[Picture: Moses said to God that he first needed to gain the confidence of his own people that his mission was divinely sanctioned before the Pharaoh might take heed of his words as well.  Free Image - CC0 Creative Commons - Designed and Uploaded by LisaLove2Dance to Pixabay]

[For articles on the “Sabbath of Va-Era" in Hebrew, click here]

Updated on January 19, 2023

Rabbi Dr. Yossi Feintuch was born in Afula and holds a Ph.D. in American history from Emory University in Atlanta. He taught American history at Ben-Gurion University.

Author of the book US Policy on Jerusalem.

He is the rabbi of Congregation Shalom Bayit in Bend, Oregon.

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Three times (twice in this weekly portion of Va-Era) Moses brings up with God the issue of his speech impediment: ''Behold, the Children of Israel have not listened to me, so how will Pharaoh listen to me? And I have sealed lips'' (Exodus 6:12). And again: ''Behold! I have sealed lips, so how shall Pharaoh heed me?'' (v. 30).  Why does Moses come back to this matter though God was evidently aware of what Moses first said to Him on Mt. Sinai, even before his going to Egypt from the land of Midian: ''...for I am heavy of mouth and heavy of speech'' (4:10)?

[Picture: Three times (twice in this weekly portion of Va-Era) Moses brings up with God the issue of his speech impediment... Free Image - CC0 Creative Commons - Designed and Uploaded by StockSnap to Pixabay]

Moses' repeated reference to his stammer mirrored his concern that because of it his mission to convince the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go and serve their God in the desert would fail. Since his own fellow Israelites would not hear him out -- indeed, they first did not: ''So Moses spoke accordingly to the Children of Israel, but they did not heed Moses...'' (6:9) -- then surely, the Pharaoh wouldn't either. That argument reminds me of my utter astonishment each time when I would see the wife and children of an ice cream maker on the island, I once lived on, buying ice cream from a competing store; they themselves preferred the superior quality of the other (imported) brand. Indeed, the other factory closed its doors before long; when the immediate family of that ice cream maker did not eat his own product, why would other people do so?

[Picture: Three times (twice in this weekly portion of Va-Era) Moses brings up with God the issue of his speech impediment... Free Image - CC0 Creative Commons - Designed and Uploaded by CDD20 to Pixabay]

And similarly, with the rare exceptions of U.S. presidents James Polk and Donald Trump who won their one-term presidency without winning their home state, (Woodrow Wilson lost it as an incumbent president), no president won the presidency without winning his home state.  If you can't sell your policies (or personality) in your own state, it's unlikely that you would be able to do so in other states.

[Picture: And similarly, with the rare exceptions of U.S. presidents James Polk and Donald Trump who won their one-term presidency without winning their home state, (Woodrow Wilson lost it as an incumbent president), no president won the presidency without winning his home state.  If you can't sell your policies (or personality) in your own state, it's unlikely that you would be able to do so in other states. Free Image - CC0 Creative Commons - Designed and Uploaded by TheDigitalArtist to Pixabay]

Likewise, Moses said to God that he first needed to gain the confidence of his own people that his mission was divinely sanctioned before the Pharaoh might take heed of his words as well.  It would take, however, nine plagues to convince the Israelites of it, before they readied themselves for the Exodus with its complex logistics, seeing that Moses' mission to them was real. And even then, the monumental Exodus event might have attracted only a fraction of the Israelites in Egypt with the bulk of them staying there. Yet, had the Pharaoh accepted Moses’ divine message even after the ninth plague, like the Israelites eventually did, the devastating tenth plague would have never befallen him.

But the people might have wised up from their slow familiarization with and acceptance of Moses' stammer.  Had Moses been an endowed orator there would likely be antagonists within the people who would argue that Moses enchanted the people as a spellbinder. They would have argued – indeed, as some would anyway do --- that Moses captivated their heart and made them accept his false ideas, not only about preparing them for the Exodus, but later on in the Sinai desert, when he delivered God's word to the people. However, with Moses as a stutterer it would become clear that Moses spoke truth to the people; the people who had to be patient with his discomfiting slow delivery of God's word, while having the opportunity in real time to dwell on and scrutinize his messages. In accepting Moses' words, they sent the message that his words were truthful and not mere demagoguery; they were not mesmerized by Moses' fluency but were rather fully convinced of his authenticity as God's envoy to them.

[Picture: Had Moses been an endowed orator there would likely be antagonists within the people who would argue that Moses enchanted the people as a spellbinder. The copyright holder in this photo has not been found. Therefore, the use is made under section 27A of the Copyright Law. The main rights holder, please contact: yehezkeally@gmail.com]

Or as the stuttering Roman Claudius said to his senators that what a man has to say is more important than how fast he gets to do it, the Israelites must have felt that Moses knew what he said to them if only because of his real difficulty to say it.  And that he must have meant what he said -- it was not an ego trip or a coerced agenda that drove him to speak -- for it was not easy for him to say even what he meant.

The Sfat Emet commentary sees another angle in Moses' tri-reference to his speech impediment -- Moses the leader who loves his people; should the people walk astray and swerve from the divine messages that Moses delivered to them, then Moses would want God to know that they only did so not because they rebuffed God's word but because he, Moses, failed to convey it clearly due to his flawed speech.

Finally, in-as-much-as it was pertinent for our narrator to note Moses’ speech impediment even thrice, so it was for him to note, when Moses and Aaron’s began the process that would yield the Exodus, that both were presently octogenarians, with Aaron being three years older.  The point here might be the same one that Rabbi Yitzchak Yaacov Reines made in one of the Zionist congresses early in the 20th Century replying to a claim that the Zionist movement ought to be led by young, rather than old people. Rabbi Rhines quoted in his speech the verse: ‘’Moses was eighty years old, and Aaron was eighty-three when they spoke to Pharaoh’’ (7:7). For Rhines it was the older generation -- in his time and in Egypt right before the Exodus -- that proved to be more pro-actively revolutionary in changing the status quo than the more passive young Hebrews who resigned themselves to slavery, and even chastised Moses for trying to change it:’’...you have made our very scent abhorrent in the eyes of Pharaoh and the eyes of his servants’’ (5:21). Indeed, had the young king of Israel, Rehoboam, son of King Solomon, listened to the advice of his father's old counselors and lessened the burden of taxes, rather than heed the counter advice of the young kids on the bloc to increase it, he might have kept his kingdom intact, rather than lose its bulk to Jeroboam... Not unlike the elder counselors of King Solomon, so were Moses and Aaron revolutionary in their envisioning of the Exodus.

[In the picture: Moses and Aaron, who is the leader? The image is a screenshot from the YouTube video: "יציאת מצרים - משה ואהרון - לאיתוראן"]

[For articles on the “Sabbath of Va-Era" in Hebrew, click here]