Moses and Multiculturalism. Barbara Johnson

the Pentateuch edited by J. H. Hertz, this passage is glossed in part as follows:

      sought to kill him. An anthropomorphic way of saying that Moses fell suddenly into a serious illness. Many commentators connect this sudden illness of Moses with his postponing, for some reason, the circumcision of his son. Tradition ascribes this omission to the influence of Jethro and Zipporah, who may have desired the circumcision postponed to the 13th year, as was customary among the Bedouin tribes. However, in the previous verse Moses had warned Pharaoh that disobedience of God’s will carried dire punishment with it: and he himself should, therefore, on no account have permitted any postponement of a duty incumbent upon him.¹

      Thus, through this literal and empirical reading of the passage, it seems as though all obscurities have been cleared up, at least enough of them for the consequences of failing to do one’s duty to come through loud and clear.

      The transformation of unclarified questions into useful lessons is even more apparent in the Pentateuch published in 1986 by the Judaica Press, with extracts or summaries of the commentary of Samson Raphael Hirsch.² The more enigmatic, the more didactic, it seems.

      24. [God confronted him.] The same God Who had just sent Moses forth with a most lofty mission, which Moses was preparing to carry out, now abruptly confronted him and considered it better that he should die. The verses that follow make it clear why Moses was so suddenly placed in danger of death. He had neglected to circumcise his son. He had gone forth to accomplish the deliverance whose import would be based solely on milah [the word—B.J.], and now he himself was about to introduce into that people an uncircumcised son. God considered it better to have Moses die than to have him set out on his mission with such an unfortunate example for his people.

      This, it seems to us, should be the interpretation of [“considered it better . . .”] Interpreted literally as [“and He sought (to kill him)”], it would be a very harsh characterization of God. God the All-Merciful never “seeks” to “kill” a man; if it is His will that a man should die, then that man will die. But interpreted in the manner suggested here, this passage teaches us the significant lesson that the plans of God cannot be influenced by any human being. . . . To God no man, not even one such as Moses, is indispensable. . . .

      25. [Hirsch cites a statement by Rabbi Eliezer of Modai in the Mekhita to Parshath Yithro (Exodus 18:1–20:23) to the effect that Yithro had agreed to have Tzipporah marry Moses only under the condition that the first son of this union should remain a heathen and not be circumcised. Also, Hirsch points out that Tzipporah, not being of Jewish origin, may have been naturally reluctant to see her son undergo the pain and the dangers of circumcision. . . . She therefore quickly circumcised her son with her own hands, cast the boy’s foreskin at her husband’s feet and said to him, as Hirsch puts it: “I have done this because you have become a ‘bridegroom of death’ on my account.”]

      26. [According to Hirsch, Tzipporah felt that this incident would ensure the observance of circumcision for all time to come. If even a man like Moses, who had been charged with a Divine mission, nearly lost his life for failing to circumcise his son, what Jew in future would dare be guilty of the same neglect?]³

      Circumcision, then, in Moses’ day as well as in ours, is a sign in the flesh of all newborn males of membership among God’s “chosen people.” It is also a sign of the covenant God established with Abraham and renewed with Moses. In other words, it is the visible sign of belonging; a sign of voluntary submission and sanctification.

      By the time Saint Paul (né Saul) plays around with the flesh and the spirit in order to explain Christianity, the inadequacy of having circumcised flesh without the corresponding circumcised spirit—indeed, the sufficiency of having spiritual faith, whether or not one has a sign of sanctification in the body—the specialness of the body becomes literal, while the spiritual becomes figurative. Judaism, as Paul explains it, is legalistic and literal, but Christian goodness is a spiritual grace that requires no law. If one strictly observes the laws of Judaism, one remains only within the law, but with Christ, one rises above it.

      Moses indeed becomes the mouthpiece of a vast array of detailed laws, as we shall see, but he also appears to be the first user of “circumcision” in a figurative sense. Long before the birth of Christ, and simultaneous with the very origins of biblical Israel, in other words, Moses can cry out to God (twice):

      And Moses spake before the Lord, saying, Behold the children of Israel have not hearkened unto me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of uncircumcised lips? (Exod. 6:12)

      And Moses said before the lord, Behold, I am of uncircumcised lips, and how shall Pharaoh hearken unto me? (Exod. 6:30)

      The Judaica Press edition of the Five Books of Moses avoids the difficulty by translating “uncircumcised” lips as “unpliant” lips. The Hertz edition says, “of uncircumcised lips, i.e., with lips closed or impeded, not properly prepared to deliver an all-important message.”⁴ This constitutes a medical reading of “uncircumcised lips”: the surgical sense of genital cutting is transferred upward to Moses’ already known difficulties with speech. Nevertheless, Moses shows himself a canny manipulator of the figurative potential of even the most surgical meaning of circumcision. As Jonathan Kirsch puts it, “Even something so basic and so concrete as the ritual of circumcision was put to use by Moses as a metaphor for an even more intimate commandment. ‘Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart,’ thundered Moses, suggesting that God sought a heartfelt spiritual commitment and not merely a sign carved into the flesh (Deut. 10:16).”⁵ It did not take Christianity, in other words, to imagine a correspondence between the spirit and the flesh, but it did take Christianity to imagine them so far apart.

      What about Moses’ speech difficulties, anyway? Why does Moses, in his third attempt to depict his lack of authority to speak for the Israelites, tell God, “O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue” (Exod. 4:10). There have been many theories to explain Moses’ speech impediment. Especially since this passage is followed by one in which an exasperated God says to Moses, “Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well. . . . And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people: and he shall be, even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God” (Exod. 4:14, 16).

      One explanation, then, is that Aaron is a more eloquent public speaker than Moses, and will be believed by the suspicious Israelites. Schoenberg, as we will see, built his whole opera, Moses and Aaron, around this opposition between Aaron’s eloquence and Moses’ message.

      Here is what Hertz has to say about it:

      slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. Lit. ‘heavy of speech and heavy of tongue.’ He may have had an actual impediment in his speech. Rabbinic legend tells that Moses when a child was one day taken by Pharaoh on his knee. He thereupon grasped Pharaoh’s crown and placed it on his head. The astrologers were horror-struck. ‘Let two braziers be brought’—they counselled; ‘one filled with gold, the other with glowing coals; and set them before him. If he grasps the gold, it will be safer for Pharaoh to put the possible usurper to death.’ When the braziers were brought, the hand of Moses was stretching for the gold, but the angel Gabriel guided it to the coals. The child plucked out a burning coal and put it to his lips, and for life remained ‘heavy of speech and heavy of tongue.’⁶

      The explanation in the Hirsch volume goes as follows: “ ‘I have difficulty starting to speak, under any circumstances; besides, I have a lisp. I have no command over my tongue.’ It is sad when a public speaker, particularly one who seeks to sway large audiences, can elicit nothing but laughter from his listeners . . .”⁷ And Nahum Sarna glosses Moses’ reluctance to answer God’s call as follows:

      He who would be a leader of people, a spokesman who has to negotiate Egyptian court, must possess oratorical skills. But Moses feels himself to be inadequate to the task. He lacks persuasive eloquence. Whether the text means that he literally suffers from some speech defect or that after the passage of years away from Egypt his fluency in the language of the land had