Arrested Development Va'Era 2023

"Heavy of Mouth" and "Heavy of Tongue" on Moses' Speech Difficulty, by Jeffry Tigay, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research

History has known other creative geniuses and national leaders, from Demosthenes to Felix Mendelsohn and Churchill, who worked their effect on humanity despite speech impediments. The bible viewed Moshe as an agent of God whose success owed nothing to his natural endowments, but only to the persuasion worked by the words and deeds he uttered and performed under divine direction.

The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodos by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

...let me emphasize that Moses, too, belongs to the complex party of those who block God’s message of redemption. In his protest, in his ironic interrogation of God’s narrative, in his questioning of the people’s “fitness for redemption,” he essentially refuses the role to which God has called him. The heart of his refusal is in these last words: “… I am of uncircumcised lips.”

Their power and poignancy can be estimated if one asks why he uses this particular form of kal vachomer logic, moving from minor to major conclusion: if the children of Israel would not listen, how can I expect Pharaoh to listen? A simpler argument might have been to speak of Pharaoh’s proven obduracy: Moses and Aaron have already experienced his willful deafness (“Who is God that I should listen to His voice?” [5:2]). Indeed, this deafness had resulted, as we have noticed, in a tragic tightening of the stranglehold of slavery. Why, then, should he listen this second time? This, however, is not the argument that Moses uses. In his words, the real pain emerges with great lucidity: it is a “hearing problem” that besets him. To put it very simply, Moses is saying, “I cannot make them listen—I am of foreskinned lips.” What he is expressing is a sense of impotence: “I am incapable of communicating with either of my two audiences—the evidence is devastatingly clear if even those who have an interest in hearing me will not listen!”

Exodus Rabbah 1:26

"And she brought him unto Pharaoh's daughter," etc (Exodus 2:10). Pharaoh's daughter used to kiss and hug Moses, loved him as if he were her own son, and would not allow him out of the royal palace. because he was so handsome, everyone was eager to see him, and whoever saw him could not turn his eyes away from him.

Pharaoh also used to kiss and hug him, and Moses used to grab at Pharaoh's crown and put it on his own head. The magicians of Egypt sitting there said, "We fear this one who grabs Pharaoh's crown and puts it on his own head may be the one, as we have been saying, who will take your kingdom away from you." Some of the magicians suggested that he be slain, others that he burned alive.

But Jethro, who sat among them, said, "This child has yet no understanding. Why not test him? Place before him a vessel with a gold piece and burning coal in it. If he reaches for the gold, he has understanding, and you may slay him. But if he reaches for the coal, he has no understanding, and a stance of death is not called for."

The items were brought at once. Then, as Moses put forth his hand to grab the gold, Gabriel came down and shoved it to the side, so that Moses not only seized the goal but also put the hand with the coal into his mouth and burned his tongue. As a result, he became slow of speech and slow of tongue.

Aviva Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture, 11-12.

... the people who left Egypt were perhaps unfit for redemption, incapable of hearing God's word in any real fullness. Their hopes of leaving the land of terror were shriveled by the cramped conditions of their nurture; they were cramped hopes, Egyptian-shaped hopes. Like the patient entering analysis, who can have only a distorted view of the process awaiting him, of the way in which it will expand the underlying structures of experience, the Israelites leave Egypt "more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads than one / Who sought the thing he loved" (William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey").

And like the analyst whose hopes for the patient are radically different from those of the patient himself, God begins a process with His people in a stage of arrested development, a process that will lead them into fuller, unimagined life.

However, in this scenario, in which God's hopes and people's hopes are profoundly different, there is a hidden assumption about the arrested "truer self" of Israel, the self that harks back to the foundational narratives of Genesis. Both analyst and patient share a hope for the unfolding of that truer self. But such a shared hope is at first almost invisible; only the discordance is visible.