The silence is the detail that visitors remembered and the one that best conveys what daily life there was. Several hundred people farming, cooking, building and teaching, communicating in a sign vocabulary the movement had developed itself, with speech permitted on two days a week that were also the fast days. Children learned the signs. The stated reasoning is completely internal to the rule: the tongue is where the commandments break, so remove the tongue from ordinary use. Whether this was experienced as peace or as deprivation almost certainly varied by person, and nobody who could answer that question survived to be asked.