If only the whole day could be as spiritually rewarding as the morning, but “the world is not all dawns and evenings, and it will not keep quiet so that we can hear the rustling inside”:
“The world blares at us. Each morning as we arise we hear the screech of the headlines, demanding our attention. This is what you must hear, think, give yourself to right now. Tomorrow the issue will be different, but it is never less than urgent, never less than loud. The melody of the self, a strain so thin and delicate, has little chance to be heard. Listening takes time and silence, and in the frantic noise we lose attunement.”
Of course, silence is an easy thing to covet, noise a difficult thing to avoid. Unless we take an extreme route out of the world like monks and ascetics, we will inevitably face the discordance of daily life. Schopenhauer believed that the level of noise one could tolerate was inverse to one’s intellect. This misleadingly broad idea strikes me as a bit of self-justification on the part of the irritable philosopher. It also seems philosophically and spiritually naive, and a concession to the very world it claims to reject. Refusing to play the game is just another way of letting the other side win.
This, then, is the challenge — to nurture a soul in the midst of struggle. “A soul is both a hearty and a fragile thing,” Wolpe writes. “The mystery is to find a way to live in a frantic and fast-paced world that does not do violence to our conscience, that does not stunt our souls.”
We Need More Chairs
What can’t be ignored — and I don’t intend to hide it from you, dear reader — is that, for David Wolpe, the solution to being unable to hear the music of one’s soul is Judaism. That’s the whole point of his book, which, don’t forget, is called Why Be Jewish? “Judaism,” he writes, “is a life system that encourages spiritual awareness and moral passion.” In his estimation (and, frankly, his book did much to convince me of this), his faith is “the mystery that the secret searches for”.
I’ve not made much of this here because I think there’s plenty of wisdom to be found in Wolpe’s writing that any secular humanist can learn from. There is, however, one key phrase he uses to describe Judaism and thereby answer the question of what we find in silence and often lose in noise: the reason, he says, that Judaism helps him “to keep the Jerusalem dawn as the day moves on” is because it “teaches souls to grow by paying attention to more than themselves alone”:
“The world is the stage of all drama. To be healthy, a soul has to care about other things and other souls beside itself and its source. If all we attend to is our own cultivation, we are listening not to the call of the soul but the tyranny of the ego.”
This is why it isn’t enough to simply retreat from the world and “ignore the clatter of the street” — because “isolation is at best a temporary solution”. That silence and solitude, then, is like fasting: it’s periodically useful, even necessary if your spiritual health is suffering from a glut of things that don’t nourish it, but it can’t be maintained long-term. Instead, the trick is to find a sustainably healthy diet. In terms of the soul, that means meaningful work, contributing to a community, finding purpose in service, and, of course, a close group of true friends. For me — a writer who can spend days alone in my study, reading and writing and thinking quietly — this doesn’t always come easily. I have to be reminded to go out of myself and into the world.
In Paris, I once stayed in a room above what was a bistro by day and a nightclub during those hours I hoped to sleep, and the bass thump of music and the voices beneath my window and the raising and clinking of glasses of wine were, I believed then, nuisances. I realise now I should have taken them as invitations to step out of myself, to join the party, to live life with others. On the roof of a restaurant overlooking Prague, I had dinner with friends I’d just made, a gathering that grew and, in doing so, expanded my experience with each new person. As Anaïs Nin once wrote, “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
The truth is that my relationship with noise and socialising would be described in the digital age with the phrase “it’s complicated”. The pull of solitude resists the push of loneliness. This struggle isn’t unique to me. The writer Colette once lauded solitude as “a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom”, yet cautioned that there are days when solitude “is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall”.
Henry Thoreau sought out his own company in the woods, where he wrote that he found it “wholesome to be alone”, adding that he “never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude”. But even he, seeking the simplicity of a quiet life, kept three chairs in his hideaway cabin: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society”. However much we might enjoy the solitary seat, we will need, eventually, the extra chairs.
NB ~ A few paragraphs in this essay were refashioned out of some material I cut from a previous piece before publication. That deleted material was briefly available in the Bonus section, but I was glad to find a true home for it here. So if something seems familiar, that’s why.
Later in the book, Wolpe writes, “We do not always need to be filled up inside in order to give; sometimes it is in the act of giving that we are filled up. Spirit contradicts the laws of physics: in being expended, it grows greater.”