Everyone has a favorite prayer—even those of us who don’t pray. My favorite prayer is four lines long, and it is in both the Rosh Hashanah and the Yom Kippur liturgy. It asks God for the ability to speak, to express oneself, to find words that have meanings.

We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment that they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It’s the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it’s a moment when they want to communicate very badly.

Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.