emunah, tefillah, a little mussar, and a shmeck of geula

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

So Why Are You Mumbling?



Do you mumble when you have important requests to make such as pass the salt or what time is it? Or how about where are my glasses or car keys? Who would think of not making one’s self clearly heard at such crucial times?

And so it goes for all of our attempted communications, for attempted is the best we can do because there is no guarantee that those that we are addressing will hear us or even understand us if they do.

But it’s not for lack of trying, because most of us are as loud as civilly tolerable even if we don’t always hit the high note of articulation.

The fact is that mumbling and communication are antithetical, so aside from two carved in stone exceptions, we make sure to open our mouths when we have something to say.

The first of these exceptions is when we verbalize (mumble) some distasteful comments under our breath which are often akin to curses.  Not nice perhaps but perfectly logical nonetheless.  After all, aside from extreme situations, who wants to be heard cursing or running down his neighbor?

The problem is that we give Hashem the same treatment, because for some strange reason we tend to mumble our brochos even more quietly than our imprecations. 

But truth be told, it’s really ourselves who are on the dead end of our brochos, for while Hashem, by way of the Halacha, may require that they should be made at the appropriate times, He doesn’t need to hear them.

But we do.

And if we said them loud enough to actually hear them and ponder their meaning for a nano second or two, we would be living in a different world.  We would be in a world in which fruit comes from the trees and bread comes from the ground instead of the super market.  And in such a world, we would understand that tragedies are guided by a Truthful Judge as opposed to just happening. 

But we don’t hear them because we mumble them to such an extent that they’re barely audible.

And it’s not for nothing that we carry on this way.  For those with eyes to see, the Satan’s tracks are all over the place and with good reason too, because he well understands that each brocha that is heard and internalized is an affirmation of Emunah.

And that’s the last the thing that the Satan wants to hear.

So he makes sure that we don’t hear it either by inducing us to mumble our brochos so that their decibel level will mirror the silence of the dead.