{"id":58121,"date":"2017-07-24T06:06:58","date_gmt":"2017-07-24T11:06:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/?p=58121"},"modified":"2017-07-24T06:06:58","modified_gmt":"2017-07-24T11:06:58","slug":"the-sound-of-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/the-sound-of-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sound of Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Scientifically speaking, sound is a vibration that travels through the air and is received by our ears. At some frequencies, the sounds can\u2019t be heard, at some, they can.\u00a0 It is generally produced when objects vibrate or move, or when two or more objects come into contact with each other. This vibration\/movement creates sound waves, which use particles in the air to travel. (Which is why there is no sound in space. It\u2019s a vacuum without air to travel through.)<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>These sound waves can be absorbed by soft objects like pillows (which is why recording booths have padded walls and microphones- to absorb ambient sound. The can also be interrupted, stopped by thins like walls, doors, even other sound waves. The more things there are in a room, especially soft, fluffy things, the harder it is to hear sounds, like people talking. Did you ever wonder why it can be easier to hear people in completely empty rooms? Why sound sometimes sound muffled in rooms with carpeting vs. hardwood or tiled floors? Why it\u2019s so much harder to hear someone when someone else is talking?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\u00a0 \u201cOkay,\u201d You say. \u201cThis is quite the science lesson, but what does this have to do with me?\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Well, what if I told you that we were all in a room with Hashem?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>When a teacher is trying to get the attention of a particularly rowdy class, they sometimes drop a textbook on the floor in the hopes that the bang will quiet the students, right? Well that\u2019s what Hashem is doing. Except He\u2019s not using a textbook, no\u2026 he\u2019s using an entire table. He\u2019s dropping that table from so high that the resulting \u201cBOOM!\u201d should burst anyone\u2019s eardrums. He\u2019s yelling for us to notice Him, He\u2019s screaming for our attention with every beat of our hearts, with every pulse of blood in our veins, with every chirp from the birds outside, with every click and clack of the keys on your keyboard, with every footstep slapping against the pavement, He is telling you \u201cLook! Here I am! I am right here!\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Except most of the time, we refuse to hear Him. We\u2019re like little kids getting news we don\u2019t like, sticking our fingers in our ears and singing nothingness at the tops of our lungs so that we can\u2019t hear Him. And our rooms, they aren\u2019t just full. They are stuffed to bursting with books and clothes and distractions. They are brimming with objects, phones, computers, television, and all those things that society, that we ourselves, put in there to try and distract us from His calls, and we let them. We let ourselves stop hearing Him because we are so scared of what we might hear if we let ourselves listen.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>But what do you think would happen if for just a minute, we cleared out the room? What if we ripped up the carpet from the floor and threw everything out and stopped screaming over Him and took our fingers out of our ears? Can you imagine if for just one second we were quiet?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Now, all of this isn\u2019t to say that technology is the bane of existence. Technology can be a great thing, if we used it right. Objects can muffle the noise, certainly, but they can also amplify it. What if we took our phones and our computers and instead of letting them be pillows and walls noise-cancelling headphones, we turned them into microphones and speakers, and turned the transmitters in His direction? What if we used the things put in our rooms to distract us into means to hear Him more clearly? Things like phones and computers, they are marvelous technological advancements that have so improved our standards of living. Often, yes, they are used as distractions, but we could use them to do so many special things. We have access to a system of communications that can allow us to contact Rabbis about\u00a0<i>halachik<\/i>\u00a0questions and talk to family hundreds of miles away. We can look up the appropriate blessings for hearing thunder and passages of\u00a0<i>tehillim<\/i>\u00a0while we\u2019re on the go. We can listen to podcasts by the greatest minds of our generation, and generations previous. What if we let our screens be the exact things that lets us get closer to Hashem, instead of being the ones that we put up to block Him out?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>What if for just one second, we held our breaths, we stopped screaming, we turned the volume on high and we just listened?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>What if we all just listened?<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientifically speaking, sound is a vibration that travels through the air and is received by our ears. At some frequencies, the sounds can\u2019t be heard, at some, they can.\u00a0 It is generally produced when objects vibrate or move, or when two or more objects come into contact with each other. This vibration\/movement creates sound waves,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133458,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Sound of Silence - OU Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/inspiration\/the-sound-of-silence\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Sound of Silence - OU Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Scientifically speaking, sound is a vibration that travels through the air and is received by our ears. At some frequencies, the sounds can\u2019t be heard, at some, they can.\u00a0 It is generally produced when objects vibrate or move, or when two or more objects come into contact with each other. 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