Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah
portion opens with God reminding Moses of the important task ahead of them:
redemption. Moses speaks to the people of Israel, but they do not listen to
him, as Pharaoh did not listen to him when Moses stood before him in the last
parasha. God, seeing that the people of Israel are not ready to hear the
message of redemption while they are so oppressed and exhausted by their
workload, tells Moses to go back to Pharaoh and tell him that God has commanded
that Pharaoh let the people go. Moses responds, “Behold the people of Israel
have not listened to me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of
uncircumcised lips?”
The plain meaning, the most immediate
and obvious explanation, of this protestation, is that Moses is pointing out
that the people of Israel should want to be liberated. If they, who have reason
to listen to a promise of redemption, who have something to gain from believing
Moses, aren’t interested, why should Pharaoh, whose interests are put most in
danger by this news, listen to Moses? There’s something to be said about
speaking truth to power, and not placing the blame on those who fear being let
down, but it’s also completely understandable that Moses holds this fear.
However, he doesn’t stop with that
comparison. That alone is not his main reason for believing he should not or
cannot speak to Pharaoh, as he feels the need to add on the comment about his
obstructed lips. Several times throughout the beginning stages of the Exodus
narrative, Moses fears he will be an inadequate speaker for the task at hand. A
rather well known legend, appearing in Shemot Rabbah, as well as recorded in the
ancient historian Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, and even mentioned in Freud's Moses and Monotheism, explains Moses’s speech impediment as the
result of a cruel test put to infant Moses by a fearful Pharaoh. Moses had
taken the crown off Pharaoh’s head and crowned himself with it and Pharaoh
worried that it might be a sign of baby Moses’s precocious desire to overthrow
Pharaoh and rule over the Egyptian people. The angel Gabriel, disguised as a
court sage, suggested that Pharaoh put before the baby an onyx stone and a
burning coal. If the baby reached for the coal, it would prove that he just
liked shiny objects and the self-crowning moment meant nothing. If he reached
for the precious stone, it would prove that Moses was indeed destined to
overthrow Pharaoh, and Pharaoh would be advised to kill the baby now. Moses,
being precocious and destined to be the demise of Pharaoh, started to reach for
the onyx stone, but the angel caused him to grab the coal instead. The baby put
his burning hand into his mouth to cool it, burning his mouth as well.
The scar was left on his mouth forever, a constant reminder of the
first time Pharaoh tried to destroy Moses for being powerful. This is one
possible explanation for Moses’s reluctance to play the part of prophet and
redeemer. Not only is his speech physically impeded, he is afraid to try to
show himself to be too formidable a foe, having already escaped near
infanticide for his precociousness. The great rabbi and biblical commentator,
Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, points out that when Moses complained he could
not be the right choice to speak for God, he never asked that his speech
impediment should be healed. He does not want to be healed; he does not want to
speak for God. It is not his lips alone that hinder him, but his fear.
The Sefat Emeth, a Hasidic work of Torah commentary,
suggests that perhaps Moses felt afraid to speak specifically because thus far
no one has listened: “Because they would not listen, therefore I am of
uncircumcised lips.” The Psalmist says, “Listen, my people, that I may speak.”
One who has none listening may as well not talk, according to this reading.
Each way of looking at the situation, whether Moses feels afraid to speak
because his lips are impeded or his lips feel impeded because his speech has
been disregarded, whether the physical scar in his mouth keeps him from
speaking or the emotional scar of having escaped near death for being
important, his reluctance to keep trying is an act of self-preservation, and as
Ani DiFranco sings, “Self-preservation is a full-time occupation; I’m
determined to survive on this shore.”
But the next line in that Ani song is, “You know I don’t avert my
eyes anymore.” Because while self-preservation is extremely important, and we
can all probably empathize a bit with Moses’s reluctance to put himself out
there, ultimately if it comes at the cost of
self-expression, then what exactly are we preserving? Moses’s reluctance to
serve God in the manner he was selected angers God. Midrash HaGadol offers a
few possible responses to Moses’s protestations:
“Rav Yehuda said: God said to Moses, ‘I am master of the universe,
I am full of compassion, I am reliable in paying reward, My children are
enslaved by human beings – and you say to Me, Send by whose hand You will
send?!’ Rav Nehemia said: God said to Moses, ‘The anguish of My children
in Egypt is revealed and known to Me... My children dwell in anguish and you
dwell at ease, and I seek to set them free from Egypt – and you saw to Me, Send
by whose hand You will send?!’”
Both midrashic twists by each of these rabbis suggest a similar
sense of incredulity from God. Whatever his fears or disabilities, Moses has
been hand-picked by God to do this hugely important task that will not only
serve God, but free an entire race of oppressed people, and Moses has the
audacity to say, “No thanks”? Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher, said in
his book Water and Dreams, “What is the source of our first suffering?
It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak … it was born in the moments
when we accumulated silent things within us. The brook will nonetheless teach
you to speak, in spite of sorrows and memories, it will teach you euphoria
through euphemism, energy through the poem. It will repeat incessantly some
beautiful, round word which rolls over rocks.” The continuation of the passage
of Midrash HaGadol quoted above, finishes with a suggestion that Moses’s
reluctance to do this task was the first and real reason he was not allowed
into the Holy Land. How much suffering did he bring upon himself by trying to
keep silent? How much extra suffering did he cause the Israelites by dragging
his feet and not rallying himself and them sooner? How much suffering do each
of us cause ourselves by not speaking about things which are important to us
because we are afraid we will say them imperfectly or no one will hear us or
others’ perceptions of us will change as a result of speaking out?
There are times when it is reasonable to want to keep quiet as an
act of self-preservation. But if we are always focusing on self-preservation
and making ourselves as small and quiet as possible so as not to expose
ourselves to potential harm, we will never fully live. Moses eventually finds
his voice. While he relies on Aaron as his mouthpiece for Pharaoh, he rallies
himself up and does what God asks of him, and eventually is able to speak with
great confidence to the people of Israel. For a guy who complains he is slow of
speech and heavy of tongue, the later books of the Torah sure are filled with
him yapping. May we all find that confidence, our voices, the ability to speak
out for what is importance, no matter how long we remained silent before. May
the brook teach us how to babble, may we find euphoria in euphemisms, may we
stop averting our eyes and hiding from ourselves. May we survive and thrive,
and in that way better serve ourselves, God, and our fellow humans. Amen and
Shabbat Shalom.
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