Parashat Shemot: An unglamorous leader

• Date: 07 January 2021
• Published date: 07 January 2021
• Author: SHMUEL RABINOWITZ

And then redemption arises from this darkness. A baby is born to a known family and after three months of hiding him, the desperate mother puts him in a cradle on the banks of the Nile River. King Pharaoh's daughter goes to bathe in the river, finds the baby and adopts him. The boy, named Moses, grows up in the palace of the Egyptian king. Later, Moses gets into trouble after killing an Egyptian who was abusing and hitting a Jew. He is forced to escape from Egypt and arrives in Midian, where he marries Zipporah, has two sons with her and settles there.

But Moses's destiny was not to live a peaceful life in Midian. The Divine plan changed his life. One day, Moses was shepherding his father-in-law's herd when God revealed Himself to Moses from within a burning bush, telling him to return to Egypt and represent the Jewish nation before Pharaoh ahead of their liberation and exodus from Egypt.

Moses does not accept the job easily. He tried to argue and refuse it five times, offering a different excuse each time for why he was unsuitable for the job and why his mission was bound to fail. Let us focus on his fourth refusal when Moses made the following persuasive claim:

Moses said to the Lord, "I beseech You, O Lord. I am not a man of words, neither from yesterday nor from the day before yesterday, nor from the time You have spoken to Your servant, for I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue" (Ibid 4:10).

This is actually a significant claim. Moses did not have rhetorical skills and even suffered from some kind of speech impediment making his speech unclear. This disability, Moses claimed, was significant enough to make him unsuitable for the job he was being told to do. One of the skills a leader needs is the ability to make speeches and persuade the masses, and this was something he felt he could not do.

God's answer was clear-cut:

But the Lord said to him, "Who gave man a mouth, or who makes [one] dumb or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? So now, go! I will be with your mouth, and I will instruct you what you shall speak" (Ibid Ibid: 11-12).

Reading God's answer, it seems that He did not promise Moses that his...