What would it feel like to have God offering you support in claiming your voice, helping you to amplify it and strengthen it so that you can speak your piece of the divine truth into the world?
God offered Moshe that kind of support at Mount Sinai. In the midst of the thunder and lightning of the revelation, we hear this strange phrase:
מֹשֶׁ֣ה יְדַבֵּ֔ר וְהָאֱלֹקים יַעֲנֶ֥נּוּ בְקֽוֹל
Moshe spoke and God answered him with a voice (Exodus 19:19)
What does it mean that God responded to Moshe with a voice? Why is it Moshe who is speaking and God who is answering? What is happening here? The midrash explains it this way: the Holy One gave Moshe koach vegevurah, “power and might,” and supported him in speaking (Mekhilta deRabbi Yishmael, Bachodesh, 4:10).
Answering as Support
So the midrash understands God’s answering as a sign of support and amplification and strengthening of Moshe’s voice. The commentator Rabbenu Bechaye explains that the word anah, “answer,” here has the connotation of siyua, meaning help or support (Rabbenu Bechaye on Exodus 19:19). God was supporting Moshe’s voice, empowering him to speak.
Support Fosters Revelation
Maybe this divine empowerment of Moshe’s voice is an intrinsic element of the Mount Sinai revelation and of all revelation, how revelation actually happens in the world. Maybe such support is what fosters revelation in some way, allowing God to reveal Godself through us as we are empowered to claim the divine truth that is planted in us and wants to come through us. Maybe we each have such a revelation to offer the world and it requires the empowerment of each of our voices to reveal it.
Feeling God’s Support
Pausing here to imagine the feeling of being supported by God as Moshe was. Feeling your own kol, your own voice, what it is you truly want to put forth into the world, a sense of your inner divine essence – wordless words that want to bubble up through you – and then sensing how God wants to amplify that, give you koah and gevurah, power and might, to speak that into the world. God responds to Moshe bekol, “with a voice,” that same kol, that same mighty divine voice that is shover arazim, that is capable of breaking down mighty cedar trees (Psalm 29:5). Sometimes there are obstacles that need to be cleared for us to have room to express ourselves. We are gifted with this divine power to strengthen us on our journey. Maybe you can feel how wobbly you sometimes are about your voice, the self doubt, the nagging insecurity, the shakiness, even as you also know – this is my truth. Letting God’s koach come into you as it came into Moshe to steady that shakiness and offer you the power and confidence and strength to claim your truth.
Attunement
The support we can feel from God is not just about power, but also about deep attunement and responsiveness. That word anah, respond, is important here. What would it mean for God to respond to you, to see your deepest self so completely and respond and reflect it back to you, perhaps like the exquisite attunement that a baby needs, a kind of mirroring that we all long for? That’s what God offered Moshe here and I believe offers us all the time – to be so fully seen that you feel that God is reflecting back to you who you really are so that you are empowered to be your true self, to be secure in claiming your essential voice because it has been reflected back to you by God in a way that blesses it and loves you into greater self actualization. That word anah, answer, implies that God is responding to Moshe and to us all the time. It’s actually written in the future tense – ya’anenu – “will respond to him” – God continues to do that for each of us, to respond us back into ourselves, to reflect back to us our truest voice so that we can claim it and step into it, a mirroring effect. Ah, that’s who I am and God blesses me in that.
The Early Silencing of Our Voice
Partly, we need that support to claim our own voice because we are often shaky about it inside ourselves. We are not unlike Moshe, feeling awkward and tongue-tied, as if we, too, have a speech impediment, “heavy of mouth,” uncertain of ourselves and our truth. And like Moshe, our speech impediment – what blocks us from fully claiming our voice – often comes from childhood.
The story is told of Moshe that when he was a small child on Pharaoh’s lap, Pharaoh’s advisors were suspicious of his charm and brilliance, suspicious that he was the one who would be the Israelite savior. And so they devised a test. They placed two piles before little Moshe, one of gold and the other of glowing coals. The idea was that a normal child would reach for the coals since they were more sparkly. But Moshe in his intelligence reached for the more valuable gold, and an angel had to come to force his hand to the coal to save him. And so Moshe reached for a coal, put it to his mouth and burned himself, causing a life long speech impediment (Shemot Rabbah 1:26).
This incident portrays in a literal way the silencing that happens in some fashion to many of us as children. We learn that it is dangerous to show our full brilliance, and in the process of learning to mask that true voice, we create a speech impediment, something that continues to stop us from expressing ourselves properly for the rest of our lives. Now it’s not necessary to be able to go back to childhood and identify if, when and how this happened to you. Just take a minute to notice if you do currently have some trepidation around expressing yourself, if there is some internal stoppage to your voice, as if your throat is not totally open to speaking your truth, some habitual internal censorship and inhibition.
God Helps Us Reclaim Our Voice
That’s where divine support comes in. In order for Moshe to be able to step up and be part of the revelation, God had to support and empower him in reclaiming the voice that he had lost. He and his voice were needed. We are each needed. And I believe that we are each offered that kind of divine support all the time, God’s ya’anenu, God’s responsive supporting energy, holding and nurturing us into empowerment and growth and the reclaiming of our voice.
That’s What Love is
The type of support and empowerment that God offers Moshe here I believe is the essence of love. I read a definition recently of love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (M. Scott Peck, as cited by bell hooks, All About Love, p. 4). Love is nurturing someone into growth, supporting them in the process of claiming their own wholeness, their own voice, their own truth. God offered that to Moshe here and out of that nurturing supportive love emerged the Torah.
Being God’s Agents of Love
How can we offer that kind of loving support to ourselves and each other, to be God’s agents on earth in loving people back into the fullness of their voices? Sometimes we are like Moshe, needing the support, and sometimes we can be like God, offering it. Maybe you can feel into your own divine capacity to offer that kind of loving support to yourself or to another person, bringing to mind a time you felt that way towards someone, maybe a child or a student, a friend or a client, remembering what that feels like, how good it feels to love someone in a way that you extend yourself for the sake of nurturing them into growth, into returning to their own fullest selves, what it feels like to want that for someone else, to want to support them in speaking forth their own unique voice – what that feels like inside you, the overflow of holding, loving, nurturing supportive energy.. You can’t fix things for them, but you can ya’anenu, you can answer them in a way that really sees them, that listens and attunes, mirroring back who they truly are, supporting them in being themselves, feeling how much you want them most of all to be themselves, to reclaim their own voice as God helped Moshe do, feeling your desire to empower them so that they, too, become a revelation. Feel how this love you are offering is healing for you, too, how the nurturing comes back to you. It is an overflow of divine loving energy that we can tap into, that rebounds onto us as we offer it to others.
Vata’an: Miriam Supports the Women
Last week, after crossing the Red Sea, Miriam and the Israelite women took out their timbrels and started dancing. The next verse says, vataan lahem Miriam (Exodus 15:21). There is that same verb, vata’an, from anah, “she responded to them.” What does that mean – she responded? The women hadn’t said anything! But perhaps it means the same thing as God’s response to Moshe here. It means support. Seeing the women come out bravely into the communal space and do this daring dance, expressing themselves so fully and vulnerably, Miriam offered them support. She wanted to amplify and strengthen their voices and their capacity to be themselves. She nurtured this tender newfound ability to express themselves, lending her whole hearted love and support to the project just as God does for Moshe here. Maybe you can imagine that circle of female dancers and offer your own nurturing support, sending it out to any woman or man who is feeling insecure and inhibited, sending your support and strength for the purposes of their growth and reclaiming of voice.
Like the Angels
The angels when they sing each morning to God provide this kind of responsive support for one another, calling out back and forth, giving each other permission and courage, onim ve’omrim, that word onim, they respond in a supportive way to one another as they gather the strength to sing God’s song, zeh el zeh, one to the other. We can offer that back and forth support between us, like a cord of energy, tapping into the divine energy of nurturing and support that is always right here, giving and receiving it.
Moshe yedaber vehaElokim ya’anenu bekol. Moshe speaks and God supports and strengthens Moshe’s voice as well as our own.
Photo by cottonbro studio at Pexels
