The Weight of Silence

There’s a strange kind of weight that silence carries. Not the absence of sound but a presence—a heaviness that presses down on the edges of the night. It seeps into everything: your thoughts, the spaces between what’s spoken and what’s buried deep inside. Silence is not empty. No, it’s full of what we spend all day trying not to feel. I remember a girl from Be’er Sheva. She must have been about twelve. I don’t know her face clearly, but I imagine her eyes were too large for her petite frame like all children’s eyes are when they’re forced to understand things too big for them. She spoke once, during a class, about other children. Children far away, children whose suffering was like a distant echo, something heard but never entirely understood. She didn’t cry for herself; she cried for them. And it made people uncomfortable.

What she said wasn’t well received. It seems that empathy has become something suspicious nowadays, like an unwelcome guest at the table. Compassion—how did we manage to make it feel like treason? Her words were met with heavy, oppressive silence that didn’t need to shout to make itself heard. It’s a silence that pushes you down, like a hand covering your mouth. They sent her home after that. October 2023, I think it was. The day she learned that caring too much can make you a target. Since when did feeling become dangerous? Since when did we start building walls so high that we can’t even hear what’s happening on the other side? These questions creep in when the silence is too heavy, when it hangs in the air like a fog, blurring the lines between what’s real and what we wish wasn’t. Empathy, of course, doesn’t respect walls. It finds its way through the tiniest cracks, insisting on reminding us of things we’d rather forget. And lately, it’s reminded me of that girl, her too-large eyes, and her too-small voice. It reminds me that once abundant compassion is slipping away like sand through our fingers.

People talk about survival and protecting themselves as if those things can’t coexist with caring for others. But survival at what cost? If we lose our ability to feel for others, what exactly are we surviving for? The walls we build aren’t just physical. They’re inside us, too. They make it easier not to see, not to feel. It’s like we’re afraid that the pain of others will somehow infect us. That their suffering will spread like a disease. But the actual sickness is the one that comes from closing ourselves off, brick by brick until we can’t feel anything at all. I wish I could go back and tell that girl she was right. That caring wasn’t wrong. That compassion isn’t a weakness. I’d tell her that someone else opens a window whenever someone shuts a door. And through that window, a bit of fresh air gets in. That’s where the strength is—not in building walls but opening a crack. Enough to let in a breeze, enough to remind us that the world outside is still there.

We can keep building, I suppose. Keep adding bricks to the walls we hide behind. But what’s the point? The real danger isn’t on the other side of the wall. It’s inside where we’ve forgotten what it means to be human. We’ve convinced ourselves that strength means not feeling, that survival means shutting down. But that’s not survival—it’s just another form of dying. So, when the silence settles in at night, and the weight of it becomes too much, I wonder—can we still feel? Or have we built so many walls inside and out that we’ve forgotten what it means to live? I ask myself this because I know our fight is not with the people beyond the borders. It never really has been. Our real struggle is with the walls inside us, the ones that make it easier to see enemies in those who are just as human as we are. It’s simple to believe the enemy is over there, across some invisible line. But the true enemy might be right here, within us—the fear of feeling and caring. Compassion doesn’t make us weak. It’s what makes us strong. And it’s something we cannot afford to lose.