VA’EIRA
Va’eira (Exodus 6:2-9:35) mostly covers the start of the familiar story of the ten plagues, recounting plagues 1-7. Moses and Aaron convey the message to the Pharoah that if he doesn’t let the Israelites go and worship YHVH in the wilderness, progressively bad things will happen to the Egyptians. Pharoah is stubborn in his own right, and his stubbornness is augmented by YHVH who repeatedly strengthens or hardens his heart to magnify the scope of YHVH’s power. “But I will harden Pharoah’s heart, that I may multiply My signs and marvels in the land of Egypt.” (7:3). The rhythm of the story is that Moses and Aaron threaten the plague unless Pharoah relents, the plague happens, Pharoah bargains for the lifting of the plague, the plague is lifted and Pharoah reneges, The cycle starts over.
I am going to focus on three themes.
Who is El Shaddai
The metaphor of “Uncircumcised lips”
The repeated demand to worship in the wilderness
Here’s how the parsha begins. “God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHVH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by the name of YHVH. I also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners. I have now heard the moaning of the Israelites, because they are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the Israelite people: I am YHVH. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptian. (6:2-7)
This sounds a lot like the people might know who El Shaddai is, but not know who this new guy YHVH is. We are readers of a text where El Shaddai and YHVH as proper names of the divine have already been blended together in Genesis, and YHVH is the predominant name of the divine. But as I read Shemot 6:2-7, there is a felt need to make sure that the hearers/readers of this text understand that El Shaddai and YHVH are one and the same. That means that the listeners/readers of this text might well think, or might even be predisposed to think, that El Shaddai and YHVH are different beings. After 3,000 years, we’ve mostly lost this ability to think they are different beings, having had monotheism drummed into our brains from our early days in Sunday schools through any advanced study we’ve done. But put aside your predispositions, what Gadamer calls your pre-judgments, and just read the text I’ve retyped. “God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHVH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by the name of YHVH.”
Doesn’t that read like this character YHVH is attempting to persuade the listener/reader that YHVH and El Shaddai are actually the same, even though they have different names? Please remember that the Hebrew Bible unambiguously knows and acknowledges the possibility of other divine beings besides the ones it claims as the one God—think of the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal as one example. We’ll also revisit this when we get to the ten utterances (commandments).
So who might El Shaddai be? El means “God.” When I use the word God in this commentary, I am translating the Hebrew Elohim, which might better be translated as “Gods” since it is in a plural form, but it is traditionally treated as if it were a singular noun. Then what do we mean by Shaddai? This is not at all clear. Hebrew is a kind of language that lends itself to this kind of ambiguity. This provides great grist for creating midrash, a both ancient and current core kind of Jewish sacred literature. Midrash are stories that address ambiguities in our inherited texts. This built in ambiguity also frustrates people who want one clear truth. Fortunately, that’s not me and I hope it isn’t you. Let me share a few theories from scholars about “Shaddai.”
One theory is that “Shaddai” refers to wilderness, mountain or an uncultivated field, as the Hebrew word “sadeh” means field. My Hebrew/ancient Semitic languages aren’t good enough to follow the details of the argument for why this isn’t the God of the fields rather than the God of the wilderness, but that’s the argument of a scholar named Ernst Knauf. This ties nicely into the demand to go worship in the wilderness that is prominent in this parsha.
A second theory is that the term means plunder, overpower or make desolate. This is based on the Hebrew shin, dalet, dalet root. So this would mean something like the destroyer God, which calls to mind Kali of Hindu fame. This also fits with later usages of the “El Shaddai” in other parts of the Hebrew Bible.
A third theory is that Shaddai refers to breasts. Shin dalet means breasts. Thus El Shaddai might mean “the many breasted God” and might indeed be female. David Biale, a contemporary scholar at Berkeley, argues that of the six times that El Shaddai is mentioned in Genesis, five of them have to do with fertility blessings for the patriarchs. Biale then continues to say that later on this meaning was “forgotten” (more likely repressed in my view) and then the meaning of the word as related to power or destruction was adopted. Biale, David (February 1982). "The God with Breasts: El Shaddai in the Bible"
I strongly believe that it is authentic Jewish/Hebrew practice to reclaim any of these three meanings of El Shaddai as indigenously Jewish/Hebrew views of the divine.
Which of these three possible meanings of El Shaddai –God of field or wilderness, God of power or destruction and God of many breasts--hold meaning for you? Under what circumstances? Why?
We talked about Moses’ reluctance to be the spokesperson for YHVH in the last parsha, and indeed he reiterates his reluctance twice more in Chapter 6, (vs 12 and 30) using a very intriguing phrase aral sefatayim. Sefatayim are lips and aral is a foreskin. The best translation I have seen is “uncircumcised lips.” This arresting phrase is unfortunately suppressed in many translations. JPS translates this as “impeded speech,” Artscroll as “sealed lips”, Metsudah as “covered lips” and Fox, generally my favorite translation, as “foreskinned lips” which is at least accurate.
Uncircumcised hearts is used as a metaphor elsewhere (e.g. Leviticus 26:41 and Deuteronomy 10:16). It can easily be interpreted as referring to people who haven’t accepted YHVH into their hearts, hence their hearts are uncircumcised. But lips? I want to offer two approaches to this term.
We could treat “uncircumcised lips” as a metaphor. What does it mean to not take YHVH into your lips? Perhaps the text is offering us a possible interpretation that Moses himself does not have any ownership of these words that YHVH has commanded him to say. This would mean Moses, in his heart, believes something like hey you burnt a bush but it was not consumed, we’ve had these really long dialogues, you’ve shown me other miracles, but, really I don’t believe what you are having me say. I will say it anyway, because you are obviously much more powerful than I am, and you scare the crap out of me, but still, I don’t really believe what I am saying or I’m not really committed to it. Maybe. Perhaps Moses’ resistance to what YHVH has assigned him to do is more than just humility about being up to the task.
We could also treat “uncircumcised lips” as what Paul Ricoeur, the great French philosopher, calls a symbol. Symbols, in Ricoeur’s usage, are things that can never be fully explained. They always contain more meaning that is drawn from mystery. Things like the moon, the sun, water, the wind—all are things that we can never fully explain. Uncircumcised lips as a symbol would mean that whatever we might say about this phrase, it would still remain a mystery, something that could not be completely unexplained by humans. Then while we might (and are) talking about it, we would, to my mind, be compelled to simply dwell with the symbol and the mystery. Dwelling with the symbol, dwelling with the mystery means not trying to explain it, but letting it permeate throughout our bodies, throughout our beings, letting the symbol move us.
Circumcision as metaphor or symbol has some obvious gender problems. While female circumcision is known and practiced, it’s more like female genital mutilation than merely circumcision. I don’t have any good ideas about how to translate this.
So what might uncircumcised lips mean? If I treat it as a metaphor, maybe my lips are only circumcised when I am speaking deep, divine truths? Then my lips would be uncircumcised if I were not truly connected with the divine and speaking from a human only context? If that’s our interpretation, most of us would have uncircumcised lips. If I treat it as a symbol, maybe I dwell with how hard it is to be truly committed to the divine? Note also that it’s not an either or choice between metaphor and symbol.
Which seems more compelling to you, metaphor or symbol for “uncircumcised lips”? What words do you speak that you own, and what words do you speak that feel as if they are imposed upon you? What are the divine words that you speak, and what are the words without divine presence? What might dwelling with “uncircumcised lips” looks like?
The repeated demand for a journey for the Israelites into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to YHVH that Pharoah keeps turning down can get lost in the drama of the plagues. Why is this so threatening to Pharoah? Why can’t he simply negotiate a short holiday, the equivalent of the week between Christmas and New Years? The people would go sacrifice, they’d come back, he’d still have his slaves and he’d only lose a week of work. He could probably negotiate some kind of surety to ensure they return.
Wilderness, by definition, is something that isn’t under human control. Pharoah is committed, above all, to control of the Israelites. My guess is that the rejection of the demand is based in his fear of wilderness in general, both for other people and internally for himself. There are many Pharoahs in the world who want everything in a neat box and want total control. Perhaps some of you work for one of them. Or perhaps you are like Pharoah in your attempt to control things around you. I have certainly been guilty of that.
It’s that very lack of control that is part of what makes the wilderness such a potentially potent place for spiritual practice. Transformational spiritual practice can only happen if you are not in control. But, and I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, it is very hard to let go of control.
Before everyone accuses me of ignoring all the situations in which we are not in control and says that what I just wrote can only be written from a point of privilege, sure there are lots of situations that don’t feel as if they come with any control. Politics is my favorite example where I don’t think I have any control at all, because if I did, it would sure look different. But Viktor Frankl taught us that we are always free, and if he believed this in the context of Nazi concentration camps, we can believe this in the land of America the fat. And think of the areas in which you do exercise control and how hard it is to let go.
Wilderness is also a potent place for transformational spiritual practice because the structures of the human world aren’t present. We, unlike our ancestors, live in a world where the proportion of human to more than human is radically tilted towards humans. But in wilderness this is reversed and all we have is the more than human world.
Do we embrace the more than human world, or do we hold onto the human world that we’ve brought with ourselves to the wilderness? What would letting go of control and trusting the divine look like in your life? How are you like Pharoah, or how do you suffer from being under a Pharoah?
QUESTIONS
Which of these three possible meanings of El Shaddai –God of field or wilderness, God of power or destruction and God of many breasts--hold meaning for you? Under what circumstances? Why?
Which seems more compelling to you, metaphor or symbol for “uncircumcised lips”? What words do you speak that you own, and what words do you speak that feel as if they are imposed upon you? What are the divine words that you speak, and what are the words without divine presence? What might dwelling with “uncircumcised lips” looks like?
Do we embrace the more than human world, or do we hold onto the human world that we’ve brought with ourselves to the wilderness? What would letting go of control and trusting the divine look like in your life? How are you like Pharoah, or how do you suffer from being under a Pharoah?
