God's Excessive Silence Poem by gershon hepner

Excessive, our own speaking power counters
God’s excessive silence that we deafen
colloquially with our earthbound encounters
with Him on earth, although He lives in heaven.

We’re living in a universe we think
that He created for us to engage
His silence, which perhaps should make us shrink
our egos while performing on His stage.

Jonathan Boyarin in “Jewishness and the Human Dimension” (New York: Fordham,2008) , writes (p.21) :

What can “meaning through absence” mean? Here is a relatively straightforward illustration.: Stephen Hawking hypothetically suppose “universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty, ” but immediately follows with the insight that if they are really universes—that is, if they are truly “separate from each other” (which means, separate from our universe and the consciousness it contains) –– they cannot really “be said to exist.” In those universes, God might be said to exercise “the excessive power of silence “ that the Egyptian-French Jewish poet Edmond Jabès counterposes, in his Le Livre de L’Hospitalité, to the human possession of “the excessive power of speech.”

10/12/09