Moses says that he is not a man of “d’varim” – the Hebrew term he uses for “words.” God nonetheless insists Moses be the leader of Israel. And the lesson begins.
By DAVID WOLPEUpdated: JUNE 17, 2021 16:30A still from the film showing Moses leading his people out of Egypt.(photo credit: screenshot)Who gives man speech? Is it not I, the Lord? (Exodus 4:11) Moses is the man who learns how to speak.We know Moses has a problem with articulation from the beginning. When Pharaoh’s daughter finds him, the text reads that she noticed the basket, opened it and saw a crying child. The Torah does not say she heard the cry, rather that she saw it. Moses always had some obscure trouble giving vent to his thoughts and feelings.For many years after the rescue, until he is grown, we hear not a single word from Moses.After Moses emerges from the palace, we become immediately aware of his reluctance to speak. He sees an Egyptian taskmaster beating a slave. The natural reaction to this injustice would be to cry out, to implore the taskmaster to stop. But Moses does not speak. He strikes and kills the Egyptian slavemaster.This scenario is repeated after Moses has run away to Midian. There he wordlessly saves the daughters of Jethro from some shepherds who drove them from the wells. Again Moses resorts immediately to action. No dialogue is recorded.When God appears to Moses at the bush, we are not surprised by Moses’s own plea. He cries out to God that he is inarticulate: “I am heavy of speech and heavy of tongue (Ex. 4:10).”Moses says that he is not a man of “d’varim” – the Hebrew term he uses for “words.” God nonetheless insists Moses be the leader of Israel. And the lesson begins.When Moses receives the Ten Commandments from God, the Hebrew makes a very subtle point about what is occurring. For in the Hebrew, the Ten Commandments are not called the Ten “Commandments.” In Hebrew they are the ten devarim (sayings). Moses begins to understand that God is, after all, a God of words, of devarim.We know this because God creates through words. We say in our morning prayers, “Blessed be God who spoke and the world came into being.” The Bible recounts: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light (Gen. 1:13).”
Now in our parasha God instructs Moses to speak to a rock so that it will yield water. Moses, out of an understandable anger and impatience, strikes the rock rather than speaking to it. The text itself gives us a subtle clue when the Hebrew employs the word vayach: “and he struck.” For this is the same word used in the Bible when, years before, Moses struck the Egyptian. Moses has learned to use force, but a leader must leave a legacy not of blows, but of words.Facing his own mortality, the end of his own leadership, Moses must decide how his influence can be made to last. His successor has been chosen and he must depart from the people. What should be his final legacy?The final book of the Torah is the farewell speech of Moses. His great concern in this book is that the people remember what he has taught. The words “hear” and “listen” are strewn throughout this book. Moses knows it is his last chance to make an impression. All he can leave behind are his words.Poignantly, this closing book of the Torah, which in English we call Deuteronomy, in Hebrew is called the book of Devarim, the book of words. The very man who insisted to God that he was not a man of devarim, a man of words, becomes precisely that – the man whose long farewell address enters history as the book of devarim. The transformation is complete, and the message manifest. God took a man who did not understand devarim, showed that revelation consisted of devarim, and finally reached the point where Moses can begin to embody this Divine lesson – such that Moses has himself become, quite literally, a man of devarim.The poet William Butler Yeats once wrote that great men do not write books, they live lives, and he pointed to Socrates, the Buddha and Jesus. Yeats neglected the greatest who preceded them all, the man of Devarim, the man who left a book – Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses, our teacher.The writer is Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of David the Divided Heart. On Twitter: @rabbiwolpe
