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Our Daf is concerned with the Temple Crier gavini who could be heard 3 parssangs (8miles) from the Temple. The mishna (Tamid) speaks of 6 sounds that could also be heard that far emanating from the Temple. Even Agrippa was so enamored he sent him gifts! To which Rabbi Levi comments on a verse from Daniel to prove why sound carries less by day than by night.
Leading us to examine the "Luxembourg effect" as well as a recent contemporary exhibit on sound and silence.
While studying this daf, the memories of Simon and Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence" inexplicably haunted me, as I followed the horrific news of the tragedy in Meron.
In the iconic lyric: Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again. The author has no one to talk to but the dark, to whom he tells, almost like a confession, about a dream he had. The first theme of the ‘vision’ is loneliness: the narrator finds himself walking alone on a narrow path, when the cold night is suddenly lit up by the flash of a neon light; he is dazzled by it, and we are told that the glare is icy, naked and unnatural. The neon conveys an idea of cold modernity, serving as a symbol for present-day industrial society, which has replaced the traditional warmth of the fireplace, bearer of communion and togetherness, with the impersonality of artificial light.