My zayde loves dogs. I remember him telling me, as a little girl, that the dogs were silent the night the Jews left Egypt. Ever since I have always attributed dogs with the power to intuit redemption and the apparent wisdom to herald its coming with reverent silence.

One night in Auschwitz, the Nazis' German shepherds refrained from barking when they saw my zayde trying to escape danger. In my mind, the Messiah is heralded not with the blows of the trumpet but with the silence of the dogs.

Last week I read that a good writer sees words where a great writer sees the spaces between them. This morning I stand on a busy Jerusalem street corner, the kind that seems to be in a perpetual state of rush hour. And then I hear the siren. But I try to listen to the silence.

So I look at all the people standing beside their cars, standing up on the buses, which are standing motionless as the traffic lights turn green, then red, then green again. And still no movement. Still no words from the other American seminary girls, feet away from me on the corner; nor from the Israeli haredi boy, paused in his trek down the hill from Bayit V'gan; nor from the Ethiopian soldier at the bus stop across the street.

I can't help myself – I'm addicted to words. I think of myself and all my words. The ones I think, the ones I say, the ones I write. I look at all these other people and think of all of their words. Words in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, Amharic, Arabic, Russian. Words they cry, words they laugh, words they pray. Words with which their parents sang them to sleep – the same words with which they will sing their own children to sleep.

And I think that all these people with all their words can never find the right words to memorialize, even just to remember.

It's impossible to encapsulate a human life in words. Even I, with my overly fond attachment to words, have never been comfortable with the concept of obituaries. No obituary, no biography can ever do justice to the life of one person. How much more so for six million. All these people, all the people in the world, with all the languages and media available, can never remember well enough with their words. But perhaps with their silence, they can.

We are the grandchildren of the survivors. Our grandparents filled books and books with testimony. Our parents filled books and books with questions. But we know that the words end with us. We cannot write the book of answers – we do not even have an appropriate response. All we can do is pass on our grandparents' books and memories; our own books would only be blank with silent remembrance.

It's not necessarily a silence of inadequacy. Or maybe it is. Maybe the point is to recognize the inadequacy of our words. To realize that if all we hear is the siren, we've missed the point of the silence. That if our commemorations focus solely on death, it is an insult to the living and the memory of life.

There are no words to adequately describe life, nor the loss of life. There are no words to adequately describe freedom, nor to describe how it can be taken away.

Sometimes, there aren't even any words to bridge the gap between earth and heaven – only tears.

Eventually, my bubbe says, there are no more tears.

And then, there is silence.