Shemot: January 9, 2021/25 Tevet 5781

This Shabbat, we begin the Book of Exodus, and with it, the Jewish nation's origin story. While we have been reading the stories of Creation and the Patriarchs up to this point, and they are certainly worthwhile stories, they are just the prologue to the story which will take up the remainder of the Torah, that of the Israelites' journey to become a free nation in their own land. This journey will come to its climax in around a month, with the giving of the Ten Commandments, but before we get to that point, our new story must begin.

So, we have the Israelites living in Egypt, slaves under the new Pharaoh's reign, who has also decreed that all newborn boys be drowned in the Nile. A prominent Levite couple has a newborn son, and the wife, Yocheved, hides the infant in a papyrus basket and sends him floating down the river, where he is found and adopted by one of Pharaoh's daughters. The baby, given the name "Moses", grows up in the palace as a prince, but he always takes an interest in the welfare of the slaves and the good operation of the slave system. After an altercation resulting in his killing one of the taskmasters, Moses is forced to flee for his life, ending up in Midian. There, he is hosted by the sheik, Jethro, and ends up marrying into the family, taking Jethro's daughter Zipporah as his wife. One day while working as a shepherd, Moses ends up coming across a burning bush through which God commissions him to go back to Egypt and demand freedom for the Israelites.

When charged with this critical task, Moses protests, saying he has never been a man of words and calling himself "heavy of speech and heavy of tongue." From this, our sages understand that Moses had some sort of speech impediment and was a stutterer. God assures Moses that he is the right man for the job and tells him that Aaron, his older brother, will go with him to Pharaoh and speak where Moses struggles, as Aaron is a much more eloquent speaker than Moses. One brother's challenge is made up for by the other brother's strength, the essence of teamwork. When I used to be involved with the ballroom dance club at UConn, one of the FAQs on the website was "What if I have two left feet?" and the answer was, "We'll find you a partner with two right feet, and you'll be all set". Nobody is good at everything, and the key is to find a support system that makes up for one's weak points.

I have often been critical of the movement within the neurodiversity community which seeks to change the perception of deviations from "normal" from disabilities to just different ways of being. I can understand the desire to not want to feel defective. Nobody wants to feel like they are somehow broken, but at the same time, it's self-deluding to pretend that disabilities don't exist. We just need to normalize them - some people have disabilities. That's fine; if they can be fixed, so much the better, and if not, that's okay too. As Mark Herdon's autistic narrator Christopher Boone says in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, "I'm meant to say that [his classmates] have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But that is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding Relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like Father who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put into his coffee to stop him getting fat, or Mrs. Peters who wears a beige coloured hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses…" The thing is, most people don't distinguish between "disability" and "inability" in a meaningful way. Just because someone has a hard time doing something, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are totally unable to do it, nor does it mean that they are unable to do other things. Moses has difficulty getting his words out, but that is not to say that he is any less wise or even eloquent in forming his ideas. He just struggles to express them verbally.

Astute readers will notice that I translated Moses's protestation slightly differently from the conventional self-evaluation, "slow of speech and slow of tongue". I chose the word "heavy" both because it is the direct translation of the Hebrew and also because it better represents the experience of at least one person who stutters. When my speech becomes halting and broken, it's not because my speech is any slower; it's that my mind is operating at a different, usually faster, speed than my mouth is capable of getting the words out. This results in me having to express ideas that are not yet fully put into words and then having to backtrack to make things understandable to my audience. I have been told that this makes me seem unintelligent or hesitant when people first meet me, but the more people hear me talk, the more that perception changes. On the other hand, I have always been told that my writing was a strength. When I write, I have the opportunity to stop, take stock of what I am saying, and then alter it if necessary before making it available for consumption. Now, obviously, I'm not sure how good of a writer Moses might have been, but even if he were a fantastic writer, it wouldn't have helped him in a society where literacy was far from universal. Just like God could see past Moses's speech difficulty and provide him with appropriate accommodation to do his job, so can we look at our challenges to find ways to accomplish our goals and missions in our own lives.