Joshua A. Fogel – Va'era 5766
As our Sefardi brethren say, buen Shabbat. Here it is late January and we're already through most of the plagues, well en route to Pesach. Rabbis and lay people all over the Jewish world will be talking today about the plagues and the hardening of Pharaoh's heart and the like. But, we still have many weeks to address these and similar themes, so I would like to focus on an altogether different topic.
One of the conceits of modern literary criticism is the rather belated discovery that translation is, in fact, a form of interpretation. But, had literary critics been aware of ancient Jewish languages, Harold Bloom among them, they would have quickly seen that, from the earliest translation of the Torah into Aramaic by the great convert Onkelos, the Aramaic term targum (meaning both this particular translation and translation in general) has been especially fruitful. The turgeman was the person in antiquity who orally translated into Aramaic as portions of the Torah were read aloud from the bima in the original, and more to the point the verb targem, which appears often in the Talmud, means to explain, for by the time of Onkelos in the 2nd century CE, as indeed well before, Hebrew was no longer the lingua franca of the Jewish people, and the Torah had to be explained, meaning translated into Aramaic.
What I would like to do in my brief and very first dvar tora this morning is to examine just one phrase from today's parasha and see how throughout the past 2000 years the translations and explanations or interpretations of this expression have been so thoroughly interwoven. I'd then like to conclude with a few remarks on what we can possibly learn from such an exercise.
The puzzling phrase in question appears at the end of Exodus 6.12: ve-ani aral sefatayim. Moses has been ordered by God, in the language of the old Negro spiritual, to go down and tell old Pharaoh to let my people go. When I learned that magnificent song as a child, I always assumed that Moses was to tell Pharaoh to let his own (namely, Moses') people go; in fact, it should be a capital "M" as God is speaking of His own people-same folks, different referent. BUT, Moses protests that, given the fact that the Jewish people won't even listen to him, how in the world can he ever expect the mighty Pharaoh to listen, especially inasmuch as: "I am aral sefatayim." I hesitate to try to translate these two words, because to do so immediately inserts an interpretation into the mix. Undoubtedly, this was an expression understood at the time whose meaning has since been lost. Aral refers to the foreskin and from there to an uncircumcised male; in Yiddish, we have the expression orl which often overlaps in meaning with goy. Sefatayim is the dual form of safah — meaning a pair of lips.
Before looking at how the great commentators and earlier translators of the past rendered this phrase, let's take a quick look at several more recent renderings. Hertz offers: "how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of uncircumcised lips?" That more or less literal rendering doesn't help much, though Hertz adds a note that "uncircumcised lips" refers metaphorically to closed or impeded lips, implying either Moses' alleged stammering speech impediment or his lack of readiness to deliver the necessary speech that will convince old Pharaoh to let the Israelite children go. For those who care, the translation of those two words is exactly the same in the King James Bible. Robert Alter's recent translation gives a variant form: "uncircumcised of lips." We get a similar rendering in a recent Portuguese translation [incircunciso de lábios] and a recent Dutch one [onbesneden van lippen] both of which go back to the Vulgate's Latin: incircumcisus labiis. The JPS translation in the Eitz Hayim has Moses saying that he is "a man of impeded speech." One other translation worth considering in this mix and which reflects basically the same filiation of interpretation is that of the great Yiddish poet Solomon Bloomgarden better known by his pen-name Yehoyash (1870-1927). Yehoyash had an extraordinary Jewish education before immigrating to the United States. There, he wrote wonderful poetry of all sorts and, among other things, translated the entire Tanakh into Yiddish. Here's how he renders all of Exodus 6.12: "Hot Moyshe geredt far Got, azoy tsu zogn: ze, di kinder fun yisroel hobn nit tsugehert tsu mir, haynt vi vet Pare mikh tsuhern, az ikh hob farshtopte lipn." Again, it's "blocked up or impeded lips."
An interesting subset of this lineage of translations can be found in the recent Chumash produced by Everett Fox who gives: "I am of foreskinned lips." Fox strives mightily to give us a Jewish Chumash faithful to the original even if that is often at the expense of full clarity; so, instead of translating aral negatively as "uncircumcised," he renders it with the neologism "foreskinned." I was initially impressed, until I checked the Buber-Rosenzweig translation into German and found: "bin ich doch vorhautig an Lippen." Fox's neologism slavishly replicates Buber's, although he adds an interesting note that "foreskinned" (aral) may here imply that something is in a natural state still requiring sanctification (as is also the case for first-born animals and children, first fruits, and the like). This is a useful clue which resonates with some earlier thinkers.
The general assessment thus far is that aral sefatayim implies that in some way Moses believes his speaking is defective. My own field being Chinese and Japanese studies, I checked recent translations into those languages and found basically the same idea of Moses claiming to be a poor speaker: in Chinese, wo zhe zhuokou benshe de ren; in Japanese, watakushi wa kuchibeta nan desu. I found similar renditions in French (n'ai pas la parole facile), Italian (la parola impacciata), and Russian (ya ne slovesen) translations. A Spanish translation I discovered has torpe de labios 'lumbering speech', which I think is very interesting and will return to. This understanding may ultimately originate with Rashi who claims that aral sefatayim is synonymous with atum sefatayim or "blocked lips." As is his wont, Rashi glosses this expression with the Old French (actually, Judeo-French) term balbe which in modern French has become balbutier, or 'to stutter.' The earliest extant Ladino translations of Chumash render this expression as "cerrado de fabla" meaning 'impeded in speech' (15th century) and "cerrado de labios" meaning 'impeded lips' (Constantinople 1547). Rashi, though, takes it one step further and establishes the linguistic linkage between aral here and the noun orlah. Orlah, as many of you know, is actually the title of a tractate in the Mishna, Tosefta, and Yerushalmi; it concerns the laws regarding fruit of newly planted trees which are forbidden or blocked to us for three years. In his commentary on our passage, Rashi cites all the other places throughout Tanakh where aral or derivatives appear and they do, indeed, connote some sort of blockage.
Nakhmanides takes a similar tack, though he does not stress Moses' plaint as reflecting a physical impediment. He notes that Moses has earlier told God that he is not a man of words, incapable of even speaking to his own people. At that point in last week's parasha, God promises that Aaron would accompany him and act as spokesman. And, now, khas vekholile, God has commanded Moses to appear before the great Pharaoh and speak on behalf of the children of Israel. As Nakhmanides understands it, the meaning is more figurative as Moses is referring to an inability to persuade because, one might say in the modern metaphor, he lacked a silver tongue. This is clearly an interpretation one step beyond the literal meaning of aral sefatayim as an unwanted skin covering his lips, a barrier that prevents more direct exposure or communication. This line of argument is similar, though clearly distinct as well, from that of Maimonides. The Rambam states that aral sefatayim refers to an uneducated man, someone unable to pray properly; it thus is meant to imply that Moses felt he wasn't sufficiently learned or fluent in diplomatic speech to make his pitch to Pharaoh.
A number of commentators down through the ages ask if perhaps Moses means literally that he can't speak the language required. The great Abraham Ibn Ezra of the 12th century argues that, although raised by Egyptians, Moses had long been living in Midian and had forgotten how to speak Egyptian. Ibn Ezra's contemporary, the Rashbam (R' Shmuel ben Meir, a grandson of Rashi and one of the Tosafot), agrees that it was in inability to speak Egyptian, not a speech impediment, a view that has found a modern supporter in the scholar Nahum Sarna. The Rashbam, who was highly critical of his predecessors for over-interpreting the Torah, claims in a blustery tone that jumps off the page now nearly a millennium later: "Is it possible that a prophet, whom God has known face to face and who received the Torah from God's hand into his own, should be a stutterer?! This thing is not found in the words of the Tannaim or the Amoraim [the sages and rabbis of the Talmud]. We should not give credence to the words of midrash." Midrash, not scripture, is the source of the idea that Moses had a stutter.
Several hundred years after the Rashbam, the great Spanish commentator Don Isaac Abravanel took the opposite approach. He claimed that indeed Moses' problem was physical. God wanted to show the Israelites that Moses' success with Pharaoh was not due to Moses' own ability but to God's intervention on his and their behalf, for God had earlier told Moses that He [God] made Moses the way he was and that He'd always be there with Moses, so to speak. Perhaps Moses was not actually offering his physical impediment here as an excuse to God but simply his fear of being a poor diplomat on behalf of the Jewish people. In fact, at no time after this do we find Moses ever having the least problem speaking; he actually makes beautiful speeches. The German Kabbalist of the 18th century Yonatan Eibschutz takes this language question one meta-step further in stating that Moses was aided in speaking to Pharaoh by the Shechinah, BUT the Shechinah only speaks Hebrew-not much help when you're trying to convince the monolingual Pharaoh. Other Kabbalistic commentators go in another, equally meta-direction to claim that Moses' speech impediment made him incapable of articulating certain specific consonants.
Although he lived several centuries earlier, the Rambam could never have accepted such an answer. Philosophically, he believed that God as absolute perfection could simply not create evil in the world. I was reminded when drafting this part of my dvar tora of that immortal line enunciated by Tevye the Dairyman under his breadth in the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof. In his typically world-weary way, Tevye whispers: "Oy, vos far a Got hot bashafn a velt mit oreme-layt?" (Oy, what sort of a God creates a world with poor people?). Like Tevye, lehavdl, the Rambam knew full well that evil (and poverty) existed, so where did it come from? It came from the absence of God's creation, respectively, of good (and wealth). God created light, and darkness, which is the absence of light, by default; and hence God created eloquent speech and its absence in the inability to speak well.
In later centuries, this argument as well as that of the Rashbam would be turned on their heads. In the latter half of the 19th century, the hassidic leader Sefat emet (Yehudah Arye-Leyb of Ger) saw Moses' plaint of uncircumcised lips as implying not incapacity but inappropriateness. He wrote: "The reason they, the Israelites, do not listen to me, Moses implies, is not that they do not want to hear the voice of God but that I am of uncircumcised lips." I assume that he meant by this that Moses was a man of inordinate humility. Much earlier Rabbeinu Nissim (the Ran) wrote that this is all part of the divine plan. Moses had all the right stuff to be a prophet except for that silver tongue, but God created him this way on purpose so that the Israelites would not be swayed to follow him as a demagogue, for people listen and obey a demagogue even when he lies to them. Thus, God wanted Moses to appear to be a regular guy, a regular human being-only more so. He was not meant to be superhuman, just a man among men.
This explanation is helpful as far as it goes, but we still don't know why the distinctive and unusual expression aral sefatayim and not another was used in Exodus 6.12. I think it's probably only bizarre to us now because we have lost the original context from whence it emerged, much as many turns of phrases in many languages are the punch lines of old jokes now lost to us or the morals of old stories which are no longer extant. Let's go back now to Onkelos and see what he made of this idiom. He certainly lived long after the era of Moses in Egypt, but he was at least a lot closer than any of the commentators we have seen. He translates "ve-ani aral sefatayim" into Aramaic as "ve-ana yakir mamlal" which means: "and I have a heavy mouth" ('heavy' can imply 'weighty' in the sense of important, too). This seems to indicate either a speech impediment or a general inability to communicate. But, when we look at how Onkelos translates Moses' earlier appeal in Exodus 4.10 from last week's parasha, we find Onkelos used exactly the same Aramaic translation, only the Hebrew original is quite different. There Moses says about his ability to speak: "chvad-peh uchvad lashon anochi" (lit., I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue), which is similar to the Spanish translation torpe de labios that I mentioned earlier. If Onkelos is right (or at least closer) in his understanding of aral sefatayim, then much of the commentators' speculation may safely be laid to rest. Maybe we shouldn't leap to search for profound or homiletic interpretations for usages that strike us as unusual now but remember, as the Talmud frequently says, "dibra tora kelashon bnei adam" (the Torah speaks in the ordinary language of the people, implying "chill out rabbis, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar": it's just a turn of phrase, though one whose origins may be lost to us now). Perhaps that's also why this odd expression appears, to my knowledge, nowhere in the Talmud. Arguing by its absence in the Talmud, à la Conan Doyle's "dog that didn't bark," can be dangerous, of course, but I just put it out there for your consideration.
Shabbat shalom, gut shabes, and buen Shabbat.