One Passage, Two Directions

Finding my voice after losing it

For the last three months I’ve been dealing with vocal strain. It’s one of those parts of the body you never notice until it stops working. I’d been the unthinking beneficiary of a reliable voice for decades, and now, suddenly, I have to think about it. Taking seriously the Talmud’s counsel that when something goes wrong a person should examine his ways, I’ve spent that time thinking hard about the human voice — what it is, and what we’re actually doing when we use it.

One of the great wonders of our physiology is the brilliant economy of space that allows some parts to perform more than one function at a time. The bones, for instance, provide the hard structure that enables us to stand and walk, but, remarkably, the interior of the bones also produce red blood cells. So too with your throat; it’s one passage with two directions. It can receive food, water, and medicine and deliver it to the proper place but it also generates the sound that allows for our most intimate and effective form of communication.

These two capacities appear in the Torah as a pair of brothers: Jacob and Esau. When Esau stumbles in from the field, famished, and sells his birthright for a bowl of stew, the word he uses is telling. “Let me gulp down some of that red red stuff,” he says — haliteni — a verb the tradition associates with force-feeding an animal, pouring food down a beast’s throat. He doesn’t ask; he doesn’t savor; he wants the world shoveled into him. Esau is the food-pipe: the throat as pure intake, the passage that only takes.

Jacob is the other throat. When he comes disguised before his blind father, Isaac feels the goatskin on his arms and hesitates: “the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” The hands may be borrowed, but the voice is unmistakably his own. Jacob is not the pipe that takes the world in; he is the pipe that sends something out — breath shaped into word, air turned into prayer and Torah and song. Where Esau’s throat pulls the material world inward, Jacob’s releases something finer than matter: the voice that is his and no one else’s. If Esau is the passage that only takes, Jacob is the passage that gives.

The Vilna Gaon points out that the word for voice itself, kol, can be spelled two ways, full (kuf, vav, lamed) or lacking (kuf, lamed). The shape of that variable letter, vav, is a straight line, reminiscent of the pipes we’re discussing. The idea is that we are called to be “full throated” — to express ourselves honestly, and all the way. A voice half-sounded, hedged, held back, is chaser, defective, and collapses into kal, light — and then the hands take over. Most people don’t lose their voice by being silenced; they lose it by never sounding it to completion — the chaser life, the withheld voice.

There is one more place the two pipes meet, and it is the strangest of all.

To make an animal fit to eat, Jewish law requires an act of precise severing. The two things the knife must cut are called the simanim — the signs — and they are exactly our two pipes: the kaneh, the windpipe, and the veshet, the food-pipe. For a mammal, both must be severed. For a bird — a lighter, more air-bound creature — one will do.

Sit with what that means. The act that makes taking a life permitted, that lifts eating out of raw appetite and turns it into something governed and holy, runs precisely through the food-pipe — the Esau-organ, the throat that only takes. You are never allowed to leave the taking-pipe alone. Consumption is not forbidden, but it is never left intact and unexamined; to be made fit, it must be cut through. And the more earthbound the creature — the more of the gullet and the ground in it — the more of the throat the act must address. The bird, half-made of air, needs less.

I don’t think the tradition is teaching anatomy. I think it is teaching what to do with a throat.

We are each a single passage running in two directions. One direction pulls the world in — food, noise, appetite, the endless red red stuff we ask to have poured into us. The other sends something out that exists nowhere else in creation: a voice that is ours and no one else’s, air turned to word. Both are ours. Neither can be wished away. But only one of them, sounded fully, is the thing we were given a throat to do.

I have spent three months unable to take my own voice for granted — reduced, some days, to the light and lacking version of it, the kol that has thinned into kal. I would not have chosen the lesson. But it has made me notice the pipe I’d used my whole life without once considering what it was for. And what it is for, I think, is not to be stuffed full. It is to be sounded — all the way.

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P.S. — I host a monthly open “Ask Anything” session online, where no question is off the table. The next one’s this week — come bring whatever you’ve been wondering about. Reserve your spot here.