Peh-Sach --The Open Mouth or 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

Hevrutah:

1. Review sources 2,3,4, 10,11 and 12. (you don't have to get through all of them-- fine if you get through three or four texts)

2. What are these sources saying about language and communication?

3. How might you articulate the intersection in these texts in the notions of speech and freedom, or the lack thereof?

“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

From, Moses, by Aviva Zornberg

“In the exiled state, language is repressed. A Pharaoh who does not know Joseph has denied vital links with his own past history. A traumatic absence haunts his realm. His edicts blunt feeling and awareness, even the awareness of pain, even in his victims. Eventually, this Pharaoh will answer Moses in their first confrontation, “Who is God that I should listen to His voice? I do not know God!” (Exodus 5:2). Pharoah’s passion for ignorance-- and for deafness-- will develop over the course of the ten Plagues, as time and time again, Moses and Aaron’s please fall on deaf ears: And Pharaoh did not listen to them.

The portrait of Pharaoh's imperviousness even to his own suffering, the compulsive “hardening” of his heart, becomes a refrain throughout the Plague chronicle. Apparently unable to grasp his own history, he enacts a kind of traumatic absence from his own experience.”

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg (born March 1944) is a Scottish contemporary Torah scholar and author. She was born in London, England, grew up in Glasgow, Scotland,and moved to Israel in 1969, where she currently resides in Jerusalem

II. Zoharic Midrash on Moses

1. “Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses out of shortness of breath and harsh bondage” (Exod 6:9). What does this mean: “out of shortness of ruah [breath]”? Rabbi Yehudah said: That they could not relax or take a deep breath. Rabbi Shimon said: “Out of shortness of spirit”—that the Jubilee had not yet released the soul [having not yet been legislated! YC] , and final spirit did not yet prevail, executing its judgments; so there was constriction of spirit. For whom? Final spirit, as we mentioned.

Come and see: “Look, the Children of Israel did not listen to me, and will Pharaoh listen to me, and I am uncircumcised of lips.” (Exod 6:12). But it is previously written: “No man of words am I… for I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue: (4:10), and the blessed Holy One replied to him, “Who gives a mouth to a human being? Who makes him mute?...” (ibid., v. 11). And He said, “I myself will be with your mouth” (v. 12). Might you imagine that it was not so? Yet now he [still] says, “I am uncircumcised of lips”! If so, where is the word that the blessed Holy One promised him previously?

…….

However, it is a mystery. Moses is voice, and speech, which is his word, was in exile; so he was “uncircumcised”— obstructed from expressing words. He said, “How will Pharaoh listen to me,” when my word is in exile? For I have no word! I am voice; word will be lacking, for She is in exile. Consequently, the blessed Holy One made Aaron his partner.

Come and see: Therefore Moses was incomplete at first—appropriately, because he is voice, coming for the sake of speech, to bring it out of exile. As soon as it came out of exile, and voice and speech united as one at Mount Sinai, Moses was completed and healed; voice and speech became as one in consummation. Come and see: All the days that Moses was in Egypt, seeking to bring the word out of exile, the word did not speak. As soon as it came out of exile, that word—who is speech—led and guided Israel, but did not speak until they approached Mount Sinai, when it opened with Torah fittingly. Now, you might say, “For Elohim said (amar): Lest the people regret when they see battle, and go back to Egypt” (Exod 13:17). However, it is not written “For Elohim spoke (dibber)” but rather “For Elohim said (amar)” which is silent intention of the heart, as we have already established.

Translated by Daniel C. Matt, The Zohar, Pritzker Edition IV

The Zohar (Hebrew: זֹהַר, lit. "Splendor" or "Radiance") is the foundational work in the literature of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah. It was written in 13th-century Spain, likely by the Castilian kabbalist Rabbi Moshe (Moses) de Leon and multiple other authors.

When the ancient Israelites wandered thought the wilderness for forty years, a certain group of Levites were given the privilege of carrying the Holy Ark. "How heavy it must have been," someone commented, "with those massive stone tablets inside it!" "No," a Levite answered. "The Ark carried those who bore it." (Sotah 35a)

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.

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.

Resources:

http://hitzeiyehonatan.blogspot.com/2009/02/bo-zohar.html