Rosh Hodesh Blessing for the Month of Elul: Listening for the Voice that Stammers

One of the things I find most compelling about Moses is his stammer.

“Choose someone else,” he says to God, right from the start. “I am heavy of speech and heavy of tongue.”

I imagine him, standing barefoot in the desert sand, before a small thornbush that no one else has noticed. To Moses, the bush is burning with divine urgency. He feels called and compelled by the mysterious Voice that summons him from within the flames, commanding him to lead his people to freedom. The bush is not consumed, but he is. Consumed by doubt about his own capacity to rise to this moment. Consumed by doubt about his own capacity, specifically, to speak.

The Bible is full of flawed heroes, ancestors who teach us how to be human by being insistently, imperfectly human themselves. But this is a singularly striking deficiency for a leader of Moses’ stature, particularly given the responsibilities of his prophetic role.

From the beginning, Moses is charged with speaking, the very thing he finds hardest to do. He must speak to the Israelite slaves and somehow persuade them to follow a God they cannot see to a life of freedom they cannot yet envision. He must speak to Pharaoh and somehow persuade him to let the people go. It is not clear which of these frightens him more.

Throughout the years in the wilderness, speech remains the defining feature of Moses’ leadership. More than anything else, this is what God asks of him, over and over again. Daber el b’nai Yisrael. Emor el b’nai Yisrael. Speak to the Children of Israel. Say to the Children of Israel.

The very weakness that is the source of his self-doubt becomes his central task — the act of conveying God’s word to the people, the act of receiving divine revelation and somehow transmitting it in language the people can hear and understand. As Martin Buber writes in Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant, “In this way the tragedy of Moses becomes the tragedy inherent in Revelation. It is laid upon the stammering to bring the voice of Heaven to earth.”

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During these waning weeks of summer, when we read the parshiyot of Sefer Devarim (literally, the Book of Words) one cannot help but wonder what has happened to the reluctant, reticent man who first heard the voice of God calling to him at the burning bush? What has happened to his sense of hesitation, and “heaviness of tongue”? What has happened to his stammer?

Moses addresses the people at the end of his life – at the edge of the Promised Land he will not be allowed to enter with them – and it seems that the man who didn’t know how to start speaking now doesn’t know how to stop.

In her book, Moses: A Human Life, Avivah Zornberg suggests that, from the beginning, Moses’ difficulty speaking flowed from not an absence but an excess of feelings and thoughts, “a kind of congested intensity.” “Personal and inexpressible, his Revelation must not be travestied by easy utterance. The stammer, here, is part of the message; the hesitation, the halting delivery . . .”

Zornberg goes on to quote psychologist Stephen Frosh who notes that there is always “a loss involved as the multiple possible ways of experiencing the world are narrowed and channeled into what can be said.” Each time we choose a word, there is another word we are not choosing. Each time we try to express what we are thinking or feeling, we risk diminishing – or even distorting – the full subtlety and complexity of what is in our hearts and minds.

In this sense, perhaps the distance between the experience of being unable to speak and having too much to say is not so great after all.

With all this in mind, I have been reading – and hearing — Sefer Devarim a bit differently this year. In this very wordy Book of Words, I have been listening for Moses’ stammer.

One of the things I’ve been struck by throughout the Book of Devarim is the proliferation of phrases in which a Hebrew root or word is doubled. There are abundant examples, most often in the form of the infinitive absolute followed by a finite verb.

Over the last two weeks, we’ve encountered: Shamo’a tishme’u. Hear, hear. Naton titen. Give, give. Aser, te’aser. Tithe, tithe.

This week, famously, we find the simple repetition of what is arguably the most important word in the entire parsha: Tzedek, Tzedek. Justice, justice.

Grammatically, these phrases are generally understood to be emphatic, underscoring the significance of what’s at stake in each of these commands. But what if we also hear something else in these doubled phrases throughout the Book of Devarim?

Hear, hear. Give, give. Tithe, tithe. Justice, justice.

What if we also hear each of these repetitions as traces of Moses’ stammer?

What if we hear them as the residue of Moses’ reticence – a reticence flowing not from having too little to say, but too much? If Moses was afraid, as Zornberg suggests, of “the narrowing of possibilities” that would occur when he attempted to compress revelation into human language – this invites us to think differently about what we are doing when we study Torah. Viewed through this lens, the ongoing process of interpretation can be seen as “the un-narrowing of possibilities” – the sacred unfolding of what might yet be revealed when we search the words of Torah and when we search our own hearts.

Indeed, each of the doublings in the Book of Devarim (and elsewhere in the Torah) has become over time an opportunity and an opening for ongoing interpretation by rabbinic commentators, yielding multiple readings, and revealing layers of meaning concealed in the language of the text.

Hearing the doublings of Sefer Devarim in this way, I suddenly imagine enormous tenderness being expressed in the unfolding of the interpretive tradition. It is as if we – and generations of readers before us – are saying: Don’t worry, Moshe Rabeinu. We are still “un-narrowing” your words. We are still excavating, exploring, expanding the infinite possibilities that you were afraid of closing off.

This is what I heard – for the first time this year – in Rashi’s commentary on the doubling from Parashat Eikev that ultimately entered our daily prayers and became part of our recitation of the Shema. V’haya im shamo’a tishme’u. If you really hear. Rashi says: Im shamo’a ba’yashan, tishme’u be’hadash. If you really hear the old, you will hear something new.

As I reflect on the meaning and message of Moses’ stammer, I can’t help but think about what is happening to language in our own time. The allure of rhetoric that is filled with self-righteous certainty. The seduction of polarizing discourse on social media that is divorced from the inconvenient awkwardness — and empathy — of in-person communication. The rush to language that is smoothed out and flattened by AI, unencumbered by the risk of really searching for and saying, however haltingly, what is in our hearts.

As we enter this month of Elul, and prepare to begin a new year, may we slow down long enough to listen for the voice that stammers, within Torah, within ourselves, and with each other.

“For it is laid upon the stammering to bring the voice of Heaven to earth.”

Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld is President of Hebrew College.

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