Speech in Exile (Dibbur be-Galut ) and the Redemption of Speech

"Galut ha-dibbur” The broken condition of language.

“When the community Israel was exiled from its home, the letters of the divine name, became, if one may say so, separated, the hey, flying apart from the vav. We can thus understand the sentence ‘I was dumb with silence’ (Psalms 39:3), as through the separation of the vav from the hey, there was no Voice, and thus Utterance was silenced”. Zohar, 116

Zohar:

And for this reason he said, "How will Pharaoh listen to me? As long as words are in exile, I have no way to express myself. I [am on the level of] voice, but I am missing words, which are in exile." So the Holy Blessed One God partnered him with Aaron.

“The language of the Old Testament is so suspicious of any rhetoric without a stammer that it has as its chief prophet a man slow of speech and of tongue.” Emmanuel Levinas

Yochanan Muffs-- From Love and Joy
Any meeting of personalities requires great bravery. One who attempts to communicate with another endangers his own life, for to do this he must reveal what is in his heart. Such an act is potentially dangerous because one does not know ahead of time if he will find a receptive ear. There is always the possibility that
the ear of the listener will be impervious. Any real communication, then, is a dangerous leap. But if one never screws up the courage to jump, he will wither away in silent isolation . . . The dialectical tension in the loving relationship – the painful need to express feeling and the anxiety that the expression might not be properly
received – is the inner dialectic of the human personality, as well as of the Divine, and is impossible to avoid.
Humankind can only overcome this tension by imitating God, by undertaking an act of bravery, a leap of faith, as God has done – by reaching out to the other, to communicate, to love.
Yochanan Muffs (1932 - 2009) was an American-Jewish professor of the Bible and religion at the Jewish Theological
Seminary in New York.

Hevrutah:

1. God finally speaks to directly to the Israelites at the beginning of Exodus 20 (text #12). How do you make sense of God's first words? Why is this God's opening statement?

2. In text #13 the Israelite's react to God speaking directly to them. How do you understand their reaction?

3. How does text #14 help you understand God's speaking to the Israelites?

3. In Text #15 there are two midrashic texts cited. What do you think each is getting at? What do they add to your understanding about God's communication with God's people? About communication overall?

The excerpt below by Nelle Morton comes from her 1977 essay "Beloved Image," which is found in her book The Journey is Home.

Hearing to Speech It was in a small group of women who had come together to tell our own stories that I first received a totally new understanding of hearing and speaking. I remember well how one woman started, hesitating and awkward, trying to put the pieces of her life together. Finally she said: “I hurt… I hurt all over.” She touched herself in various places as if feeling for the hurt before she added, “but… I don’t know where to begin to cry.” She talked on and on. Her story took on fantastic coherence. When she reached a point of most excruciating pain no one moved. No one interrupted. Finally she finished. After a silence, she looked from one woman to another. “You heard me. You heard me all the way.” Her eyes narrowed. She looked directly at each woman in turn and then said slowly: “I have a strange feeling you heard me before I started. You heard me to my own story.” I filed this experience away as something unique. But it happened again and again in other such small groups of women. It happened to me. Then, I knew I had been experiencing something I had never experienced before. A complete reversal of the going logic in which someone speaks precisely so that more accurate hearing may take place. This woman was saying, and I had experienced, a depth hearing that takes place before the speaking – a hearing that is far more than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes speech –a new speech—a new creation. The woman had been heard to her own speech.

While I experienced this kind of hearing through women, I am convinced it is one of those essential dimensions of the full human experience long programmed out of our culture and our religious tradition. In time I came to understand the wider implication of this reversal as revolutionary and profoundly theological. Hearing of this sort is equivalent to empowerment. We empower one another by hearing the other to speech. We empower the disinherited, the outsider, as we are able to hear them name in their own way their own oppression and suffering. In turn, we are empowered as we can put ourselves in a position to be heard by the disinherited (in this case other women) to speaking our own feeling of being caught and trapped. Hearing in this sense can break through political and social structures and image a new system. A great ear at the heart of the universe –at the heart of our common life—hearing human beings to speech—to our own speech.

Nelle Katherine Morton (January 7, 1905 – July 14, 1987) was an American theologian, professor, feminist activist, and civil rights leader. ... She wrote prolifically on religion, spirituality, feminism, intersectionality, and language. In 1985, she published an anthology of essays titled The Journey Is Home.

“The Language of the Unheard” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, "The Other America,' April 1967

I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.