Throughout this past year, I stopped praying.

There was no dramatic crisis of faith or moment when I decided I no longer believed. Instead, prayer became inaccessible, as if a door I had walked through had quietly closed. I talked about it with friends and classmates. As a rabbinical student, I felt embarrassed. I wasn’t angry with God. I wasn’t rejecting prayer. I simply couldn’t find the words. I tried to force them.

Every night, I told myself I would at least say the Shema. Some nights I did. Many nights I didn’t. Yet every morning, without fail, Modeh Ani found its way to my lips. Before I could think, before I could question, gratitude somehow emerged even when nothing else would.

I spent months wondering what had happened. Was I spiritually numb? Was I failing? Had I stopped caring?

Then came the diagnosis.

Cancer had been growing inside me during the very months I felt spiritually empty. The diagnosis did not answer my questions, but it changed them. I had spent a year believing I had stopped talking to God. Afterwards, I began to wonder if something else had been happening. Maybe the silence I experienced wasn’t an absence of God. Maybe it was the quiet language of a body calling for my attention.

Parshat Ha’azinu begins with an unexpected imperative: “Give ear… Listen.”

Moshe speaks these words at the end of his life. He knows he will not enter the Land with the people he has led for forty years. He cannot accompany them into what comes next. He cannot protect them from every mistake or spare them from suffering. Instead, he offers them a final teaching and asks them to listen.

There is something poignant about this moment. Moshe is preparing to leave, but he is also preparing his words to remain. He cannot control what the Israelites will do once he is gone. The only thing he can ask is that they listen closely enough to carry his words with them when he is gone.

The Hebrew itself is instructive. Ha’azinu is not simply “hear.” It carries the sense of inclining one’s ear, of giving careful attention. It not only asks, “Can you listen?” but, “What are you listening to?” That question has become my own Ha’azinu.

When I look back after my diagnosis, I realize I had been asking the wrong question. I had been asking, “why can’t I pray?” I was measuring my relationship with God by the words I could or could not produce. I should have been asking, “what should I listen for?”

I do not believe my cancer is God speaking to me, nor do I believe my inability to pray was a punishment or a test. But I do wonder whether, while I believed I had become disconnected from God, I had actually become disconnected from myself. My body was carrying an illness I did not yet know was there. My soul could not find words, but it had not stopped listening.

And perhaps there is something else in the prayers themselves that I missed.

Every night, I tried to make myself say Shema. “Hear, O Israel….”—the prayer itself begins with listening. Yet I struggled to say it.

And every morning, Modeh Ani remained.

I did not have to force those words. They were simply there: I give thanks. Even when I could not articulate what I believed, something in me still expressed gratitude for awakening to a new day.

I don’t know exactly what to make of that. But I wonder whether prayer was not entirely absent during that year. Perhaps I had been looking for prayer in the words I could consciously choose, while something quieter continued to speak through me.

We tie religious practice to speaking: prayer, confession, praise, petition. We teach ourselves what words to say and when to say them. We worry about saying the right words, finding the right intention, creating the right relationship with God through speech.

But what happens when you cannot speak?

I had thought silence meant indifference. If I wasn’t praying, then I didn’t care. If I had no words, I had nothing to offer. I think about silence differently now. It is not necessarily indifference or absence. Silence can be full.

It can hold fear, grief, exhaustion, uncertainty, and hope. It can hold questions that are not yet ready to become words. It can become the place where truth lives when words are unable to express it.

This is what Ha’azinu asks of us. Listening is not passive. To incline one’s ear is to pay attention. It is to make room for something we might otherwise miss.

For me, that means listening differently now. Listening to my body. Listening to my heart. Listening to the people who sat with me when I could not find the words to pray. Listening to the prayers that somehow remained, even when I thought prayer itself had disappeared.
And perhaps listening to God, not for an explanation, or an answer, but simply for God’s presence.

As Moshe’s final words echo across generations, he reminds us that faith does not begin with certainty, but with listening.

I am slowly finding my way back to prayer. I still don’t know why I stopped praying when I did, or what exactly happened in that silence. I don’t know whether I was being asked to hear something or simply moving through a season I could not yet understand.

But I no longer think that having no words means having nothing to say. I understand now that sometimes the first act of faith is not speaking at all but inclining our ear and asking: What have I not yet heard?