This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Dr. Cécile Bruriah Gonçalves, has been sponsored by Elliot Eisenberg.
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The opening of Parashat Va’era stages a crisis of speech that runs far deeper than the surface of the words of the Book of Exodus. The Torah grapples with understanding when speech becomes prophetic, when oppression stifles our speech, and which social rules dictate who may speak, who may hear, and under what circumstances speech can arise. The text reports, “וְלֹא שָׁמְעוּ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה” (“they did not listen to Moses”) and gives a reason: “מִקֹּצֶר רוּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָה קָשָׁה” (“because of their shortness of breath and harsh servitude”) (Exodus 6:9). The Torah presents the Israelites’ failure to receive Moses’ message as neither a moral failure nor some lack of faith, but the Israelites could not listen to Moses as the result of a bodily and psychological state produced by oppression.
Moses, however, immediately interprets the message’s poor reception as resulting from himself: “וַאֲנִי עֲרַל שְׂפָתָיִם” (“as for me, I have uncircumcised lips”) (Exodus 6:12). In his mind, Moses transforms a structural impediment into a personal deficiency. In response, God declares, “אַהֲרֹן אָחִיךָ יִהְיֶה נְבִיאֶךָ” (“Aaron, your brother, shall be your prophet”) (Exodus 7:1). The divine solution here is not the normalization of Moses’ body but the bringing in of a third party to mediate.
This triptych—confiscated breath, self‑accusation, mediation—constitutes one of the places where the Torah offers, internally and without polemic, a radical critique of ableist and patriarchal norms. It opens the way toward a theology of interdependence grounded both in classical commentary and in contemporary feminist and anti-ableist readings.
Shortness of Breath: Egypt as a System for Producing Incapacity
Classical commentators read the expression “מִקֹּצֶר רוּחַ” (“from shortness of breath”) in Exodus 6:9 not as a moral metaphor but as a precise description of the bodily effects of oppression. The French commentator Rashi (c. 1028–1105), in his commentary on Exodus 6:9, explains, “כָּל מִי שֶׁהוּא מֵצֵר, רוּחוֹ וּנְשִׁימָתוֹ קְצָרָה” (“whoever is afflicted has short breath and constricted respiration”). The inability to listen is therefore not a refusal but a physiological impossibility. It is not that the Israelites did not want to listen to Moses; they could not listen. The Spanish commentator Ramban (1194–1270), also on Exodus 6:9, adds that the taskmasters “לֹא הִטּוּ אֹזֶן” (“did not allow them the space to listen”). Egypt confiscates time, attention, and inner availability. Oppression is not merely a burden of labor; it is the removal of the very capacity to be present to a word. Writing in Italy, Ovadiah Sforno (c. 1475–1549), on the same verse, notes that the people “לֹא נָתְנוּ לֵב לְהִתְבּוֹנֵן” (“did not give their heart to contemplation”). Oppression destroys the capacity to pause long enough for a word to take root.
These readings converge toward an anthropology of oppression: Egypt produces a state in which the very conditions of listening are destroyed. The biblical text refuses to moralize this incapacity. It describes it as a systemic effect, not a spiritual defect.
This analysis resonates with a foundational insight in the sphere of disability studies: incapacity is not primarily a property of the body but an effect of the social environment. Parashat Va’era articulates this though long before modern theory. Egypt is not merely a site of suffering; it is a system for producing incapacity, a mechanism that manufactures bodies unable to hear—not by nature, but by design.
Uncircumcised Lips: The Internalization of Ableist Norms
Faced with this structural incapacity, Moses adopts a strictly personal understanding of a world that will not listen to him. Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on Exodus 6:12, interprets “עֲרַל שְׂפָתָיִם” (“uncircumcised lips”) literally; Moses refers to a real difficulty of speech, a bodily impediment that might cause his tongue to stumble. Ibn Ezra writes that Moses fears “תִּכָּשֵׁל לְשׁוֹנוֹ” (“that his tongue might falter”).
This shift in interpretation—from blaming a structure to blaming a person—is precisely what critical analyses of ableism identify as a central mechanism of oppression: the transformation of systemic violence into personal insufficiency. Moses reads the failure of communication through the dominant norm of oratorical competence. He assumes that liberation requires a conforming body, fluent speech, flawless performance.
The Torah shows how ableist norms colonize even the consciousness of the liberator. At the very moment when Moses is called to challenge the oppressive order, he reproduces its internal logic. He confuses non‑reception caused by confiscated breath with a deficiency in his own mouth.
This confusion is not a psychological detail; it is a theological turning point. The Torah stages a leader who, before speaking to Pharaoh, must unlearn the ableist norm that shapes his relationship to speech.
Non‑Reception as Asphyxiation
The Polish Rabbi Efrayim Shelomoh Luntschitz (1550–1619), in his Keli Yekar commentary on Exodus 6:9, offers a decisive hermeneutical correction. He observes the Israelites as unable to respond to Moses, for “לֹא יָכְלוּ לְהוֹצִיא מִן הַפֶּה תְּשׁוּבָתָם” (“they were unable to bring forth any reply from their mouths”). Their silence is not refusal but impossibility.
Moses, failing to grasp this state, interprets non‑listening as voluntary refusal. He assumes the people “do not want” to leave. Rabbi Luntschitz shows that this reading is mistaken; oppression succeeds precisely when it makes asphyxiation appear as a choice.
The theological implications are profound. The Torah refuses to treat non‑reception as a spiritual fault. It refuses to treat silence as sin. It refuses to treat exhaustion as moral failure. Incapacity is read as symptom, not transgression.
Divine Mediation: An Alternative to Normalization
God does not propose to correct Moses’ impediment. God does not promise healing. God does not transform Moses into an ideal orator. Instead, God institutes mediation: “אַהֲרֹן אָחִיךָ יִהְיֶה נְבִיאֶךָ” (“Aaron, your brother, shall be your prophet”) (Exodus 7:1).
Moses remains the source of authority, but the word passes through Aaron. The Torah thus rejects the patriarchal and ableist fiction of autonomy. The Torah rejects the idea that prophetic leadership requires bodily self‑sufficiency. It proposes an architecture of interdependence in which an interpreter is not a concession but a constitutive component of revelation.
This reading resonates with Rabbi Dr. Julia Watts Belser’s critique of religious narratives that equate wholeness with bodily normalization. Va’era, without theoretical discourse, offers an alternative: bodily difference is not an obstacle to mission; it is integrated into the very structure of divine speech.
Mediation is not a second‑best solution. It is a theological choice. It means that prophetic speech is not the expression of a self‑sufficient individual but the product of relationship, circulation, and assumed interdependence.
The Feminine as the Infrastructure of Prophetic Speech
The ancient rabbinic book Shemot Rabbah 1:26 describes Pharaoh’s daughter embracing, raising, and naming the child drawn from the Nile and concludes that the scriptural name of Moses is the one she gives him when, in Exodus 2:10, “וַתִּקְרָא שְׁמוֹ מֹשֶׁה” (“she called his name Moses”). The identity of the liberator is sealed by a feminine act of care and naming at the heart of the oppressor’s palace.
The Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 14a, declares Miriam a prophetess even before Moses’ birth, stating that she prophesied, “עֲתִידָה אִמִּי לָלֶדֶת בֵּן שֶׁיּוֹשִׁיעַ אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל” (“my mother will give birth to a son who will save Israel”). The first word of deliverance is the word of a woman.
Rabbinic tradition thus affirms that liberation is not the work of an isolated man but the result of a network of feminine mediations—care, prophecy, naming—without which Moses’ public speech would not exist.
This structure echoes the analyses of Judith Plaskow and Rabbi Dr. Rachel Adler: the erasure of feminine mediations is not a narrative detail but a hermeneutical distortion. Va’era, read with these midrashim, refuses this distortion. Our Torah reading shows that male public speech rests on invisible feminine gestures that are not peripheral but constitutive.
An Ethics of Breath: Transforming the Conditions of Listening
If Israel cannot listen due to shortness of breath, then the community’s task is not to blame the audience but to transform the conditions that prevent listening. In a feminist perspective, contemporary shortness of breath is the exhaustion produced by invisible labor, microaggressions, and exclusion from decision‑making spaces. In an anti-ableist perspective, shortness of breath is the fatigue of those who must constantly negotiate access, justify their presence, and explain their needs. Silence is not apathy; it is a symptom. And the Torah forbids reading silence as a fault.
Va’era offers not a heroic narrative of liberation but a deconstruction of the norms that obstruct liberation. Egypt manufactures shortness of breath. Moses internalizes ableist norms. God refuses healing and institutes mediation. Women make public speech possible.
The exodus begins when this oppressive architecture is exposed: when Moses ceases to read his body through the categories of power; when the community recognizes that shortness of breath is not a fault; when feminine mediations cease to be invisible; when interdependence becomes a theological principle.
Va’era teaches that liberation arises not from conformity or perfection but from a lucid recognition of shared vulnerability and from the construction of structures that allow all breaths—even short ones—to participate in revelation.
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