The tendency of meaning to burn out of language is a
constant theme in Nietzsche’s writings. Here lies the paradox of the stammer:
May your virtue be too
exalted for the familiarity of names: and if you must speak of her, then do not
be ashamed to stammer of her. Then speak and stammer, “This is my good; this I
love; it pleases me wholly; thus alone do I want the good. I do not want it as
divine law; I do not want it as human statute and need: it shall not be a
signpost for me to overearths and paradises. It is an earthly virtue that I
love: there is little prudence in it, and least of all the reason of all men.
But this bird built its nest with me: therefore I love and caress it; now it
dwells with me, sitting on its golden eggs.” Thus you shall stammer and praise
your virtue.
To speak publicly of one’s “virtue” is to vulgarize its
precious idiosyncrasy. Nietzsche’s solution is: “Speak and stammer.” In a
valuable essay, “Moses the Modest Law-Giver,” Julie E. Cooper extends this
notion to the issue of Moses’ stammer. 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, the “fundamental
inhibition of expression,” convey the excess of revelation. They may also
convey the ambivalence of the prophet before the overwhelming influx of
revelation. Fear and desire may create a dumbfounding conflict.
The role of prophet or poet holds at its heart the paradox
of speaking the unspeakable. While language is necessary for life within a
stable social order, there is always “a loss involved as the multiple possible
ways of experiencing the world are narrowed and channeled into what can be
said.”
A certain kind of reticence, or circumspection, therefore
halts the true prophet, faced with the inscrutable God, whose revelation must
be narrowed into what can be said. In a moment of pure desire, Moses asks God,
“Let me see please Your Glory” (33:18). God denies his request and grants him
only a vision of His “back”:
“You cannot see My
face, for man may not see Me and live.” And God said, “See, there is a place
near Me. Stand on the rock and, as My Glory passes by, I will put you in a
cleft in the rock, and shield you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I
will remove My hand and you will see My back; but My face may not be seen”
(33:20–23).
God’s face cannot be seen by human eyes, but His “back,” the
traces of God’s presence in the world, can be glimpsed after He has passed by. One of the Hassidic masters of the
nineteenth century, R. Mordecai Yosef Leiner, known as Mei HaShiloach, reads
the reference to God’s “back” as a temporal reference to the past—to that which has passed and gone.
Moses is given insight into past history, into processes already under way. But
to see His face, or Presence, would mean to read God’s meanings in the present
moment: this is beyond human understanding.
But this, precisely, is what Moses desires: to fathom God’s
ways in real time. So the Talmud describes his desire at this moment: “Moses
said in God’s presence, ‘Master of the Universe, why do the righteous suffer,
and the wicked prosper?’” This is the radical question, the core problem of
souls. In a moment of divine favor, this is Moses’ request, Let me see Your face! But God answers
inscrutably: “The righteous who suffer are not perfectly righteous; and the
wicked who prosper are not perfectly wicked!” In spite of the unique intimacy
between Moses and God (“He spoke with Him face to face, as a man speaks to his
friend” [33:11]), a full revelation of divine meanings is withheld from him.
God is inscrutable on this most painful of human questions.
Moses, in particular, is haunted by the unintelligible world into which he has
been—twice—born. His life is, in some obscure way, a metaphor for that of the
people to whom he is strangely attached. Why is he chosen? Why are they chosen,
for genocide and for redemption?
Emmanuel Levinas, the French Jewish philosopher, remarks on
the choice of Moses:
The language of the
Old Testament is so suspicious of any rhetoric which never stammers that it has
as its chief prophet a man “slow of speech and of tongue.” In this disability
we can see more than the simple admission of a limitation; it also acknowledges
the nature of this kerygma, one which does not forget the weight of the world,
the inertia of men, the dullness of their understanding.
Moses is chosen because of his disability, which conveys not
only his own limitations but also the human resistance to revelation. This
resistance implies that the messenger will himself be afflicted by a sense of
the clogged medium in which he has to speak. The language of the prophet will
reflect this stalled experience; he will express himself through indirection.
Moreover, as Cooper argues, a kind of tragic realism
requires the prophet to keep in mind the unredeemed nature of the world. An
inherent silence will haunt the precipitations of speech. The most enlightened
of human beings is nevertheless illumined only intermittently. This is
Maimonides’ image for the philosopher’s experience of Revelation: like
lightning flashes, truth appears and disappears. A literary modesty must
therefore mark his utterances.
Even Moses, for whom these flashes appear continuously,
hides his face when God first speaks to him. Even he has imperfect access to
God. Maimonides refers to the light that later irradiates Moses’ face. It too
is a subtly broken light: pulses, rays, rather than a direct energy. Both his
reception and his transmission of the law have this intermittent though dense
quality. The truths that God would reveal are always indirect, with gaps and
silences built in.
From Moses byAvivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Published by Yale University Press in 2020. Reproduced with permission.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg lectures on the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic thought at academic, psychoanalytic, and Jewish educational institutions around the world. In 1995 she received the National Jewish Book Award for Genesis: The Beginning of Desire.
Ep. 134—The Therapeutic Benefits of Reading Greek Tragedy