“The alphabet is an abolitionist. If you would keep a people enslaved, refuse to teach them to read.” 

– Editorial on “Education in the Southern States,” in Harper’s Weekly, November 9, 1867

The Torah says in this week’s Parsha, Shemot, that after 210 years of slavery, the Jewish people cried out:

“It was after many years that the king of Egypt died and the Israelites groaned due to their bondage and cried out; and their cry for help from the bondage rose up to God. And God heard their moaning, and God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God knew…And God said [to Moses], ‘I have seen the plight of My people in Egypt and have heeded their outcry because of their taskmasters; because I know their pain…And now go, I will send you to Pharaoh, and you shall free My people, the Israelites, from Egypt.’”

Moshe questions God, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh?” God answers, “I will be with you.” Moshe keeps at it, over and over again, refusing to go, arguing that he is not a good speaker and the Jews and Pharaoh will not listen to him. It all seems to circle back, around and around, on not speaking and not hearing.

How can it be that Moshe, who is a man of action—who cares for the downtrodden, who killed an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Jewish slave, and who jumped in to rebuke a Jew who was arguing with another Jew— when God asks him to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let the people go, Moshe refuses over and over again, each time citing a lack of ability to speak on his part and a lack of ability to listen on the part of others. What holds back his ability to express himself and why does he fear he will not be heard, even after God reassures him twice that, “I will be with your mouth,” and arms Moses with two convincing miracles to perform?

The Zohar writes that the exile of Egypt was an exile of speech—of voice, words and language. Rabbi Solovetchik explains (Redemption, Prayer and Talmud Torah, in Tradition, 1978), “The slaves were gloomy, voiceless and mute. The women did not cry when their infants were snatched from their arms; the men kept quiet when they were mercilessly tortured by the slave drivers. Torture was taken for granted. They thought this was the way it had to be…He [Moses] did not believe that those slaves would ever be liberated. Hence, while Moses, and with him the whole community, had already broken out of their silence, they had yet to find the words…”

Rabbi Soloveitchik says that there are three levels to redemption from slavery. At first, there was no sense that anything was amiss, the Jewish slaves took for granted their state of being. Moshe, by striking the taskmaster, opened the door of possibility to the idea that perhaps things can be different than they are. This engendered a cry, as the Torah states, “and they groaned.”  But the groan was not enough; the next step in true freedom is full self expression—the telling of one’s story and the belief that one can have impact on history, that one ultimately matters. This is something that Aaron helps Moshe with. While Moshe has the first stage, voice, Aaron can marry that with the words, with language. Later, at Mount Sinai, when God speaks the 10 “words,” the Jewish people are endowed with dibbur, with speech, and they become the people of language, the People of the Book. The idea is that words not only matter, but matter the most of anything—that words and ideas, in this case, Torah—can change the world.

Many years later in the United States we see the power of speech as key to redemption in the reflections of Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass in his autobiography (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave) quoted his master’s rebuke of the mistress who taught him the letters of the alphabet: “Learning would spoil the best n**** in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that n**** (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.”

Douglass further reflects:

“I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty, to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. . . . Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.  From this time, I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell (a larger measurement of 45 inches).”

Perhaps this parsha should prompt each of us to ask in what way we, free people, are enslaved? In what way is our own voice in exile? In what ways do we hold back from telling our story of what truly matters to us?   What do we fear saying that could indeed impact the world? How do we, like Moshe, underestimate our own potential and the ability of others to hear us?