The Sanctuary of Silence

The only words in the sanctuary ritual were ones "written" on the priestly garments and worn by Aaron when he serves in the mishkan.

Yehezkel Kaufmann (from The Religion of Israel, cited in Knohl Between Voice and Silence: The Relationship Between Prayer and Temple Cult)
The priestly temple is the kingdom of silence. In Egypt, Babylonia and in the pagan world in general, word and incantation were integral parts of the cult; act was accompanied by speech. The spell expressed the magical essence of cultic activity. In more developed form, pagan rituals might be accompanied by mythological allusions relating to events in the life of the gods. Speech thus articulated the magical-mythological sense of the rite.. P makes no reference to the spoken word in describing temple rites. All the various acts of the priest are performed in silence.... Not only have spells and psalms no place in the priestly cult, even prayer is absent. Priestly speech is found only outside the temple or apart from the essential cultic act...... This silence is an intuitive expression of the priestly desire to fashion a non-pagan cult. Though the detail of the priestly rites, magical in origin and essence, could not be done away with, the magical motivation made explicit in the accompanying utterances was eliminated. Therewith the Israelite cult became a domain of silence. The details of ritual lost their intrinsic meaning and became a vehicle expressive of human submission to the command of God. The silence of the temple cult served to heighten the awe of holiness.
The priestly cult in the temple of silence could not contain the abundance of popular religious sentiment. Around the silent sanctuary throbbed the joyous popular cult, all tumult and passion.

Dr. Israel Knohl (from Between Voice and Silence JBL 115/1)
The writings of this school contain no description of God, and the only action directly ascribed to God is that of speech and commanding. According to the viewpoint of this school, the relation between God and Israel, and the cultic structure that expresses this relationship, are completely separate from any anticipation of providence or divine recompense and are not rooted in a mutual covenantal system. The complex of cultic imperatives of the Priestly Torah does not contain even a single ceremony whose purpose is to infuse blessing and salvation or to directly ask for the fulfillment of any human request....
It seems to me that the holy silence of the priests becomes far clearer against the background of this religious outlook. In the absence of a relation-hip of providence or recompense between God and Israel, there is room neither for petitional prayer nor for hymns of thanksgiving. By its very nature, the language of prayer and hymn is permeated with anthropomorphic language concerning God. Neither is it consistent with the spiritual tendency of the priestly teaching, which tends to reject anthropomorphic and anthropopathic imagery. The refusal to ascribe any kind of characteristics or actions to God makes any positive speech concerning God impossible. Hence, the sole alternative open to one standing before the holy is absolute silence...may be seen from the combination of the testimony of the Priestly Torah and that of the non-Priestly strata, the Temple complex was constructed of a series of circles of voice and silence distinct from one another.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (from The Sound of Silence Covenant and Conversation - Bamidbar)
The service of the Priests in the Temple was accompanied by silence. The Levites sang in the courtyard, but the Priests – unlike their counterparts in other ancient religions – neither sang nor spoke while offering the sacrifices...
The Zohar (2a) speaks of silence as the medium in which both the Sanctuary above and the Sanctuary below are made.
There were also Jews who cultivated silence as a spiritual discipline. Bratslav Hassidim meditate in the fields. There are Jews who practise ta’anit dibbur, a “fast of words”. Our most profound prayer, the private saying of the Amidah, is called tefillah be-lachash, the “silent prayer”. It is based on the precedent of Hannah, praying for a child.
he silence that counts, in Judaism, is thus a listening silence – and listening is the supreme religious art. Listening means making space for others to speak and be heard. As I point out in my commentary to the Siddur,[5] there is no English word that remotely equals the Hebrew verb sh-m-a in its wide range of senses: to listen, to hear, to pay attention, to understand, to internalise and to respond in deed.
This was one of the key elements in the Sinai covenant, when the Israelites, having already said twice, “All that God says, we will do,” then said, “All that God says, we will do and we will hear [ve–nishma]” (Ex. 24:7). It is the nishma – listening, hearing, heeding, responding – that is the key religious act.
From time to time we need to step back from the noise and hubbub of the social world and create in our hearts the stillness of the desert where, within the silence, we can hear the kol demamah dakah, the still, small voice of God, telling us we are loved, we are heard, we are embraced by God’s everlasting arms, we are not alone.

Rabbi Josua Boettiger; The Center for Contemporary Mussar
If the Jewish people are truly a people of the word, then by definition we must also be a people who commit to understanding, practicing, and conditioning silence. Silence and speaking are mutually dependent. As we see in our larger societal context, if there is not a silence for our words to arise from, then there is only cacophony, words upon words, and a climate of out-shouting one another. The world we currently inhabit is an unfortunate example of this – words themselves have become debased, devalued, and utterly forgettable.
Ivan Illich, in an essay called, “The Eloquence of Silence,” writes that there are three types of silence. The first is the silence of pure listening. This is the silence of humility, of an authentic interest in the other – the lived practice of making the one across from us our teacher. It takes a special kind of Mussar alchemy to transform the stranger or even enemy into our teacher, ... – not just to re-humanize the other, but to learn from them.
Illich’s second kind of silence is the silence that precedes words, the silence that is a preparation for speech; a considering of what ought to be said, and how. Perhaps at the heart of this type of silence is a sense that we shouldn’t rush to speak. Aviva Zornberg brings a teaching that at our Seders, we are largely silent until the matzah unlocks our throats, and allows a speech that surprises even the speaker, a speech from the unconscious depths. If the first kind of silence primes us to hear the other, this second kind of silence primes us to hear an unrehearsed part of ourselves not used to speaking. It allows something ancient to pass through us.
Illich’s third type of silence – “the silence of love beyond words” – is, God willing, where we are left once we say “L’shanah haba’ah b’yerushalayim” and our Seders end. We look around the table, and beyond the table, and experience such a shtika/silence echoing.

Silence BY BILLY COLLINS
There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.
The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.
The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.
The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.
And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night
like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.