BIRTH INTO LANGUAGE
Slavoj Žižek writes about the experience of trying to understand a word in a foreign language:

[We] really understand it only when we perceive how our effort to determine exhaustively its meaning fails not because of the lack of our understanding but because the meaning of this word is incomplete already “in itself” (in the Other’s language). Every language, by definition, contains an aspect of openness to enigma, to what eludes its grasp, to the dimension where “words fail.”

Reared in the majestic clarity of the Egyptian language and culture, Moses is moved by his encounter with the broken cries of the Israelites to a realization of his own “out-of-jointness.” As he becomes fully present to the ruptured voice of his brothers, something shifts in him. He speaks for them, bringing his own lack to bear on theirs.

From this perspective, there is always something strange, uncanny about human language, a blind spot that is only covered up by the many meanings of words. The sixteenth-century Jewish philosopher and mystic Maharal reads a classic Talmudic passage to suggest something of this inherent lacuna, as well as to place Moses in relation to it:

The Sages said (B. Niddah 30b): When the newborn emerges into the air of the world, an angel comes and strikes it on the mouth and makes it forget the whole Torah. Why does the angel strike it on the mouth? For it is by way of the mouth that the newborn becomes a living, speaking human being; and by the same blow on the mouth, the angel makes the infant forget the whole Torah.

Maharal goes on to explain that it is through the mouth —through language—that the newborn becomes a complex physical-spiritual being. Before the child is born, it is pure soul, unattached to body, and knowing “the whole Torah.” Its creation as a speaking, living human being is completed only after the angel has struck it on the mouth, at the same moment making it forget its previous oceanic soul-existence and opening it to language. Now the child is fully born into the complex human reality. He cites the classic Aramaic translation of Onkelos: “‘Man became a living being’ (Gen. 2:7): he became a living, speaking being.”

Language, then, constitutes the human being; at the same time, it represents a loss. The child loses its pre-human “total knowledge”; the angelic blow obscures and diminishes a primal oceanic harmony; but at the same time opens the mouth of the newborn. A full, complicated being is now born. Embodied soul, he or she bears the insignia of an extraordinary loss that is also an extraordinary gain. Immaculately made, the newborn must suffer a split, precisely in the place of the mouth. Impossible knowledge and embodied voice struggle to testify. The child begins to speak the “out-of-joint” language of an incarnate spirit.

The most striking part of Maharal’s reading is its ending. Here, Maharal uses the Talmudic myth of human creation to explain Moses’ speech defect. Moses, he declares, remains mysteriously untouched by the angel’s blow. His being has never been diminished and evolved in the way the myth describes. He retains a pristine access to “the whole Torah.” In him, language is undeveloped; he is, in a sense, not fully born to language and to ordinary humanity.

Maharal here conveys a “secret” understanding of Moses’ state as nonspeaker. He is unhindered, undiminished, and therefore, in a sense, not fully human. He has not yet entered the midst of life. When, therefore, Moses speaks of his own inadequacy as speaker, he increasingly becomes aware of a need to enter into the world of language. If he is to speak to as well as for his newly acquired brothers, he must be born into loss. Purity of being must give way to the possible embarrassments of language. If he is to be with the Israelites, he must surrender to the incompleteness of a human life. In this way, perhaps, his people will hear him, as one hears one of one’s own kind.

In the biblical text, we can trace Moses’ development in this direction. One indication is the way his language becomes more expressive each time he returns to the subject of his speech defect. Increasingly, he becomes aware of lacking something he now desires. At first, at the Burning Bush, he describes himself as “not a man of words,” a neutral observation. Then, he is “heavy of mouth, and heavy of tongue”—a more sensual depiction of a burden, an excess impeding the flow of language. Only after he has begun to fulfill his mission—speaking to Pharaoh to no avail, and then to the Israelites, also to no avail (Ex. 6:9)—does his language erupt in the grotesque imagery of “I am of uncircumcised lips!” (6:12, 30). A foreskin closes his lips, so that they are webbed shut. The movement, somewhat comic, of the mouth compulsively opening and closing, is alien to him. He is whole, singular, and contained in his knowledge of “the whole Torah.”

Increasingly, Moses articulates a fantasy of in-fancy, of being sealed against language. In reality, of course, he speaks whenever necessary. But, in his own mind, perhaps, there is a desire and a fear—a desire to remain in a state of pristine oneness with the divine, and a fear of being permeable, volatile, fully born.

Perhaps he recognizes in himself something of the impassive dignity of Pharaoh, whose apertures are sealed, who neither listens nor, increasingly, speaks, when Moses makes his demands. As the midrash evocatively puts it, “Pharaoh neither takes in nor gives out.” He is never seen either to eat or to excrete. Denying his human needs, his existence in the rhythms of human time, Pharaoh constructs himself as the emblem of an illusory self-possession, as immune to others as he is to his own needs and to the life and death within him. As Rashi says, “He makes a god of himself.” A perfect circle, like the mythic Uroborus, the snake with its tail in its mouth, he is impermeable. “I am my river, and I have made myself,” he declares in the words of the prophet Ezekiel (Ez. 29:3).

When Moses confronts Pharaoh, he recognizes his own impenetrable condition. To express a new ambivalence, he uses the repulsive imagery of a foreskin sealing his lips—an excess, a “too much” of total knowledge. “Less is more”: the foreskin is to be removed, a blockage cut away, so that Moses can gain access to his own vulnerable humanity. Only so will he gain access to his new brothers’ hearing. A desire is born—a desire to be born into language, with all its inherent losses.

The point of contact between Moses and the Israelites is Moses’ mouth. If his voice is to be heard, he must undergo a trauma, a wound, or a belated blow with no angel in sight. In the meantime, he is in the grip of ambivalence. He wishes to speak, but he refuses to lend his full voice in all its elemental force, its unmanageable background noise, to his intercourse with his brothers.

An act of circumcision is apparently required, in order to bring into view Moses’ own humanity, blind spot and all. Perhaps the strange and violent scene in chapter 4 of Exodus, where Moses is attacked by God, symbolically expresses this requirement.

On his journey back from Midian to Egypt, at a malon, a hotel, God seeks to kill Moses. In this cryptic narrative, Moses is saved from death by his wife, Tzippora, who takes a flint and cuts off her son’s foreskin. This mysterious crisis is resolved by an act of circumcision—performed by a woman. Something is staged that speaks of the feminine, of a movement “downwards” into the body and its openings, into the vulnerability of the male organ and of the parted lips that can speak.

This is an act of milah: the Hebrew word for circumcision evokes the later Hebrew word for word. It is echoed in the word malon (hotel), which contributes to the verbal field of therapeutic openings, of the operations necessary for human communication. It is after this narrow escape that Moses speaks of himself as “of uncircumcised lips.” The physical intervention that has saved his life reminds him of another area of resistance.

Stone Tablets inscribed by the finger of God are a magnificent image for permanence. To smash these tablets is evidently to destroy the assurance of permanence. The Talmud expresses the idea: “If the Tablets had not been smashed, the Torah would never have been forgotten by Israel.” The stony object with its engraved letters represents the Written Torah— forever preserved, subjected. As an image for the unforgettable, the Tablets must give way to the life of human beings, who “learn and forget.”

After they are smashed, the life of the Oral Torah begins. As Moses constantly warns the people, to forget the Torah is, on the one hand, the worst risk of their future history. On the other hand, unmaking what has been made may release the object to translation, to unconscious transformations, elaborating it in a world of diffuse impressions. In a word, forgetting generates interpretation. Smashing the stony writing restores it to its elements, to its godly, human potential. Unmaking things gives value to our making. Ultimately, unmaking, forgetting clears space for human creativity.