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I’m sitting at a wedding dinner, the person next to me is animated. Her hands are gesticulating and her lips are moving rapidly. All the physical signs indicate that she is telling me something amusing but I can’t hear a word she is saying. The background music is so loud that it literally drowns out the conversation. I nod politely, I raise my eyebrows at what I guess is the punchline, but I have miscalculated. Fortunately she appears not to notice. Unfortunately the charade continues, for most of the evening. This is not an isolated incident. Wordless noise is all around us. Ubiquitous music plays incessantly in cafes, bars, restaurants and public spaces. Sometimes it is so loud that it drowns out one’s capacity to think or have a simple conversation. Shakespeare would have described this relentless noise as: “Sound and fury signifying nothing” And as if to mirror this sound without words, we also increasingly inhabit a world of words without sound. It seems that everybody is talking. Ours is a world of extensive political campaigns, endless news cycles, incessant analysis, commentary and spin. All of which is only exacerbated on social media. We are so overwhelmed by words that we are incapable of hearing the human voice behind these words, much less the concerns, hopes and fears of the other. Instead of words bringing us closer to each other, they pull us further apart. Simon and Garfunkel were critiquing the culture of 1960’s when they described a society of those who talk without speaking and speak without listening but the lyrics in Sound of Silence ring as true, if not truer, today. The great 13th century Jewish mystical text, the Zohar, represents our world of boundaries, dimensions and physical objects as a world of “words” while imagining the boundless divine energy that animates it as a “voice.” In a perfect world these two components – voice and words - are in sync and complement each other, enabling the divine subject to find expression in a world of objects. But the Zohar sees our world as imperfect and broken. Ours is a ruptured world in which the divine voice lacks the language to give it expression, and our reductive materialism leaves us with a world of empty objects or hollow words. Our task, says the Zohar, is to repair this breach by relearning the lost art of conversation that attunes us to the sacred in our world and in each other.