This article was first
published by Jewish Ideas Daily (www.jewishideasdaily.com) and is reprinted with
permission.
Stuttering, the curious speech impediment that causes a few percent of the
mostly male population to succumb unpredictably and unwillingly to occasional
muteness, most recently received attention with the Oscar-winning film The
King’s Speech, the story of Britain’s wartime King George VI.
The
discussion engendered by the film reminds us that the origin of stuttering
remains mysterious. None of the purely physical theories – involving brain
function, genes or speaking technique – has yielded a clear explanation.
Psychoanalytic theory offers more interesting clues: It observes that stuttering
often begins after an early childhood event, and it builds on the general
observation that most stutterers do not stutter when they speak
alone.
These observations are particularly interesting from the Jewish
perspective, because Moses himself likely stuttered. Indeed, the story of Moses
may hold a key to the origins of stuttering.
First, though, was Moses a
stutterer at all? In the first weekly Torah portion of Exodus, God speaks to
Moses at the burning bush after his flight from Egypt, announcing that He will
liberate the Israelite slaves and instructing Moses to return to Egypt to lead
the mission. Moses is reluctant to accept, and from Moses’s own mouth we hear
the reason for his reluctance: He is kaved peh, heavy of mouth. God seems to
acknowledge the impediment, assuring Moses that He “will be with your mouth and
teach you what to say.”
Moses begs God to send someone else; God is angry
but finally agrees to send Moses’s brother Aaron with him as his spokesman in
Egypt. Aaron performs this function until, toward the end of the Torah, Moses
gains a stunning eloquence.
Still, how do we know that Moses’s speech
impediment was stuttering and not something else? There are differences of
opinion from the earliest commentaries.
Some say Moses had acquired a
foreign dialect after his many years in Midian. Others say he felt his older
brother Aaron merited the position. But stuttering is the most credible
candidate.
Rashi says that kaved peh approximates the verb balbe in Old
French, “to stutter.”
Also, the common Hebrew word for “stutter” is the
onomatopoeic gimgum. Recall Moses’s plea to God at the burning bush: “I am not a
man of words, not since yesterday, nor since the day before yesterday, nor since
You first spoke to Your servant, for I am heavy of mouth and heavy of
speech.”
In Hebrew, “not,” “nor” and “nor since” are all the word gam
(also). Moses is saying gam... gam... gam – very like gimgum.
Samson
Raphael Hirsch, the 19th-century German rabbi renowned for his etymological
mastery of the Hebrew language, explicitly refers to Moses as a
stutterer.
Of Moses’s protestation that he is orel sfatayim,
“uncircumcised of the lips,” Hirsch says that in the Torah’s nomenclature, orel
(uncircumcised) means “unpliant,” referring to “one who has no control over the
faculty with which he is naturally endowed.”
This is a perfect
description of stuttering: There is no physical impediment or injury but, at
times, an insurmountable lack of control. “Moses is saying,” explains Hirsch,
“‘Even if I overcome the clumsiness of my vocal organs, I still lack the actual
power of speech, the right words fail me.’” Indeed, one might ask whether God
would have appointed Moses as His emissary if Moses had suffered from a physical
malformation, since stringent provisions in the Torah make persons with such
physical defects ineligible for important tasks of Divine service.
THERE
IS one more clue: The second weekly Torah portion of Exodus tells us that when
Moses spoke to the Israelites, they did not heed him “because of shortness of
breath and hard work.”
Commentators have said that the phrase refers to
the condition of the overworked Israelite slaves, but it may just as well refer
to Moses. For a stutterer, speaking before a multitude is hard work; the effort
to finish one’s words typically leads precisely to a shortness of breath.
Perhaps the Israelites lost patience and faith as they watched Moses desperately
struggling to get words out of his mouth.
If, indeed, Moses was likely a
stutterer, we must return to the question of origin: How did it start? The
rabbis of the midrash were not unaware that stuttering usually begins after some
childhood incident.
As recounted in Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Book of
Legends, the midrash says Moses was so handsome that “whoever saw him could not
turn his eyes away from him.”
Young Moses “used to grab Pharaoh’s crown
and put it on his own head.” Court magicians prophesied that Moses would usurp
Pharaoh’s power, and some counseled killing him: But Jethro (the priest of
Midian and Moses’ future father-in-law), 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 a 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 sentence of death is not called for.”
The items were
presented to Moses, who reached for the gold; but the angel Gabriel shoved the
child’s hand aside, “so that Moses not only seized the coal 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.”
So, it seems there was a definite
starting point to Moses’ stutter. But should we take the midrash literally when
it says Moses burned his tongue, causing a physical impediment? Probably not.
Midrashim are often allegorical, alluding to something that may not be
immediately apparent. Here, it is deceptively easy to imagine that Moses, his
hand shoved away from the gold, would seize the coal; it is easy to envision
small children putting things in their mouths.
But the angel merely shoved
Moses’ hand away from the gold; why did the child grab the coal? And why would
he put not just his hand but the hot coal in his mouth? Hadn’t the coal already
burned his hand? Aren’t we hard-wired to drop a coal that is burning hot? We
must view the result as somehow self-inflicted, with a degree of intention. What
we may have here is a protest, an affirmation of self-control after such control
was momentarily lost with the angel’s shove.
Moses did something that the
benevolent angel could not have intended. He asserted his self-control in the
most unassailable way possible, although it meant grievously wounding
himself.
If this is the case, we are faced with another fundamental
question: Why does a wound that is not physical persist into adulthood? A person
changes profoundly between three years old and 80 (the age at which, according
to tradition, Moses spoke to Pharaoh); why does the susceptibility endure? It
must be that the first manifestation of a stutter is not a culminating result of
some underlying cause, like a trauma, with the rest of one’s stuttering life a
residue, but rather a humble beginning. The child experiences something for the
first time; that something is a theme that stays and grows with him and is,
perhaps, never undone.
In Moses’s case, of course, it seems to have been
undone. That, too, is far from explained.
The writer lives in Helsinki,
Finland. He can be reached at samuel.davidkin@welho.com. This article was first
published by Jewish Ideas Daily (www.jewishideasdaily.com) and is reprinted with
permission.