Word (Term): :ערל שפתיים, aral sefatayim, “a person of uncircumcised, obstructed, or sealed lips”
Context: When God asks Moshe to speak to Pharaoh, Moshe responds that he will not be able to complete the mission properly because he is ערל שפתיים, aral sefatayim. (Exodus 6:12 and 30).
Midrash: There is a famous midrash which explains how Moshe came to have difficulty speaking: As a child in the palace, Moshe was much beloved by everyone, including Pharaoh. He would sit in Pharaoh’s lap and play with his crown, putting it on his own head. Pharaoh’s advisors warned Pharaoh that this child could be the troublemaker they had foreseen. A test was devised to ascertain little Moshe’s intelligence – two piles were put before him, one of glowing hot coals and the other of gold. If he went for the gold, he would be showing his precocious intelligence and would be killed; if he reached for the coals, he would be considered normal and therefore not dangerous and would be allowed to live. Moshe, who was indeed a child of unusual intelligence, naturally reached for the gold, but an angel came and steered his hand toward the hot coals, which Moshe then placed in his mouth, causing a lifelong lisp (Shemot Rabbah 1:26).
Interpretation: In addition to the physical explanation of Moshe’s speech disability, this midrash also implies a psychological explanation: Moshe learned from a young age, surely not just this one time, but again and again, he learned to suppress his intelligence in order to survive; he learned to hold back his voice – the truth of what he thought was right – he learned that to express what he thought, to show his most brilliant self, was not an act that would be received with love. And so, as a mechanism for survival, he habituated himself to stopping his own voice; he constricted those muscles; he placed an obstacle to seal his own lips; he became an aral sefatayim. As is often the case, the very mechanism that helps us survive childhood – an angel come to rescue us at the time – does not serve us well in adulthood.
Moshe is an individual representative of an entire suffering nation. According to another rabbinic tradition, the power of speech, dibbur, was “in exile” == inaccessible – for the entire people of Israel at this time. Part of what happened to them over the course of hundreds of years of enslavement is precisely this loss of voice. As an oppressed people, they gradually learned they had no power, no recourse, that speaking out was pointless, and so became voiceless, lost touch with the ability to know what they need and to ask for it, to stand up for themselves.
If he is going to redeem this people, Moshe has to first redeem his own voice, to recover the ability to speak his truth, to open his sealed lips. And so, as Moshe, with God’s and Aharon’s help, learns to speak to Pharaoh, the people, too, begin to sigh and to call out, at first only wordlessly and with no direction – they do not cry out “to God” while still in Egypt – until, eventually, their voice, the voice that had lain dormant all those years, this suppressed strength of their ancestors, hakol kol Yaakov, our national ability to use words powerfully, reemerges at the splitting of the Sea, where they cry out “to God,” and burst forth in the brilliant song of Az yashir.
And so, on Seder night, when we celebrate the exodus from Egypt, we celebrate through speech – by opening our lips to tell the story – because part of what we are celebrating is precisely this national redemption of speech.
Personal Message: To some extent, we all go through some obstruction or inhibition of our voice in childhood, as part of the socialization process. We learn to inhibit those parts of us that are deemed dangerous or unacceptable in our childhood homes, closing off some aspect of ourselves and limiting our voice. In our childhood, an angel helps us choose survival, but at what cost?
What parts of your voice have gone into hiding, into exile, over the years? What truth of your own self have you learned to seal up and inhibit, to hold back? In what way are you, too, an aral sefatayim, a person of obstructed lips?
Hashem sefatay tiftah. O Lord, please open my blocked lips. Let me fully realize my voice so that I can return to wholeness and sing out my true song – a song of endless praise to You.
The reclaiming and redemption of each of our voices helps us all move closer to the redemption of the world.
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