The great writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, “Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.”

The silent Amidah is the longest intentional period of silence we ever experience. It is, at its best, an audience before G-d.

And then it ends. Now what?

Step one, or actually, step two: we speak. Sooner or later, we will speak. So because of step two, we should have step one: We think about how we are going to speak.

Can we improve the silence?

Not if we are doing lashon hara, inappropriate speech. How prevalent is inappropriate speech? Well, the Chofetz Chayim (Rabbi Yisroel Meir Hacohen) wrote a four volume, 1674 page, book about it. Simply put, it’s a lot harder to speak well than it is to speak poorly.

Improving on silence ain’t easy.

And it gets worse. Because not only do I have to control my own speech. At the same time, I recognize that I am the subject of other people’s uncontrolled speech. And there’s not a lot I can do about that. What goes around comes around. Just as I have the ability to slander, I have the vulnerability of being slandered.

So the prayer continues, “And to those who demean me, let my soul remain quiet.” Leaving the Amidah puts me back into the world where people speak. But the experience of the Amidah, the lived silence before the Master of the Universe, leaves a place of quietude and balance inside me, a place where my soul can take refuge from “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

And from there, I can take the next great step, the one that really prepares me for a return to the “post-Amidah” world—humility. My teacher Alan Morinis taught that Rabbi Bachya ibn Pekuda, one of the early masters of mussar, the Jewish ethical tradition, wrote: “All virtues and duties are dependent on humility.” And the Talmud underscored this point: “One who sacrifices a whole offering shall be rewarded for a whole offering. One who offers a burnt-offering shall have the reward of a burnt-offering. But one who offers humility to G-d and man shall be rewarded with a reward as if he had offered all the sacrifices in the world. As it is written, ‘A contrite and humbled spirit is a sacrifice to G-d. G-d does not ignore a broken heart.’” (Sanhedrin 43b)

All Amidah prayers are a reflection of, and to some extent, a substitute for, sacrifices that were performed in the Temple. So it is fitting that the Amidah concludes with subtle reference to the one sacrifice we still can bring—a broken heart.