We went to another Bat Mitzvah today, for a classmate in my daughter’s seventh grade.  As a part of the ceremony we recited this poem/prayer:

Nature is God’s niggun,
a wordless melody of unfolding life.
To awaken God we must hear the nigun.
To awaken God we must listen to deep silence.
Silence arises when thinking ceases.
If we would know God
we must quiet the mind,
cease the chatter that passes for knowledge
when in fact it only flatters the foolish.
We cannot live without words
but let us not imagine that words are sufficient.
As a symphony needs rest to lift music out of noise
so we need Silence to lift Truth out of words.

 The parallels here with Taoism are striking: wordless teaching, the limits of knowledge, quieting the mind…  A "niggun," or "nigun," is the wordless chant that accompanies the religious ceremony.  "Nature is God’s niggun" – if we changed "God" to "Tao" this line would capture very well the sensibility of the Tao Te Ching, passage 43, Lau translation:

 Exterminate learning, and there will no longer be worries.

The most submissive thing in the world can ride roughshod over the hardestin the world;
That which is without substance entering that which has no crevices.

That is why I know the benefit of resorting to no action.
The teaching that uses no words, the benefit of resorting to no
action,these are beyond the understanding of all but a very few in the
world.

   The writer of the Taoist-Jewish poem/prayer is Rami M. Shapiro.  I think this is him.   I will write to him and ask if he has ever read the Tao Te Ching.  I am certain he has.

        Beautiful.

        Mazeltov!