Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Drash Va'era 5766- Uncircumcised Tongues

After Moses’ first disaster talking to Pharaoh and the Israelites, God talks to Moses again and tells him to talk to the Israelites again, who are so stressed out, they promptly ignore them. Then God tells a despondent Moses to talk to Pharaoh once again, and Moses objects. God tells Moses that he will use signs and wonders to make sure everyone knows God’s power. First there is the wonder of the staff being turned into a snake, then the staff eating the other snakes. Then begins the plagues, where we have the first seven of the ten.

Moses, in response to God’s command to go see Pharaoh a second time, complains

And Moses spoke before the Lord, saying, Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of uncircumcised lips? (Ex. 6:12)

The text then does a detailed genealogy of the Levites, ending with the verses (ex. 6:26-30)

26. These are Aaron and Moses, to whom the Lord said, Bring out the people of Israel from the land of Egypt by their hosts. 27. These are those who spoke to Pharaoh King of Egypt, to bring out the people of Israel from Egypt; these are Moses and Aaron. 28. And it came to pass on the day when the Lord spoke to Moses in the land of Egypt, 29. That the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, I am the Lord; speak to Pharaoh king of Egypt all that I say to you. 30. And Moses said before the Lord, Behold, I am of uncircumcised lips, and how shall Pharaoh listen to me?

These two passages appear to be describing the same incident where God talks to Moses and Aaron. Interestingly in both cases Moses uses a phrase found only here: uncircumcised lips. What are uncircumcised lips? What does this phrase mean? Once before in Exodus 4:10-11 Moses objects:

And Moses said to the Lord, O my Lord, I am not a man of words yesterday nor the day before, nor since you have spoken to your servant; but I am a heavy mouth, and a heavy tongue. And the Lord said to him, Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? Is it not I the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth, and teach you what you shall say.

As discussed last week, one Midrash blames this on an injury while Moses was young, and he burned his mouth. But on evidence from Gods reply, the Midrash for these verses goes with the obvious answer to God’s rhetorical question: this was an intentional defect in Moses; if God wants to remove it, he will. The cause however does not help us understand what uncircumcised lips are. The word for uncircumcised has some interesting meanings. When not linked with speech it shows up thirty eight times in Tanach, and by context in these sentences has two meanings: In its natural state and dirty foreigner.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a final research paper for a class on medieval Judaism. While I’ll talk about the subject for that final in the Drash for Parshat Mishpatim, it’s the process of research here that I find interesting. Many of the primary sources I’m working on have no easily accessible nor reliable translation. Thus I have to translate the material from Medieval Hebrew. The commentator I’m translating, also named Shlomo, had a similar problem, though with a different language. Rabbi Shlomo b. Yitzchak, know to the world by his nickname Rashi, was one of the most prolific commentators in all of Jewish history, writing a commentary not just to Torah, but to all of the Talmud. Using a very literal method, he more or less gives his reader the bottom line about a phrase in the work he is commenting on. Often, they are incredibly short statements. For example, there’s the lead up to my tag line in Ber 62a. Compared to the Talmud obliquely describing the “talking and laughing and doing his requirements” of the Sage Rav, Rashi makes clear what going on: “he’s having sex.” Rashi, who spoke French, also understood that sometimes words don’t translate easily and would place French words transliterated in to Hebrew to explain a strange vocabulary word.

As I read Rashi in the original, it’s not easy. Italian printers, centuries after Rashi, decided their texts need a little visual something for segregating commentary from text. So they typeset Rashi in a wildly different font from most Hebrew. We today call this script Rashi script after the texts which get printed in this font, not the font’s inventor. Secondly, Rashi writes in a derivative of Rabbinic Hebrew, and I’m just learning Rabbinic Hebrew. While the basic rules of grammar are close to Biblical, they are not quite the same, and, even worse, Rabbinic Hebrew added a lot of colloquial expressions. For example the phrase for having sex I mentioned above is literally “serve his bed.” Thinking about the trouble I have in my studies, I have a different Midrash why Moses was not a man of words with an uncircumcised tongue.

Moses had to have known at least three languages: Hebrew, Egyptian, and Midianite. The forty years prior to the Exodus would have been in Midianite. After forty years of an exclusive use of a language, people forget a lot of their former use of language. Of course they do not know the contemporary colloquialisms. What this means is that his slowness of speech and unformed words were a matter of always being the foreigner in his speech, no matter who he talked to. He reminds me of my own struggles with Hebrew and Aramaic. I can put together a sentence and translate, but it takes me a long time, it is far from instantaneous and always requires a dictionary. Uncircumcised lips means with a naturally foreign accent and demeanor, one that makes the speech of Moses far from convincing. Imagine replacing Charleton Heston with Bob Marley as Moses in The Ten Commandments. To American audiences at least, particularly in the 1950’s but even today, this would be bordering on the ridiculous. As hard as we try not to be racist, Moses has to be the white all-American reciting from King James, not a black Jamaican with alien speech patterns. Such would be true of Pharaoh and the Israelites when Moses the Midianaite at first talks for God to Egyptian and Hebrew audiences. Moses knows this, and does have a better speaker there: Aaron, though with the “foreigner” tagging along even Aaron loses creditability.

God’s solution to all this is "Go anyway". At the burning bush God intimates that Moses not being a man of words is intentional. In the text of Exodus 6, we get two other responses. One response is these two who speak for God are not foreigners at all. They are direct line descendents from Levi. Their mother Yocheved, and grandfather Kohath are Levi’s grandchildren. Their father Amram was among Levi’s great grandchildren. They are far from foreign.

The second is what takes up the rest of the narrative of this portion. In the Perkei Avot there is this quote from R. Simeon b. Gamliel:

All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence. Study is not the most important thing, but deed; whoever indulges in too many words brings about sin. (M. Avot 1:17)

From the time Moses and Aaron begin to act instead of talk things change. By the end of this portion they have not only the attention of all the Israelites, but even Pharaoh’s magicians concede “This is the finger of God!” On the other hand, the too many words of their first attempts not only didn’t work, they had a negative effect. Being a man of deeds and not a man of words turned out not to be a bad thing at all.

As Mark Twain once summarized this whole argument “Thunder is impressive, but lighting gets the job done!” Study is of course important, the rabbis were clear that knowledge led to action. But in the end it is what we do that matters. Moses may not have spoken well in Egypt, but he did the job and by doing so succeeded in freeing the Israelites. The lesson of uncircumcised lips is that we don’t always have to talk our way out of things; sometimes we won’t be able to. Often doing the good deed is far more effective.

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