"Every year, just before Yom Kippur, I make a concerted effort to speak out the shadowy contents of my heart to another human being. I usually find myself speaking of things I have thought of a thousand times before — of my anger, of my obstinacy, of my refusal to give up the grudges I hold against people. I know these things as well as I know the back of my own hand. I have thought these thoughts a thousand times before. Still, to get them out makes a tremendous difference. I know them, but as long as they are unspoken, I can ignore them. I don't have to act on them. Now that I have said them out loud to another human being, they are out there in the world. It would be much harder to ignore them anymore; harder to deny them; harder to act in a way that failed to take them into account. . . . 

"Speech is one of our distinctive human attributes. It is through speech that we make the inner, outer; that we bring the metaphysical into the physical ; that we make real the purely intellectual. It is through speech that action begins. Every time I speak, it is the result of something metaphysical arising in my soul as an idea or a spiritual impulse. It becomes speech in my mouth and then goes out into the air of the room as a wave — a part of the world of Asiyah, the physical world. Then it enters someone else's ear and then their mind, where it is transformed into something metaphysical again. All this is a truly miraculous transaction and a decisively human power. And think of how intimately it joins us to those to whom we are speaking. Think of the intimate access it gives us to their inner lives and vice versa."