The DAG"Z on Va’eira

(yes i know i'm a week late)

1. Moshedipus

In his infancy, according to a famous legend, Moses was the object of an infanticidal attempt by Pharaoh. At three years old, he took Pharaoh's crown from his head and put it on his own. Pharaoh's advisers, led by Balaam, urge that the child be put to death. Clearly, his gesture is one of usurpation — he aims, like all his Israelite ancestors, to overthrow the superior, the elder rival. The angel Gabriel, disguised as one of the Egyptian sages, proposes a test to determine if there is precocious intent behind the infant Moses' act. An onyx stone and a burning coal are placed before him: if he reaches for the coal, brighter but worthless, he will prove that he is just an infant, attracted to the shiny; if he reaches for the valuable stone, he will prove his precociousness and the sinister nature of his self-crowning. Moses, who is indeed precociously wise, and destined to overthrow Pharaoh, reaches for the stone. But Gabriel supernaturally diverts his hand towards the coal; he burns his hand and puts it instinctively to his mouth, burning that as well. This gesture saves his life, and also explains how he becomes "heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue."

As Robert Paul suggests, Moses' "speech-defect" thus can be understood as the "scar" left by a failed infanticidal attack, like Oedipus's wounded feet. He has survived his "father's" fatal attack; later he will kill this father at the Red Sea...

2. ‘Orla

Moshe describes himself as ‘aral sefatayim — "of uncircumcised lips". When he is attacked by God on the way back from Midyan to Mitzrayim, Tzipora saves his life by circumcising their son. In cutting away their son's foreskin with a stone knife, she circumcises her husband's lips. The child is now unblocked from entry into the Hebrew/Israelite covenant; Moshe is now unblocked from leading the Israelite Nation into the future.

3. Quoting Sartre

"How can anyone choose to reason falsely? It is simply the old yearning for impermeability... there are people who are attracted by the permanence of stone. They would like to be solid and impenetrable, they do not want change: for who knows what change might bring? ...It is as if their own existence were perpetually in suspense. But they want to exist in all ways at once, and all in one instant. They have no wish to acquire ideas, they want them to be innate... they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and the quest for truth play only a subordinate part, in which nothing is sought except what has already been found, in which one never becomes anything else but what one already was."