Parashat Vaera opens with a dialogue between God and Moses. The backdrop is the crisis in the redemption story we saw at the conclusion of the previous Torah portion, where Moses’ initial request to free the children of Israel from slavery resulted in Pharaoh intensifying his oppression of them. Now God seeks to strengthen Moses’ resolve to go forth again on his mission and redeem the children of Israel from bondage. But Moses hesitates: “And Moses said before the Lord, behold, I have impeded lips, and how shall Pharaoh hearken to me?” (Exodus 6:30)
This response is puzzling. Earlier in the narrative, at the burning bush, Moses had already tried to exempt himself from this task due to his rhetorical disabilities: “And Moses said to the Lord, I am not a man of words … for I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (Exodus 4:10). God’s response was to appoint Aaron as his spokesman, and it appeared Moses was satisfied with this solution. Why then is he raising this objection again?
In addressing this question, the Zohar opens new horizons of meaning in this dialogue:
Come and behold: “Behold … how will Pharaoh hearken to me and I have impeded lips?” Previously, it is written: “I am not a man of words … for I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue,” and the Holy One, blessed be He, responded, “Who made a mouth for man, or who makes one mute …” and He said, “And I will be with your mouth.” One might think this was not so? Yet now he says, “and I have impeded lips.” If so, where is the promise that the Holy One, blessed be He, made to him initially?
Rather, it is a mystery: Moses is voice, and speech, which is his word, was in exile, and he was blocked from articulating words. Therefore, he said, “And how will Pharaoh hearken to me,” while my word is in his exile, for I have no word. I am voice; the word is worse off, for it is in exile.
Come and behold: As long as speech was in exile, voice was gone from it, and speech was uncircumcised, voiceless. When Moses came, the voice came. Moses was voice without speech because it was in exile. And as long as speech was in exile, Moses went as voice without speech, and so it went until they drew near to Mount Sinai and the Torah was given. At that time, voice joined with speech, and then he spoke words. This is what is written, “And God spoke all these words.” Then Moses became properly whole with speech, voice and speech together in wholeness.
Why does Moses raise the same objection twice? The Zohar’s answer is that these are actually two separate claims in two different contexts.
Initially, Moses was raising an objection about his physical limitations. Appointing Aaron to speak on his behalf adequately addressed that concern. But here, Moses is not referring to physiological limitations, but to the deficiency of his prophetic power, of his capacity to mediate God’s word. The Zohar explains this in kabbalistic language: Moses, the father of all prophets, is identified with the sefirah of Tiferet, and it is essentially this that is articulated when he prophesies. However, the prophecy embodied in Tiferet is a raw voice, a formless intuition untranslated into words and sentences.
To express this raw prophetic intuition in a manner that can convey meaning, it must first pass through the sefirah of Malchut, the lowest sefirah and the interface between the human and divine realms. Malchut acts as a kind of transformer for the higher sefirot, actualizing those impulses in the material world. Therefore, Malchut is called “Speech,” while Moses is “voice.” When they combine, voice becomes speech — a semantic structure bearing meaning. However, this is impossible in a state of exile, which is the state the Israelites find themselves in at this point in the biblical narrative. Out of empathy with the exile of the people, Shekhinah (which is associated with Malchut) is also in exile, meaning it is unavailable to translate the raw divine voice into human language. Consequently, God’s word cannot be heard in the world — or in the language of the Zohar, prophecy is in exile.
This distinction between voice and speech reflects a familiar cognitive state. Many of us have probably had the experience of sensing a sublime idea we can’t quite express in words. Exile is thus not merely a political state, but a degraded human mindset, lacking in inspiration. When Moses says that he is of impeded lips, he means that he is unable to speak the prophetic voice within him. Only when the redemption of the nation is complete and the people stand at the foot of Mount Sinai — only then will Moses be able to convey God’s word in language. Then the entire nation will also be able to hear the Ten Commandments, the voice of prophecy descending from heaven and crystallizing into patterns of words and sentences. As the biblical text states: “And God spoke all these words, saying.” (Exodus 20:1) These words come from the mouth of Elohim, the name of God identified with the sefirah of Malchut.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of pre-state Israel, saw in the return of the Jewish people to their homeland the beginning of a redemptive process. Kook believed that the core of that redemption would be the revival of Jewish creativity — literature, poetry and art, expressions of spiritual and cultural renewal. Following this teaching from the Zohar, Rabbi Kook believed that the stagnation that afflicted Jewish cultural creativity in exile was a result of this exile of speech, of the exile of the Shekhinah and of the spirit of prophetic inspiration from which all spiritual creativity flows.
Kook concluded that when the curse of exile is removed – the exile of the Jewish people and the exile of Shekhinah – the Shekhinah would again become speech and the great voice, suppressed for so many years, would again bring forth prophecy, creativity and the most sublime expressions of the spirit. The renewal of creativity is therefore an expression of the redemption of speech, which is the redemption of the Shekhinah from its exile.
This piece was originally published as part of A Year of Zohar: Kabbalah for Everyone, an original series produced by My Jewish Learning and Sefaria. Sign up for the entire series here.
