Moses; A Human Life, 4 Moses in the Family; Mirrors and Foils

IN QUEST OF BROTHERHOOD: EARLY HISTORY
The quest for brotherhood and the question of brotherhood pervade Moses’ early life. Both father and mother soon fall out of his story. His brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, however, remain as both foils and mirror reflections. Moses’ singularity is perhaps best understood through his relations with those who are closest to him.

It is God who definitively declares Moses’ difference from his brother and sister. Addressing their envy of him, God says: “Not so [lo chen] is My servant Moses!” (Num. 12:7). Miriam and Aaron and all other prophets are in one category and Moses alone in another. They may experience God in dreams and visions, but Moses alone is “faithful in all My household.” His connection with God is of a different order.

The Torah, of course, ends with a similar statement about Moses’ singularity: “Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom God knew face to face” (Deut. 34:10). But that “last word” of the Torah emerges from some ahistorical point: a view from nowhere. It is a metaphysical statement, detached from subjective experience. In the scene with Miriam and Aaron, however, God enters the family situation in the thick of its emotional embroilment. Moses, He says, is simply other, lo chen—not so, not like his siblings, not like any other prophet. His metaphysical difference begins at home, in his own family.

From the beginning, Moses’ difference sets him apart. He is the child born after Pharaoh’s decree against male babies. From the moment when, at three months of age, he is cast out alone on the Egyptian river, he remains essentially alone. This, even though his sister, who is identified at first simply as his sister (Ex. 2:4), stands guard over him and even returns him to his mother’s breast. His infant experience, as the child of genocide, shuttled between mothers and cultures, largely obliterates his birth family from memory.

One telling fact is that his parents and sister are unnamed in the early narrative; he is, in fact, the first to be named—by the Egyptian princess—after he is weaned and restored to her. In the beginning, he himself and those who figure in his early life are referred to simply as a man, a woman, a child. Relationship, therefore, and the attribution of relationship become highly significant in this narrative: Moses is repeatedly called a “child,” but Pharaoh’s daughter recognizes him as “a child of the Hebrews” (2:6). His sister proposes bringing “a woman” to nurse the child “for you”; Miriam summons the “child’s mother,” who is charged by Pharaoh’s daughter, also unnamed and always referred to in this way, with nursing “this child for me” (2:9). The woman takes the child, nurses him, and on weaning him brings him back to Pharaoh’s daughter—“And he became a son to her.” Her effective maternal right over him is asserted in her naming of the child: “I drew him (gave birth to him, in Egyptian) from the water” (2:10).

The passage quietly describes the splitting of identity of a mother’s child, whose sister arranges for the ultimate re-mothering of that child, as if he were reborn. Miriam’s act is a survival response to the world of violence that is Egypt. When Moses enters conscious life, he “goes out to his brothers to see their sufferings” (2:11).¹Vayigdal—“And he grew up”—is used twice, once when he is weaned and handed back to Pharaoh’s daughter, and again when he emerges from the palace. It seems to signify a new stage of development. This first personal exodus presages the larger national event.

Moses’ quest is for brothers, for others who are like him. As we have noticed, it is unclear whether Moses knows the Hebrew slaves to be his brothers. Possibly, the young Egyptian prince, uneasy in his identity, emerges from the palace to look for kin in the least likely place, among the low-caste slaves. He “sees” their suffering, their labors. At the same time, he “sees” an Egyptian—who, like him, belongs to the master race—beating “one of his brothers.” The ironies multiply. The narrator refers to the slaves, factually, as “his brothers”; he himself consciously identifies at first with the Egyptian—only to find himself moved toward a sense of kinship with the one who is being beaten. Ambiguously, his brotherhood with the Hebrew slave becomes a subjective choice. It leads him to kill the Egyptian, responding to violence with violence.

Strikingly, this whole early passage of his life is conducted in almost total silence. Without uttering a word, he absorbs the situation and acts.

The following day, the split in identity is further complicated when he sees one Hebrew about to kill another. He cries out—his first speech: “Why would you strike your fellow?” With this outraged cry, he protests against the violence that erupts between those who are like each other, like brothers. Implicitly, he also expresses his own sense of lacking a “fellow.” His new sense of brotherhood is complicated as the “guilty one” taunts him: “Are you going to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Having disposed of one violent other, he discovers otherness even among the victims of violence. In a kind of “double-bind” situation, Moses is silenced. He says nothing, and flees.

Silent still, he arrives at the well in Midian, saves Jethro’s daughters from the shepherds, and marries Tzippora. Then, he speaks by naming his son Gershom, “for he said, I have been a stranger in a foreign land” (2:22). Using both the words for “stranger” and “foreign,” he makes a factual observation and a reflexive one. Classically, naming a child is an opportunity for self-reflection. This is Moses’ first observation about himself.

Still overwhelmingly silent, Moses arrives at the “mountain of God,” where a bush burns without being consumed. Fascinated, in soliloquy, he then says, “Let me turn aside to see this great vision” (3:3). When God calls him by name—twice— he responds, “Here I am!” But throughout God’s long speech, in which He promises salvation for “My people,” and commissions Moses as His delegate in delivering the Israelites from Egypt, Moses utters only two questions: “Who am I . . . ?” he asks (3:11); and, “If they ask me, What is His name? what should I tell them?” (3:13). Both questions express a desire to know mysteries: his own identity, God’s identity; questions within questions. But in both cases, his desire is framed by the need to explain himself to others. His concern, it seems, is largely with how he will be received by Pharaoh and by the Israelites, who now represent fragments of his split identity (his “grandfather,” Pharaoh, on the one hand, and his newly perceived brothers, on the other).

Again, Moses listens silently to God’s long speech commissioning him and foretelling the narrative of the Exodus. Only in chapter 4, after a scattering of brief questions, does Moses begin to speak his mind: “They will not believe me, nor will they listen to my voice” (4:1). Repeatedly, he speaks of his inability to speak: “Please O God, I have never been a man of words, either yesterday or the day before, or now that You have spoken to Your servant; I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (4:10). In a sense, he is never as eloquent as when he invokes his speech disability, the weight he carries inside his mouth. Ironically, this is his most expressive moment so far, when he puts something of his inner life into words.

1. AARON
“All brothers hate one another . . .”
Why does he so passionately resist God’s call? Rashi diagnoses his resistance as a phenomenon of brotherhood: “All this resistance was because he did not want to assume greatness (gedula) over his brother, who was older (gadol) than him and already a prophet.”²Rashi to 4:10. Reluctant to usurp his elder brother’s role in the family and in the community, Moses shrinks from “greatness.”

The idea of disrupting the natural order, specifically the law of primogeniture, carries the stigma of a primal taboo. Although there are many violations of this norm in the book of Genesis—the younger brother chosen over the elder—the norm retains power to create a shared world of values and practices. As Robert Cover puts it, it remains “the great fault-line in the normative topology of the Israelites.”³Robert M. Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review (November 1983), 22.

So Moses is reluctant to cross that line with his brother Aaron. Hence, since Aaron is the established prophet and leader of the Israelites, Moses for the first time mentions a speech defect that he claims as a longstanding disability.⁴Regarding Aaron’s role as prophet and leader, see, e.g., Ezekiel 20. This passage is used as a proof-text in several midrashic texts. Is this an alibi to release him from God’s call? Has he developed this “stammer” in the stress of his new awareness of a complex identity? As we have noticed, his early life has been marked by long periods of silence punctuated by brief convulsive speech made up of questions, negations, and a single, powerful expression of attentiveness: Hineni!—“Here I am!” (3:4). A confusion of tongues . . .

In some midrashic sources, his reluctance to usurp his brother’s leadership is glowingly praised: “You find that all brothers hate one another . . . [but Moses and Aaron] did not hate one another but rejoiced in each other’s greatness.”⁵Tanchuma Shemot, 27. Moses refuses God’s call because “all these years, Aaron my brother has been the prophet—should I now trespass on my brother’s terrain and distress him!” God then reassures Moses precisely on this score: Aaron “will come out to greet you with joy in his heart!” (4:14).

God’s plan is to assign the brothers different roles that will honor Moses’ sensitivity to his brother’s role: “There is your brother Aaron the Levite—I know that he speaks with great ease.” Moses will convey God’s words to his brother who, as an eloquent speaker, will act as Moses’ mouthpiece. This plan is, in fact, carried out, when Moses later meets Aaron (4:27–31). Moses’ oedipal anxiety is relieved, and his relation with his brother becomes a model of ideal fraternity.

There are, however, some significant complications in this narrative. First, strangely, when God responds to Moses’ unspoken anxiety about usurping Aaron’s role, He is described as angry with Moses (4:14). Second, in midrashic readings Moses is punished for resisting God: he loses the function of High Priest, which is transferred to Aaron, together with the speaking function.⁶This is the impact of God’s anger on Moses’ life: his brother, who was a simple Levite, now becomes High Priest, while Moses is demoted to simple Levite. See B. Zevachim 102a. In some way, speaking to Pharaoh will transform Aaron’s ritual role. And third, God violently attacks Moses on his return journey to Egypt: “And it was on the road at a hotel that God encountered him and sought to kill him” (4:24).­According to midrashic tradition, the reason for the attack is Moses’ continuing resistance to God’s mission. Even though God has reassured Moses about Aaron’s reaction, Moses still maintains his posture of resistance: “Send by whose hand You will send!” (4:13). And God is angry. Moses’ reluctance to speak, to assert his power in voice and word, alienates him from God.

The result is a lifelong preoccupation with the issues of language. In this preoccupation, his brother Aaron is deeply involved. On the face of it, the tension between them is allayed; they are to play complementary roles; fraternal aggression, the tragic subject of Genesis, gives way for the first time to brotherly love. And Moses can for the first time speak of “my brothers”: “Let me go now and return to my brothers in Egypt, and let me see if they are still alive” (4:18). But whom exactly is he referring to? His siblings Aaron and Miriam? Or the Israelites, whom he now perceives as his kin? The smaller and the larger fraternal groups are no longer objects of such anxiety. That is on the face of it. But even though Aaron has become his brother and his ally in a new and fuller sense, this, apparently, does not entirely resolve the question of Moses’ identity. He remains heavy of mouth, unable to speak. God is angry; Moses is punished by losing the High Priesthood; God attacks him on his journey back to Egypt.

In the wake of Freud and other contemporary thinkers, Julia Kristeva claims that language originates in an experience of loss, the loss of “an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother.”⁷Julia Kristeva, Black Sun (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 43. The mourner mourns the lost mother and can then recover her in symbolic language: he can speak about her. “Depressed persons, on the contrary, disavow the loss.” They can never reach the position of really losing and mourning. In consequence, their language has an artificial quality, cut off from vital experience. The condition of asymbolia, the loss of symbolic meaning, writes Kristeva, manifests itself as melancholia, a “fundamental sadness.” Their language “is to them like an alien skin; melancholy persons are foreigners in their maternal tongue. They have lost the meaning—the value—of their mother tongue for want of losing the mother” (my emphasis).⁸Ibid., 53.

In Moses’ early life, his mother is lost, briefly retrieved, and then replaced by another mother, complete with a new tongue. Never does he speak of this loss, or of the double loss, as God urges him back to the brothers and the mother tongue of a primal existence. Only when he speaks about speech, reflexively mourning what he is not, does the world of the symbolic begin to open up for him.

The melancholy subjectivity of a Moses is juxtaposed with his brother Aaron’s expressiveness. God describes Aaron as dabber ye-dabber, as a fluent speaker, who is “coming forth to greet you with a joyous heart.” Active, spontaneous, emotionally-integrated, Aaron will provide what Moses lacks—he will be Moses’ mouthpiece (literally, his mouth), while leaving Moses the role of inscrutable divinity, remote, somehow stranded.

With all the complementary harmony of the brothers, each rejoicing for the other, a strain persists in Moses’ experience. When, later, Aaron is in fact appointed High Priest in the Tabernacle, Moses’ reaction is deeply ambivalent. Many midrashic sources tell of his disappointment at the loss of the priestly role. Since he acts as High Priest during the seven days of inauguration, he slips so totally into his role that he is shocked when God makes it clear that he is merely to dress Aaron in his priestly vestments. It is Aaron who will wear those vestments, which in themselves represent expressiveness.

The notion that clothes make the man dominates these biblical descriptions of the priest for whom role and clothes are equivalently effective. The priestly breastplate is set over Aaron’s heart, which rejoiced at Moses’ leadership. Aaron is a fitting wearer of these robes; an error or omission in these robes would disqualify his service. The harmonious connection between inward and outward, unarticulated thought and representation, the heart and its language, is his territory.

Moses and the High Priesthood
As for Moses, the moment in which he is commanded to invest his brother in the priestly role becomes, in the midrashic tradition, resonant with personal feeling. Suddenly, unexpectedly, there is grievance, a sense of loss, an experience of mourning.

In one expression of this theme, Moses is compared to a displaced wife:

“And as for you, you shall bring forward your brother Aaron . . .” (28:1). It is written, “If Your Torah had not been my play, I should have perished in my poverty” (Ps. 119:92). When God told Moses, “As for you, you shall bring forward your brother Aaron . . . ,” He did him an injury. God said, “I had possession of the Torah, and I gave it to you: if it were not for the Torah I should have lost My world!” This is like a wise man who married his close relative and after ten years together, when she had not borne children, he said to her, “Seek me a wife!” He said to her, “I could marry without your consent, but I seek your compliance.” So said God to Moses, “I could have made your brother High Priest without informing you, but I wish you to be great over him.”⁹Exodus Rabba 37:4.

The analogy involved in this midrash is startling. Moses is compared to a wife who is asked by her husband to find him another wife! When God asks Moses to appoint his brother High Priest, He is similarly doing him an injury. We require the shocking analogy in order to appreciate how much pain the divine will causes Moses. God asks for Moses’ invetanut, his cooperation, his compliance in a move that undermines his own status.¹⁰The midrashic term invetanut derives from anav, humble, which the Torah, in a rare moment of explicit portrayal, describes as Moses’ dominant characteristic: “Moses was a very humble man, more so than any man on earth” (Num. 12:3). The midrashic narrative focuses on a specific moment when Moses demonstrates his greatness in an act of humility in relation to his brother Aaron. A pang of loss initiates him into conscious mourning.

The wife’s humility/compliance becomes, in the narrative of God and Moses, a demand that “you be great over him.” The apparent dissonance between humility and greatness becomes the central tension of the midrash: compliance, forbearance, will be renamed as greatness. In the relation of Moses and Aaron, Aaron is the older, the “greater” in age—and therefore, in power. He is to be High Priest, literally, the Great Priest. But Moses’ compliance becomes an enigmatic form of greatness.

And yet, Moses’ sense of injury is justified. He had some right to expect that the High Priestly role would be his. Perhaps in light of the paradigms of Genesis, the notion of primogeniture overturned has become a new convention: the younger brother proves himself to be the child of destiny and supersedes the older, the “greater.” Abel, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph are the most prominent examples. Moreover, as the recipient of all God’s instruction about the Tabernacle, Moses is justified in expecting to become the prime actor within its precincts. The shock of exclusion, therefore, represents a reversion to the original typology, to the domination of the elder brother.

Another midrash refines and sharpens the point. At Moses’ first encounter with God at the Burning Bush, God had addressed him: “Moses! Moses! . . . Do not come closer . . .” (Ex.3:4–5):

And he replied, “Here I am!” . . . “Here I am, ready for priesthood and for kingship! . . .” God replied, “Do not approach closer—that is, your children will not offer sacrifices (lit., bring close to Me), because the priesthood is reserved for Aaron your brother . . . and the kingship for King David.” And yet Moses attained both: the priesthood, when he officiated during the seven days of Inauguration of the Tabernacle, and the kingship, as it is written, “Then he became King in Jeshurun” (Deut. 33:5).¹¹Exodus Rabba 2:13.

The ground on which the midrashic theme is based is the phrase, Al tikrav halom—“Do not come closer.” This kind of intimacy, the offering of sacrifices—hakrava, bringing close— is not your prerogative. “Your children will not offer sacrifices”: it is the hereditary nature of the priesthood that disqualifies Moses—just as the first wife’s infertility is the reason for the second marriage. Moses loses the priesthood—although he himself does perform the role during the Inauguration of the Tabernacle—because he lacks some reproductive capacity. (It is striking that Moses’ biological children are not his spiritual heirs. They play no role in the history of the Exodus or in the wilderness.)

Moses cannot “propagate” his connection to God; he cannot reproduce himself. Like the wife in the midrash, he is “close” to God, he has a natural affinity with the divine, but this kind of affinity does not lend itself to replication.¹²See Sefat Emet Likkutim, Exodus, Tetzaveh. Moses’ encounter with the divine is perhaps by its very nature inimitable. Mystical sources read the expression, “man of God” (Deut. 33:1), as referring to an intimate erotic relation that transcends transmission or propagation.

Moses’ “infertility” becomes the ground for denying him the High Priesthood. But why is Moses surprised when God tells him to “bring Aaron close” into this dynastic role? If he knows from his encounter with God at the Burning Bush that, despite his “readiness,” he will be disqualified for the priesthood, how can he be disappointed when the moment of inauguration arrives? A disappointment that is expected is not exactly a disappointment! But at the later moment, as in the parable of the abandoned wife, a theoretical knowledge becomes shockingly real and immediate. It is as though Moses has “forgotten” God’s warning at the Burning Bush. His amnesia is disrupted when God uses the same word hakrev—“Bring him close!”—as He had used at the Burning Bush. Earlier, Moses had repressed his experience of loss, and therefore he had not mourned the loss. Now, what he has known from the beginning is reenacted in all its fullness.

In Moses’ life, a kind of amnesia makes its appearance more than once. Repeatedly, he seems both to know and not to know of an essential loss. Midrashic versions of Moses’ life repeatedly bring to light this dynamic of forgetting and remembering. Toward the end of the forty-year journey in the wilderness, for instance, God abruptly decrees that Moses will not consummate his journey by leading his people into the Land. This tragic declaration is made in mysterious circumstances, after Moses has struck the rock at Meriva to produce water for his people: “Because you have not trusted Me to sanctify Me before the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this community into the land which I have given them” (Num. 20:12). Clearly, this is a shocking moment for Moses and Aaron. And yet, according to midrashic sources, Moses had been told from the beginning of the story that he would not lead the people to their destination.¹³See Rashi to Ex. 6:1. Again, the same dynamic: the present crisis catalyzes an old, suspended knowledge of loss.

A repressed memory is rearranged, rewritten under the vital impact of present knowledge. Freud named this dynamic Nachträglichkeit. Perhaps all these obscured traumas of Moses’ life gesture toward a primal loss that has never been fully acknowledged? In psychoanalytic terms, it is the loss of the mother that forms the primal stratum, forgotten and re-transcribed, of experience. The loss of the mother, quite literally in Moses’ case, engenders in him a continual quest for echoes of that loss.

The Crown of Torah
In the midrash about the compliant wife, God consoles Moses for the loss of the High Priesthood. He names his compensation Torah, which saves the world from extinction: “I had possession of the Torah, and I gave it to you: if it were not for the Torah I should have lost My world!” In other words, Moses, who lacks the reproductive capacity that biologically preserves the human race, is endowed with another world-preserving capacity. Playing on a verse from Psalms (“If Your Torah had not been my play, I should have perished in my poverty” [Ps. 119:92]), God tells Moses: “If it were not for the Torah, which I have given you, I should have lost My world!”

The divine world is the world of play with Torah texts. Moses becomes the prototype of those who engage in this divine play, separating words and letters and connecting them in different formations. His role is of incomparable significance. It involves losses, gestures of compliance that are read as gestures of spontaneous greatness. Generic rather than genetic, Moses’ role is seen in later texts as representing the ongoing generativity that preserves God’s world.

Moses’ place in this world is nevertheless enigmatic. At the moment when he is told to yield place to his brother, the Torah has God address him with the emphatic pronoun Ve-atta: “As for you, bring close your brother . . .” This emphatic address is repeated several times in the immediate context—three times within five verses (Ex. 27:20; 28:1, 3) We would normally expect Ve-atta to set up a contrast with another subject. Here, since Moses is the subject of the entire passage, it is not clear why the text targets him at this point.

Ironically, too, the Torah portion in which the triple address occurs is the only one in which Moses’ name is entirely absent. A tension forms between absence and emphatic presence: a moment of loss and gain. Just where Moses is asked to comply in yielding his brother the dignities of a dynastic role, God insists on the intimate invocation: “Now you . . . you . . . you.”¹⁴A similar tension of presence and absence is found in the liturgical timing of the Torah portion, which is usually read in the week when 7 Adar occurs—the date of Moses’ birth and death. A mythic birth-death theme haunts Moses’ life.

A quiet pulse sounds within the text that celebrates Aaron’s official inauguration. God has apparently shifted the center of gravity away from Moses to Aaron. Moses is left with a merely instrumental role. But the pulse of Ve-atta evokes a new kind of power. The balance of forces is subtly re-centered. Losses and gains shift their meanings.

Moses is asked to accept—like the compliant wife—a place of distance and loneliness, in which he will re-create union in the mode of play. Surrendering the priestly garments, which speak the language of representation—public, ceremonious, relatively static—Moses is to create a playful language—in fact, a poetic language. “If Your Torah had not been my play (sha’ashua), I should have perished in my poverty.”

This sha’ashua, this playfulness, is entirely serious work: God’s world depends on it. The poet plays in the space that John Keats names negative capability: “where a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”¹⁵Keats, Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 53. In this space, one is capable of eluding rigid forms; one moves into and out of many roles. One can even, in Keats’s self-description, become a sparrow pecking at the gravel: “. . . if a Sparrow come before my Window, I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.”¹⁶Ibid., 50.

The culture of sha’ashua arises precisely when law is crystallized, transmitted in written or engraved form, when the creative surge seems frozen in place. This is a moment of danger, when God’s world becomes brittle. In the view of a number of commentators, while the formalism and ceremoniousness of the priesthood is given to Aaron, Moses becomes the agent of that different valence of spirituality that will be called the Oral Torah, the Torah of the Mouth.¹⁷See Ha’amek Davar, Sefat Emet, Pri Tzaddik. Moses, the non-speaker, is both the passive medium registering God’s Torah and, in these commentaries, the creator of Torat Moshe—Moses’ Torah—the product of intellectual labor and creativity. Mystical traditions lie behind these retellings of Moses’ story.

Moses becomes the type of those who generate complex, irreducible interpretations, poems in themselves. His special responsibility will be the olive oil for the Menorah, the candelabrum in the Tabernacle. R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin of Volozhin (known as the Ha’amek Davar) discusses the “wondrous” symbolic power of the Menorah; its seven branches and its elaborate knobs and blossoms suggest a fantastic beauty of wisdom and ingenuity.¹⁸Ha’amek Davar cites R. Tarfon, who used to celebrate a brilliant interpretation with the words kaftor va-ferach!—“A knob and a blossom!” (Genesis Rabba 91:12).

In this view, Moses’ genius is quite different from that of Aaron. His is the “crown of Torah,” which, unlike the crown of priesthood, or the crown of royalty, is not hereditary. It is, according to Maimonides, potentially accessible to every Jew: “Whoever wishes may come and take of it!” Democratic in essence, its authority transcends and is the source of the authority of the other two crowns. Moses-figures, in every generation, move beyond fixed forms of understanding toward new combinations of words that, Godlike, create worlds.

Who is the Moses who emerges from this portrait of brotherhood? He is the man without fixed identity—in a sense, childless; in a sense, parentless; child of two cultures, Hebrew and Egyptian, and marginal, in a sense, to both. He cannot, at first, find himself in any language. A protean figure, he wears many crowns, but he is absorbed into no single role. Neither priest nor king, he will know both crowns. Momentarily absent from the text, he is yet pervasive. He is the other, who expresses what the structures repress.

His project is the discovery of a voice that is uniquely his, “for the sake of Israel.” He is to be God’s second-person address. He is to respond to his brother with a magnanimous imagination. “As you live,” he says, in another midrash, “even though you have become High Priest, it is as though I had become High Priest!”¹⁹Tanchuma Shemini, 3. A metaphoric genius allows him to lose the hard casing of selfhood in acts of imaginative power.²⁰In this “chameleon” mode, Moses reminds us of John­Keats’s description of the “poetical Character . . . which has no self—it is everything and nothing. . . . When I am in a room with People . . . then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children . . .” (Keats, Letters, 172). In all this, Moses is inwardly in process. As in most processes, there are points of strain. The midrash allows us to glimpse an intimate narrative of becoming, with its anger and melancholy, as well as its luminous harmonies.

2. MIRIAM
Secret Meanings
There is yet another dramatic confrontation between Moses and Aaron, this time together with their other sibling Miriam. In this mysterious episode, narrated in Numbers 12, Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses—be-moshe—protesting his singular claims to prophecy: “Is it only be-moshe, through Moses, that God has spoken? Has He not spoken through us too?” (Num. 12:1–2). Moses becomes an object of envy within his own family. Miriam, who is the moving spirit of this conflict, is afflicted with leprosy and isolated from the camp, until the seven-day quarantine period is over.

The central issue of the narrative is Moses’ difference from all other prophets, including his own siblings. To Miriam, particularly, this difference looks like arrogance: God has spoken through her and through Aaron in the same way as through Moses. God’s answer is trenchant: Lo chen—“Not so—not like others—is My servant Moses!” (12:7). Moses is a world of his own, fundamentally different from all other prophets. It is not arrogance but, strangely, humility that characterizes him in his difference (12:3).

Difference and sameness: within his own family, Moses lives in the eye of that storm. In Miriam, particularly, midrashic sources trace currents of feeling that run deep: they detect a sexual motif in her protest. Drawing on the mysterious reference to a “Cushite woman whom he had married” (12:1), Rashi tells a story of a separation, rather than a marriage: Moses had separated from his wife Tzippora (here called the Cushite woman), abstaining from sexual relations because of the demands of his prophetic condition.²¹Rashi engages in elaborate wordplay to make the identification of the Cushite woman. The general gist is that Tzippora is beautiful, inside and out, so that the only reason for Moses’ abstinence is the consuming nature of his prophecy. In this reading, Miriam’s envy is complicated by her conviction that there need be no tension between sexuality and prophetic experience. She and Aaron have received prophecy without interrupting their sexual lives. Miriam comes to know about Moses’ private life and sharply protests against his celibate state.

In the midrashic narratives, as recounted by Rashi, secret meanings subvert the apparent narrative. Miriam is aggrieved not at Moses’ marriage, but at his separation from his own wife. I suggest that when she protests against his splitting between sexual and prophetic experience, she draws on the origins of her relationship with him. We remember that when she first appears in the biblical narrative, she is holding vigil over her baby brother, who floats in a box, a basket, on the Egyptian river. In the event, she restores the infant Moses to his own mother’s breast, until he is weaned. Miriam is a maternal surrogate, enabling the physical reunion of mother and child. Why, in this moment of danger, does she play the maternal role?

Midrashic traditions fill in a backstory. Miriam’s special connection with Moses begins before his birth. At the height of the Egyptian genocide, when baby boys were to be thrown into the river, Miriam’s father separated from his wife. Miriam then confronted her father with her conviction that he is doing Pharaoh’s work: “Your decree is harsher than Pharaoh’s: he decreed against male children, while your decree prevents any child from being born!”²²Exodus Rabba 1:17. In response to her protest, her parents reunite and Moses is born.

This midrashic narrative positions Miriam as the daughter who makes possible the birth of her younger brother. She is, in a sense, a co-mother; her critique of sexual separation brings Moses into the world. Her relation with her younger brother is, therefore, unusually intense and complex. And years later, when that brother separates from his wife, her passion for connection is again aroused.

The moment of confrontation with her father, the man of “decrees,” is recorded in the midrash as her moment of prophecy.²³Gezera—“decree”—derives from the root g-z-r, which means “cutting.” The decree implies incisive separation, exclusion of the forbidden. But this moment is unrecorded in the biblical text; it is celebrated cryptically, years later, at the Red Sea, when she is given the title “Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister” (Ex. 15:20). “When did she prophesy?” asks Rashi. “When she was Aaron’s sister, before Moses was born!” She prophesied the birth of Moses who would redeem the Israelites from Egypt; and then, in the lonely force of her prophetic vision, she stood guard over his basket in the river. Standing “at a distance,” she is alienated from her own family, who now doubt her prophecy.²⁴Exodus Rabba 1:25. Shamed, excluded, her prophecy in question, she bears it staunchly within her like a pregnancy, waiting to know its outcome.

In this powerful midrashic narrative, Miriam is the type of the courageous but despised prophet. This is the moment when she moves from being “Aaron’s sister” to being most truly Moses’ sister (2:4). This moment is deeply implanted within her. It will emerge later in two different forms. When she leads the women in song and dance at the sea, the text refers to her as Miriam the prophetess; and when she speaks against Moses, God declares judgment on her, shaming her: “If her father spat in her face, would she not bear her shame for seven days? Let her be shut out of the camp for seven days, and then let her be readmitted” (Num. 12:15). Strangely, her early history of prophecy is reenacted when God quarantines her; again, her Father puts her at a distance. The Talmud notices another link between the two episodes: “As she waited for Moses [in his basket in the river], so Israel waited for her in the wilderness.”²⁵B. Sotah 9b.

Alienation and solitude, a father who shames her, a people that gathers her in—at the heart of Miriam’s drama is her fraught relation with her brother Moses, which continues throughout her life. Her prophetic role in bringing him into the world endangers her position in her family; as Moses’ sister, she risks her identity as her father’s daughter. Then, her little brother grows bigger and eclipses her. Her prophecy ceases; his begins and flourishes.

But the main characteristic of her relation with Moses is suggested by the ambiguous preposition be—“against” and “through”—that throbs through the later story of envy. Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses; and they protest, “Is it only through Moses (be-moshe) that God has spoken? Has He not also spoken through us (banu)!” The same preposition is used with different meanings: it expresses an adversary relation, a targeted aggressiveness; and it expresses the inward experience of prophecy—God’s speaking in or through a person, in a vision or a dream. When God explains Moses’ difference, He uses the same preposition in the same two senses: “Mouth to mouth, I speak through him! . . . Why have you not been afraid to speak against My servant, against Moses?” (12:8). The text then sums up this section of the narrative: “God’s anger burned against them.”

What emerges from this use of the preposition is the intensity of a relationship that is both hostile and deeply empathic. Projection and envy are the shorthand terms for this complexity. Miriam knows what it is to have God speak through her, and she desires to be again a vessel for divine inspiration. In her fantasy, she is merged with Moses, the brother she has “mothered” into the world. It is inconceivable that her vision, in which the sexual and the spiritual are fused, should be different from that of Moses. She speaks, therefore, in and through his imagined world, and against the sexual separation by which Moses expresses his singularity. What bond could be deeper than the bond between this sister-mother and this brother-child? But for him separation from his wife is God’s will, and God acknowledges his intuition. His relation with God is unique and all-consuming—peh el peh, mouth to mouth.

God too speaks in the language of double meanings, picking up the ambiguity of Miriam’s use of be-, even as His anger burns against—and within—her. Aaron, praying for his sister, touches off similar depths as he speaks of the shared, half-consumed flesh of siblings: “Let her not be as one dead, who emerges from his mother’s womb with half his flesh eaten away!” (Num. 12:12). If Moses’ sister, who has come forth from the womb of his mother, is afflicted with leprosy, then it is as though half his flesh, too, is consumed.

The macabre image conveys Aaron’s understanding of the intimate connection between Miriam and Moses. All three siblings emerged from the same womb—and siblings are one flesh.²⁶“He is our brother, our flesh,” Judah says of Joseph (Gen. 37:27). But Aaron speaks of his (Moses’) mother’s womb, and of his flesh alone. Moses has the power to intercede for his sister, precisely because of the primal connection between them. They emerged from their mother’s womb in a unique sense: for Miriam, by reuniting her parents, had brought that womb back into the world of possibilities.

The primal connection created by the flesh and the imagination of those who emerge from the same womb is expressed in unusually charged language. Aaron is here entering into the private world of meanings that is shared by Miriam and Moses. And Moses responds with the briefest, convulsive prayer—“God, please, heal her please!”—from his own flesh, a cry stronger than empathy.

Singularity and Solidarity
Moses’ position in this story is harder to detect than that of his passionate sister. Throughout the episode, except for his prayer, Moses is silent. It is God who “hears” the implications of Miriam and Aaron’s complaint. At this point, Moses is described: “the man Moses was very humble, more than any other human being on the face of the earth” (12:3). God then speaks about Moses’ singularity. How are we to imagine Moses’ personal reaction to the family drama of love and envy in which he is involved? Is he impervious to the question of his difference? Do his siblings’ grievances affect him?

The question touches on the issue of brotherhood, in the most personal way. Every time God uses the expression, “your brother Aaron,” it holds emotional meaning for the man who had two mothers and two mother tongues, the Egyptian prince whose brothers are slaves. When God describes the forthcoming original encounter of the brothers, He declares, “Here is Aaron your brother the Levite—I know that he is a ready speaker. Even now, he is setting out to meet you, and when he sees you he will rejoice in his heart” (Ex. 4:14). This relation, in its complementarity, is to embody and transcend the tension of brotherhood. But when his brother and sister attack him for not being identical with them, his separateness is reaffirmed. At this juncture, what does his silence say?

On the one hand, God, in a sense, speaks for him, when He characterizes him as uniquely “ne’eman, faithful, trustworthy, in all My household” (Num. 12:7). The nineteenth-century Hassidic master, Sefat Emet, interprets this difference of Moses: ne’eman, he suggests, means stable, unchanging. All other prophets are transfigured by the prophetic experience. They are ecstatic, beyond themselves: “their faces would flame like torches.” Moses alone remains constantly attuned to the wavelengths of the divine. “Mouth-to-mouth” expresses an intimacy without ebbs and flows, in which his true nature remains unchanged. His sexuality is sublimated in devekut, a passionate but even intimacy with God.

This reading imagines Moses’ unique way of living as a man who is “the man of God.” It speaks of a kind of detachment from the tides of human emotion. But in this incident with his sister, Aaron calls on his solidarity, his brotherly attunement with Miriam. For the first time, Moses confronts his uneasiness with differences and distances, with the need to negotiate the gaps between himself and others. Even with those who are closest to him, in whom he finds the most poignant reminder of the womb that bore them, there arises that uneasiness. With Miriam, his sister-mother, who finds his difference unthinkable, things fall apart.

He prays for her as “half his flesh.” But something new emerges in Moses in this crisis. Being the same and not the same as his sister becomes for Moses a clue to the mystery of brotherhood. Imagining himself as the one who is envied, he is brought up against his own singularity, as well as his womb-­ identity with his siblings.

A short time before this, Moses had cried to God about the paradox of his own identity: “Did I conceive this people, did I give birth to it, that You should say to me, Carry it in your bosom, as the wet nurse carries the suckling child—to the land that You swore to its fathers?” (Num. 11:11–12). Using imagery that expresses an inexpressible frustration, he imagines himself as mother to his people, to his brothers. There is a violence in his cry: How can he carry this people in his bosom, as though he had been impregnated with them, had given birth to them, had become their male wet nurse? The demand made on him by God is ultimately a demand that he speak to them; and he is as unequipped for that role, as a man is unequipped to conceive, give birth, and suckle. To speak to them, he imagines, would mean to hold them, to be entirely present to their needs, to be penetrated by them, even, like Miriam, to give birth to them.

Unlike a mother, or a wife, he is not flesh of their flesh. And yet his imagination dwells on feminine images of nurturance, of deepest connection, of trustworthiness in relation to the people. To be an omen, a male wet nurse, would be to display in his relation to them the same unchanging stability, the same availability, as God celebrates in the related term ne’eman. The demand is that he be constantly attuned to the wavelengths of his people as he is to those of his God. The devekut, the passionate intimacy of motherhood, (ideally) without ebbs and flows, is imaginatively present to him. Womb and breasts are implicitly grafted on, as the man Moses imagines the totally unacceptable. In some way, God seems to demand a feminization of his masculine self.

His cry is an utterance that refers to a performative possibility. If he had said, “I conceived this people, I gave birth to it. . . ,” this would have met the conditions that the British philosopher J. L. Austin applies to a performative utterance: “to utter the sentence is not to describe my doing [a thing] . . . or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.”²⁷J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Examples of the performative utterance include, “I promise,” “I bet,” “I bequeath,” “You are sanctified to me.” Moses, on the other hand, undoes a possible world at the same time that he alludes to it. His cry is, in a sense, more potent than an explicit performative utterance. It evokes the pathos of uncertainty about what he might become capable of. It perpetuates the prestige of pregnancy, birth, and suckling, while creating a penumbra of different ways of imagining it.

Moses’ outburst, which ends in a death wish (11:15), gives voice to ambiguities of sameness and otherness that at first trouble him like a loss of personal power. It echoes within his prayer for his sister who is half his flesh. And it bears unexpected fruit in his violent encounter with another member of his family, his cousin Korach.

3. KORACH
A Freudian slip
Korach and Moses confront one another with overt hostility. A political rebellion is afoot; power issues are at stake. Korach defies the leadership of Moses and Aaron: “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and God is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above God’s congregation?” (Num. 16:3). The rebels’ claim sounds appealingly democratic. Moses “falls on his face” on hearing it.

However, beneath the political surface of the narrative a different confrontation is taking place. Korach and Moses are first cousins, mirror images, each inviting the other to greater self-knowledge. In this sense, they are like the sibling couples we have discussed: Moses and Aaron, Moses and Miriam. Here, too, the issue is the tension around sameness and difference. Korach speaks a rhetoric of totality: “All the community are holy, all of them . . .” Oceanic holiness is the condition of the people, without nuance or conflict or difference. This claim contains enough truth to be persuasive: the camp of Israel is potentially holy, and its symbolic center is the Tabernacle with God inhabiting its recesses. But the totality of the rhetoric signals demagoguery. Such a language leaves Moses speechless— prostrate, mouth in the earth.

A famous midrash heightens the drama by suggesting that all the rebels deck themselves out in tallitot she-kulan techelet, prayer-shawls that are entirely made of blue thread. In place of the single blue thread that is commanded and that signifies a slender link with the transcendent (sea, sky, the throne of glory),²⁸B. Sotah 17a. they stand flaunting a total holiness—heavenly blue as far as the eye can see—and taunt Moses: “Do these garments still require a thread of blue?” Their sarcasm is clear: in the face of the oceanic holiness of the people, how can you insist on the difference of a particular man, or a particular family, or symbolic object? The image speaks louder than a thousand words in ridiculing and silencing Moses. What can be said in reply to the theatrics of totality? The rebels have, effectively, put an end to language.

Moses falls on his face; he is struck dumb. Or, as Rashi puts it, “Moses’ hands fall limp.” His sense of personal power ebbs in a collapse of face and limbs; but surprisingly, he swiftly recovers and begins to speak. He speaks at length, first to Korach and his group, then to Korach alone, and, finally, to the other rebel leaders, Dathan and Aviram. Transcending his despair, he attempts to engage the rebel leaders in dialogue.

But Korach has no reply; Moses’ words fall on deaf ears:

With all these arguments, Moses tried to win Korach over, yet you do not find that the latter returned him any answer. This was because he was clever in his wickedness and thought: If I answer him, I know quite well that he is a very wise man and will presently overwhelm me with his arguments, so that I shall be reconciled to him against my will. It is better that I should not engage with him. When Moses saw that there was no good to be got of him he took leave of him . . .

“And Moses sent to call Dathan and Aviram” (v. 12). They too persisted in their wickedness and did not deign to answer him. “And they said: We will not come up. These wicked people were tripped up by their own mouth; there is a covenant made with the lips—for they died and went down into the bottomless abyss, after they had “gone down alive into the underworld” (v. 33). “And Moses was very angry” (v. 15). Why? Because when a man argues with his companion and the other answers him in argument, he has satisfaction, but if he does not answer he feels aggrieved.²⁹Midrash Bamidbar Rabba 18:8.

In the view of the midrash, Moses attempts to make peace with Korach, who is too canny to respond. Korach considers Moses’ power with words to be dangerous, seductive. Perhaps it is language itself that he senses as treacherous.

Compelled to abandon this project, Moses turns to the other rebels, where he fares just as poorly. Dathan and Aviram do in fact technically reply to Moses’ overture, but the gist of their reply is Lo na’aleh—We will not come up! In other words, they use words to refuse dialogue, beginning and ending their scathing speech by repeating Lo na’aleh! Their reply is a verbal sneer.

Here, our midrash makes a startling interpretation: “They were tripped up by their own mouth; there is a covenant made with the lips.” Dathan and Aviram find themselves speaking beyond their conscious knowledge. As in what we now call the Freudian slip, their words run away with them: refusing to come up, they will very shortly find themselves on the way down to the underworld. Unwittingly, they foretell their own macabre fate.

Perhaps they are not so much foretelling as testifying to the course they are already set upon. Rejecting language, refusing to treat with Moses, they are already turned toward death. The biblical motif of “the silence of the grave” is implicit here. “The dead shall not praise God, nor any that go down into silence,” says the Psalmist.³⁰Psalm 115:17. See also, among many other examples, Psalms 94:17; 88:12. The dead cannot speak, praise, communicate. Silence becomes in many biblical passages a synonym for death. In choosing not to respond to Moses’ call, the rebels have refused language; they have chosen death over life. If they will not come up, they are already on the way down to the silent shades.

Speech as Trauma
Moses’ angry reaction becomes in the midrash a deep grief.³¹The biblical word vayichar, without the word af, is often translated in this way in the midrash, as though it referred to a generalized emotional agitation. This is presented as a normal human reaction to being ignored by another. But, we may remember, Moses has a particular reason to be pained by such an experience. In terms of his personal history, when his overtures fall on deaf ears, his worst fears are fulfilled. At the Burning Bush, at the very beginning of his mission, he had shied away from God’s call with the words: “But they will not believe me, they will not listen to my voice, they will say: God never appeared to you!” (Ex. 4:1). Pleading his inability to make the people listen to him, he went on to use idioms and metaphors to convey his rejection of God’s mission: “Please, O God, I have never been a man of words, neither yesterday nor the day before, nor now that You have spoken to Your servant; I am heavy of speech and heavy of tongue” (4:10). “Moses spoke to God, saying, ‘The Israelites would not listen to me; how then should Pharaoh listen to me, a man of uncircumcised lips!’” (6:12).

When he complains of being unable to speak, he means he is unable to make people listen to him. If the other refuses to respond, clearly communication has failed. To speak in the fullest sense is to make the other speak, to elicit a response.³²See Sefat Emet Shemot, p. 84 (U-bil’shon ha-passuk . . . kabbalat bnei yisrael). It is this nexus of communication that from the outset arouses dread in Moses. Now, in his scene with the rebels, it seems that his dread is realized in the most painful way. Reaching out to them, his gesture meeting with no response, an old wound reopens: he has failed to speak.

God responds in an unexpected way to Moses’ complaint at the Burning Bush. Instead of reassuring him, promising him communicative power, God asks a question: “What is that in your hand?” This is the scene that follows:

And he replied, “A rod.” He said, “Cast it on the ground.” He cast it on the ground and it became a snake; and Moses fled from it. Then God said to Moses, “Put out your hand and grasp it by the tail”—he put out his hand and seized it, and it became a rod in his hand—“so that they may believe that God, the God of their father, the god of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, did appear to you.”

God said to him further, “Put your hand into your bosom.” He put his hand into his bosom; and when he took it out, his hand was encrusted with snowy scales! And He said, “Put your hand back into your bosom.”—He put his hand back into his bosom; and when he took it out of his bosom, there it was again like his own flesh. (4:2–7)

Instead of healing Moses of his oral dread, God enacts with him the very experience, in the flesh, of his dread. The rod in his hand is no sooner named as such than it becomes a snake—“And Moses fled from it.” An object that has just emerged from his own body, a safe, definable object, which was, in a sense, a symbolic extension of the power of his hand, now arouses in him an uncontrollable, visceral fear. In an instant, as it leaves his hand, it becomes unrecognizable, terrifying. Then, at God’s command, he overcomes his fear and grasps the snake, which re-transforms in his hand into a rod. “This is the first sign,” designed to create belief in the Israelites (4:8); but a sign, as well, to himself, a staging of his own fear of that which emerges from his body and can no longer be mastered.

The second sign is even closer to the bone: his hand emerges from his bosom covered with snowy scales; when he puts it back in his bosom and again withdraws it, it has been restored kivsaro—to be part of his flesh again. Here, Moses’ very flesh goes dead as it goes forth toward the world—a kind of ghastly birth. The very same movement of in-out then brings his hand back to life, to become again his own flesh.

I suggest that these signs, in addition to their public role— to convince the people of the truth of Moses’ claim that God indeed appeared to him—have another purpose: Moses is being brought face to face with the dynamic of his own fear. Both signs reenact the trauma of the act of speech: the movement from an interior to an exterior world, and the dread of what cannot be controlled in that communication. In speaking, in meeting the other, there is sacrifice, there is transformation, even a fantasy of losing oneself. Taken through a flesh-parable of fear, death, and resurrection, Moses must think of the edges of his body, his hand, his skin—and of that quintessential edge which is the mouth.³³The Hebrew word for “two lips”—sefatayim—is also the word for “two edges.” Here, the self touches the outer world; here, volatile changes and exchanges take place. This is the site of desire and fear, the boundary that creates longing and recoil. Between the lips rises the erotic space, the wish to transmit messages, to dissolve boundaries.

A Zone of Vulnerability
This erotic reach gives life to language, flouting the edges of things, enhancing meaning, inspired by an impossible desire. It begins with the first oral experience of the infant at the mother’s breast.

As we have seen, the Torah devotes considerable space to a description of Moses’ infant nursing history. Clearly, if the baby Moses is to be saved from the fate of Israelite male infants, some provision will have to be made for feeding him. But the fact that the Torah gives prominence to this technical issue (the wet nurse is a common resource in ancient aristocracies) signals a site of tension.

Miriam, Moses’ sister, volunteers to bring Moses’ mother to act as a surrogate for the Egyptian princess. But several verses (Ex. 2:7–10) then recount, in slow motion, how his mother is hired and how she feeds her own child, as though to allow the reader to dwell on the paradox of the situation. Moses is to be nurtured by the princess’s hired surrogate—who happens to be his birth mother.

Rashi quotes from the Talmud: “The princess tried out many Egyptian wet nurses, but he refused to nurse, because he was destined to speak with the Shechina” (B. Sotah 12b). Here, the double sense of orality is explicit: the mouth that will speak with God cannot feed from impure breasts. The basic oral impulse—to feed—is in this child inhibited at the earliest stage. Fraught with his future, precociously dedicated to an ultimate conversation, he cannot inhabit his body, reach beyond its edges with full spontaneity. Even when he is reunited with his mother, she nurses him in a double role—as his mother and as the princess’s surrogate.³⁴The idiom, le-hanik le . . . (nursing for . . .) is used in Miriam’s proposal and in the princess’s speech to Moses’ mother. Interestingly, when she nurses him, the text drops the le- idiom— simply, “she nursed him.” Radiations from the future inhibit both tactility and language.

We have noticed the possible connection between this experience of alienation and his later description of his relation to his people: “Did I conceive this entire people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom as a wet nurse carries an infant,’ to the land that You have promised on oath to their fathers?” (Num. 11:12). The bizarre image of Moses as failed male wet nurse suggests a deep frustration, a yearning for a simpler, more organic world of connection. Wishing and fearing to feed, to be fed, to speak, to evoke response, Moses knows the traumatic gap that makes dibbur, the human speech function, a zone of vulnerability.

The World of As-If
Returning now to the Korach narrative, we may appreciate the history of Moses’ despair. When the rebels make their stand, with their dazzling and unanswerable assertion of total holiness, “Moses heard, and he fell on his face” (16:4). After this moment of speechlessness, he attempts to speak to Korach and to Dathan and Aviram. Both overtures are rejected, one in silence and the other in words of repudiation. But the fact that he tries again after Korach has rebuffed him becomes the trigger for an important Talmudic teaching: “From here we learn that one should not persist in a machloket, in a dispute, for Moses sought them out [lit., courted them] in order to come to terms with them through a peaceful dialogue.”³⁵B. Sanhedrin 110a. See also Rashi to 16:12.

The imagery of courtship, with its erotic implication, evokes a Moses who is willing to sacrifice his dignity in his desire for connection with the rebels. A tension is set up between the static hold of machloket and the dynamic, even seductive project of speech. To persist (lit., hold on tight) in machloket is to create a rigid, unchangeable situation. Moses overcomes the compulsive hold of machloket; in terms of his personal history, he overcomes his own impulse to retire into silence. He reaches out beyond his edges to “court” Korach, and then Dathan and Aviram.

The sarcastic reply of the latter raises further questions about language:

And they said, “We will not come up! Is it not enough that you brought us out from a land flowing with milk and honey to have us die in the wilderness, that you would also lord it over us? You have not even brought us a land flowing with milk and honey, and given us possession of fields and vineyards—Will you gouge out these men’s eyes? We will not come up!” (Num. 16:12–14)

Beginning and ending their speech with refusal, Dathan and Aviram repeat, “We will not come up!”³⁶Rashbam reads this as refusing to submit to judgment. As we have noticed, the midrash reads this as referring ominously to their final descent into the earth. We suggested that this descent reflects the movement away from language, downward into silence.

In addition, on a conscious level, the rebels mock Moses’ pretensions: he claims to be bringing them up, to life and to the inheritance of the Land, when the reality is that they will all die in the wilderness. Lo na’aleh implies, then, “Your use of idioms of aliya (ascending) is mere propaganda. The truth behind your rhetoric is yerida, loss, the final descent to death.”³⁷See Or HaChayim to 16:12. The rebels caustically remind Moses that the whole generation is condemned to die in the wilderness; there is no meaning to Moses’ description of a future aliya: “We will not be ascending into the promised future.” In sophisticated fashion, they expose the fictions of his language.

Seforno makes an even more sophisticated suggestion. The rebels say, “You have not even . . . given us possession of fields” (16:14). However, in Hebrew, this reads as a positive statement (lit., “you have given us . . .”). The word not must be carried forward from the previous phrase. However, Seforno reads: “Is it not enough that you have brought us out of a land flowing with milk and honey to this wilderness, but you are also mocking us: your rhetoric pretends that you are giving us an inheritance of fields and vineyards. Every time you speak about the commandments to be fulfilled in the Land, it is as though the Land is really to be ours, with its fields and vineyards.”

In this reading, the rebels are exposing the propaganda language of a ruler who is trying to pull the wool over their eyes—in the text, to gouge out their eyes. Unmasking his rhetoric, the rebels accuse Moses of demagoguery. More than that, they express a deep distrust of language itself. Twice, Seforno uses the word k’eelu (“as if”) about Moses’ way of using language. “You are mocking us, playing with us,” they claim. But perhaps what they cannot tolerate is the very nature of language— playful, metaphorical to the core. Your words are “as if,” they say. Perhaps all significant language is as if, referring only partly to a demonstrable reality.

Their disenchanted sneer is itself unmasked. The world of dibbur, of language, is a world of as if, which acknowledges imagination, desire, the role of eros. The fiction of the future, the ongoing invention of the self, the attempt to dissolve boundaries—these are all part of the project of language. As Jacques Lacan puts it, Les non-dupes errent—“Those who will not be duped are themselves in error.”³⁸Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXI, November 1974. Compulsively suspicious, the rebels attack Moses’ language, ignoring their own implication in the world of dibbur. They may, in fact, be the most duped of all, since their own fantasy world remains un­ acknowledged.

In his struggle for integrity in language, Moses is now faced with the silence of Korach, on the one hand, and with the verbal sneer of Dathan and Aviram, on the other. Both represent a radical rejection of the world of dibbur. Indeed, the drama of this confrontation rises partly from Moses’ own history of refusal to speak. But Moses’ history indicates a struggle with that refusal. From the moment when he describes himself as “of uncircumcised lips,” there is born in him an awareness of an impediment, a block to be overcome.³⁹See Rashi’s translation of “uncircumcised” as “blocked,” on Exodus 6:12.

Uncannily, Moses sees a version of himself in his cousin Korach. Both men, in different ways, are possessed by a suspicion of language. But for the first time Moses hears of his own unknown power with words. Strangely, Korach expresses his fear of that power, so that Moses is compelled to adjust his own sense of incapacity. At the same time, he witnesses as in a distorted mirror the effects of the refusal to speak. Korach’s silence tells of his withdrawal from the life-drama of language, and Dathan and Aviram’s suspicion of metaphor mirrors Moses’ own fastidiousness. Even as they mock him, they perform their own deathward fall into silence.

Eros and Language
In a provocative discussion of Korach’s “disputatious” stance,⁴⁰Machloket (dissension, schismatic behavior) is seen in midrashic sources as Korach’s fatal flaw. Maharal diagnoses Korach’s personality as destructively self-righteous. Speaking from a place of total rightness, of din, such people bring ruin upon the world. Korach avoids debate; he is so “right” that he can make no space for discussion. As “master of dissension,” he suffers from a kind of manic rationality. His words avoid metaphor, real questions, any indication of the human incompleteness that inspires language. In this sense, he represents a resistance to language.

Ironically, in this reading, the machloket (disputatious) mentality avoids debate, argument, the exchange that affects both sides. Maharal’s narrative brings to mind G. K. Chesterton’s provocative statement: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. . . . His mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.”⁴¹G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 19–20. The perfect circle of the mad mind may take the form of a world of wholly holy people, undifferentiated from one another and from themselves, defined by their rightness.

In a different language, a classic narrative of creation tells of how the Infinite One, who encompasses all reality, retracted His light, so as to leave space—a challal panui—in which, through language, to project a world as ours, with boundaries, separations, objects, space, and time. This act of divine self-­ limitation is known as tzimtzum.

R. Nahman of Bratzlav, the nineteenth-century Hassidic master, reshapes this cosmological model, first developed in the kabbalistic teachings of R. Isaac Luria, in order to speak of the creation of cultural worlds, worlds of human meaning. This creation, too, depends on the gap of incompleteness, where the discourse of scholars, for instance, can leave space between them for new worlds of thought to form. Between any two who speak or argue, it is the void allowed by each, the willingness to suspend prejudices, that opens to unpredictable insight.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin writes: “Friendship does not abolish the distance between human beings, but brings that distance to life.”⁴²Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1983), 73. This, too, for R. Nahman, is the role of machloket: to bring to life worlds not yet seen. This gestation requires a space—the irreducible distance between human beings.

Korach, averse to spaces, suspicious of speech, is declared in the Zohar to have “repudiated the creation of the world.” This mystifying statement is profoundly connected with the Lurianic concept of tzimtzum. Korach is allergic to voids, breaches in the perfect circle of rationality, to the erotic reach of language itself. Intelligent, sane, like Chesterton’s madman, he is incapable of the movement of desire.

In this analysis, Korach’s resistance arises out of a profound disorientation in the world. And Moses very well understands his allergic response to language. For Moses, however, a struggle has long been under way to revive the maternal tongue. As we have suggested, this would mean, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, acknowledging the loss of the mother and mourning her loss. To recover language from the repressed state she calls asymbolia, one needs to lose, to experience a void, a break, a renunciation. Sometimes, this is approached precisely by negating the repressed idea (the loss of the mother). Citing Freud, she sees in negation a freeing of the mind that can now partially accept the unacceptable idea. Here the symbolic process may begin, in an acknowledgment through denial.

Perhaps we can hear Moses’ protestations in this way: “I am not a man of words . . . I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue . . . of uncircumcised lips . . .” Perhaps even, “Did I conceive this people, did I give birth to them, that You say to me, Carry them in your bosom, as a wet nurse carries the suckling infant?” Rhetorical questions function as negations, which, in their own way, acknowledge loss. For Moses, a recovery of language would mean a recovery of desire. As part of that process, Moses sees his cousin Korach as mirroring his own struggles with language.

Voids and Differences
But against this background of sameness, Moses’ difference from Korach emerges in high relief. When, for instance, Moses falls on his face, he enacts his speechlessness in the face of a world that he knows well, a world that makes speech redundant (a sea of blue, with no void for desire). But when Moses begins to speak and to “court” the rebels he sets a distance between himself and his cousin, as well as, perhaps, a distance from his former self—a distance to be bridged by language. With gaps and voids comes the erotic reach toward the other.

Mei HaShiloah, the modern Hassidic master, diagnoses Korach’s malaise in terms that are quite similar to the ones we have explored.⁴³Mei HaShiloah, 2, Korach (K’tiv . . .). Korach, he says, has no access to his own void, his chissaron, his incompleteness. Most pitiable of human beings, he is “lost”—a reference to the description of Korach’s disappearance into the earth. Some essential dimension of humanity is blocked from his view. This has to do with differences, with gaps between people and with a similar blindness to his own internal gaps, places of difference from his own conscious self. These inner blind spots make growth impossible.

To be redeemed, Korach would need to discover a critical new awareness of his chissaron, his human shortcomings—and of the difference between himself and Moses. By putting it in these terms, Mei HaShiloah is suggesting that the nub of the story is precisely this question of difference. He imagines a possible reversal for Korach’s locked-in state. In a sense, there must be such a possibility—a human being must be capable of moments of revelation; otherwise, the perfect, narrow circle of madness will prevail: an unthinkable prospect. The reversal must come in a moment of uncanny insight: Korach and Moses are different, one aware of his chissaron, the other not. At least insofar as Korach might acknowledge this difference, he might gain access to his own internal void and—like Moses—begin to speak.

What Moses comes in this narrative to represent, then, is the movement toward language. Acknowledging himself as aral sefatayim—“of uncircumcised lips/edges” (Ex. 6:12)—he recognizes the “foreskin,” the impediment, that needs to be removed. Now, a project is born: the opening of his body and mind to a sense of its own incompleteness—a circumcision of sorts.

With this movement comes a sense of his difference from himself. No longer all of a piece with himself or with the world, aware of his edges, internal and external, Moses is reborn as a speaking being, capable of symbolic thinking and therefore of creating his own specific world. A fantasy of wholeness is relinquished. The philosopher Jacques Maritain speaks of “some abiding despair in every great poet, a certain wound in him that has set free the creativeness.”⁴⁴See Marion Milner, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (London: Routledge, 1988), 208. The awareness of a wound, an “abiding despair,” brings Moses too to a new voice.

Such a history of Moses reaches us by way of indirection. In a sense, imagining Moses as a great poet may seem a literary luxury. In the traditional view, everything important that Moses said was a transmission of God’s words, so that we might say that his own creativity, his own poetic voice, is neither here nor there. However, at least in the many moments when he is speaking in his own voice—to God, to his people, to the Egyptians, and to himself—there is clearly a self, a subjectivity at work, which is, with all its difference, a recognizably human subjectivity. Moses’ prophetic greatness has everything to do with the singular force of his language. Most importantly, there is a dynamic, a movement of sensibility at work, reflexive, aware of its own chissaron—of the wound at the root of his being.

The great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls this chissaron the “fracture” that opens one up to revelation. This fracture breaks one open and allows the shock of otherness—the relationship with the face of the other, which is the immediate arena of revelation. When one welcomes one’s neighbor, when one greets him with hineni (“Here I am”), one exposes oneself to a divine worry—the “uncontainable impact of God’s Infinity”—which is divine inspiration.⁴⁵Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 207. Because of this fracture, one’s own I is called into question: “The voice coming from another shore teaches transcendence itself.”⁴⁶Ibid., 171. Prejudices, rigidities, easy assumptions about the other are suspended in such “face-to-face” moments.

Moses is the key figure in such a theology. His stammer gives him access to a relation with an Other that is “better than self-possession.”⁴⁷Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 209. “The language of the Old Testament is so suspicious of any rhetoric without a stammer that it has as its chief prophet a man ‘slow of speech and of tongue.’” ⁴⁸The Levinas Reader, 197. His is to be a language that never forgets its stammer, the difference between inner and outer worlds, between self and other.

“There is a crack in everything”
One last witness to the connection between Moses and Korach is the modern Hassidic master Sefat Emet. He takes us to the beginning of the world—and to the end of the Korach narrative. He too tells of the chissaron, the incompleteness from which the world suffers. This is an essential incompleteness, which allows, on occasion, the victory of hessed (grace) over din (strict justice). We yearn for wholeness, precisely because, like the troubadours’ amour de loin, it is far from us.

There is a rupture in human experience—a crack in the cup—which generates this yearning; desire builds toward a transcendent source of grace—hessed—such as the Sabbath. The inherent turbulence of the world is exposed at the very moment when creation is completed, in the twilight moment before Shabbat. At this moment of greatest tension, “between the suns,” the demons of chaos (mezikin—destructive angels, as Sefat Emet calls them) are aroused and, with the onset of Shabbat, laid to rest. The world is made whole for the Shabbat moment.⁴⁹Leonard Cohen writes of this moment: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in” (“Anthem”).

Here, Sefat Emet brings us back to the Korach narrative. In this primal twilight, “the mouth of the earth (pi ha’aretz) was created.”⁵⁰See Pirkei Avot 5:8. This is the crack into which Korach and his followers vanish. It represents all the chissaron—the fracture in the world—that Korach set himself to deny. Demonic forces take their revenge on him for his manic rationality. He has closed out the dynamic of longing that lives in language. He has lost the sense of the gaps and edges of human experience, and with it the ability to be permeated by infinity. Like a stone, he sinks into silence.

Conclusive Meaning: The Mouth of the Earth
In bearing witness to Korach, Sefat Emet is also implicitly telling us about the different history of Moses. For Moses too, we have suggested, knows about the fantasy world of totality. For him it is perhaps more real than for any other human being. And yet he is moved toward others, toward Israel, toward himself, across the gaps. Increasingly, he comes to know that he was born into the cracked world in order to let light in. Language will be necessary, even a source of blessing, if he can find the stammering voice with which to speak.

The final scene, the showdown between Moses and Korach, is initiated by Moses’ speech of warning:

By this you shall know that it was God who sent me to do all these things; that they were not of my own devising [lit., not from my heart]: if these men die as all men do, if their lot be the common fate of all mankind, it was not God who sent me. But if God brings about something unheard-of [lit., if God creates a new creation], so that the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, you shall know that these men have spurned God. (Num. 16:28–30)

More than a warning, this speech is Moses’ theological confrontation with the rebels. It is about God and revelation and difference. Mostly, it is about knowledge: the approaching cataclysm will make the truth of their history apparent. And indeed, “The ground under them burst asunder, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up” (16:31–32). The text insists on the grotesque oral imagery of Moses’ scenario. That the ground bursts asunder and the rebels go down to the underworld is apparently not sufficient to convey the scene. The earth must become a maw yawning wide, swallowing up its victims. When does this moment of oral horror arrive? With precision, the narrative presents the timing: “Scarcely had he finished speaking all these words . . .” (16:31).

When Moses stops speaking, when he closes his mouth, the earth opens up its mouth and swallows. Speaking and eating— two oral functions—are in tension. As long as Moses speaks, the mouth of the earth remains closed. When it opens, it is not to speak but to consume. The terrible alternative to spoken words is the cataclysm of final and irrefutable revelations. Moses had, as it were, exhausted (k’chaloto . . . et kol ha-devarim) all the resources of language, so that nothing remained but the brute apocalypse. The limitation of human language, indeed, is that words can never achieve that finality, the last word, of the consuming earth. Moses speaks to the very last moment, in order, in a sense, to hold an option open. Orality is at issue here. Moses speaks not only to warn but also to exercise the power of language, to keep worlds in play. When he closes his mouth, the earth opens its mouth to devastating effect.

In this horrifying scene, Moses stands at the very edge of the pit. When it yawns open and closes over the dead, something conclusive has happened. The truth of Moses’ story has been manifested. But this is a situation of final resort. With what feelings does Moses—and those like him who inhabit the difficult ground of language at the edge of the pit—view the closure of the story? The scenario seems to be his idea, since there is no mention of a command from God. Perhaps the apocalyptic scene represents his sense of the limits as well as the power of language. Once again, his early anxiety about not being heard is vindicated. Language displays its ultimate weakness. He is heard by God but not by the people. In the end, only the blatant theatricality of the earth’s mouth can bring the rebellion to an end.

The Paradox of Song
But the rabbinic sages will not allow the matter to rest there. In spite of the conclusive ending of the story, they insist on reopening it. “Are the Korach conspirators destined to re-ascend from the underworld?”⁵¹B. Sanhedrin 108a. There are a number of hypothetical answers to the question. But the question itself is significant. Something is not quite closed: the mouth can still ask questions. After all, there is the mysterious statement a few chapters later: “And the children of Korach did not die” (26:11). A full verse is given to the statement, leaving an impression of an unfinished thought.⁵²Typically, the biblical verse is composed of two halves, separated by a punctuation mark, the etnachta. This verse ends in “mid-verse.” And Korach’s children are later recorded as the singers in the Temple: several of the Psalms are attributed to the sons of Korach. But were they not swallowed up in the general cataclysm of “all Korach’s people”? (16:32).

One resolution is offered in the Talmud: “A place was reserved for them in the underworld and they sat there and sang.”⁵³B. Sanhedrin 110a. At the last moment, they repent; or, more precisely, they experience pangs (hirhurim) of penitence—qualms, pangs of worry. They crack open, disrupted, their humanity restored. Perhaps Moses’ words did not fall on deaf ears after all.

The songs of Korach’s sons are there in the Psalms for all to read. Some, particularly Psalm 88, record the very experience of those whose voices survive to register their own redemption. Repentance and song are forces that reopen the most closed of narratives.

Here, we return to Moses, whose own history includes the paradox of song. It is, again, Sefat Emet, who spoke of the crack through which grace may enter, who draws our attention to Moses’ song-moment at the Red Sea: Az yashir moshe—“Then Moses sang/would sing . . .” (Ex. 15:1).⁵⁴Sefat Emet, Vayikra (Pesach), 79. Rashi reads the unusual future-tense narrative form as a moment of intentionality: “Then there came up in his mind the intention to sing a song.” He also quotes the midrashic reading: “This is a biblical reference to the revival of the dead!” Sefat Emet comments: what Moses actually sings is that part of his internal song that lends itself to the words of the world. But a residue remains within, the fantasy of praise that cannot pass—not yet—the barrier of consciousness. This unconscious life is what the midrash refers to when it says that the text hints at the resurrection of the dead. Then, infinite desires, expressed only in fragmentary ways in this world, will find full expression. This is the intention that comes up in Moses’ mind.

Beyond the words of the song that Moses authors, there is the residue of what cannot yet be sung. “Not yet” sustains the intuition of ultimate possibility. Moses’ intention of a future song emerges from his specific experience of speechlessness and song. Beyond his relation with his cousin Korach, there are songs that will yet find words: Korach’s sons will sing, and Moses’ song will redeem death itself.