The Sound of Silence

As a child, this song soaked so deeply into my DNA, through my little am/fm radio.  It’s part of the soundtrack my generation was infused with, saturating my cells, and fusing with my soul.

It came to me this February morning in 2025, this day when I’m all too grown up.  The sound of silence.  And all these layers of the lyrics, terrible layers, layers I never completely and clearly understood, experienced, felt and knew like I do now, hit me.  And all I can do is cry.  Because since October 7th, and the world’s reaction to it, I understand the terribleness of the sound of silence, the sounds of silence, the sound of chanting, the sound of invisibility.  “People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening, people writing songs that voices never share, no one dared, disturb the sound of silence.”

And I know I’ll never be the same.  I’m not the child who first heard this beautiful, haunting, poetic song.  I felt and understood how deep it is but I didn’t know.  All the layers, all the truths, some of which are terrible, you have to know for those chords to be fully audible.  And now I do know and I mean really know, which you can’t get from history, even very well communicated and expressed history, you can only *know* when it happens in your time.

And even before October 7th, I was starting to really know.  Then October 7th came, and everything I had started to learn before it crystalized, and became exquisitely clear.  So crystal clear.  And people, communities, and places I thought were mine and were safe and were home and knew me, are not, were not, and did not, and probably never were and never did.  And the chanting got louder and deafening, but so too did the silence.  And then the silence grew and grew, even after the loudest chanting, at least temporarily, had subsided.  The silence just keeps growing, and getting more and more deafening.  It reached a crescendo in the last couple of weeks.  And this morning, this beloved song from my childhood came to my mind from my soul and heart.  The lyrics, the music, all so intimately familiar, hit me like a crushing tidal wave in terrible new ways and intensity, and held me under.  There is no air in this totally enveloping, powerful wave.  I cry yet make no sound, into the terrible, terrible silence.

Click here to listen to the song "The Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel