The Way of the Flint/The Way of the Mouth

What is going on in the somewhat strange biblical story known as “the circumcision at the inn”? (Exodus 4:20-26)

Moses is on his way, together with his wife Tzipporah and their two sons, to Egypt, in obedience to God’s commands. Suddenly the Lord appears and wishes to kill him (who Moses? The son?)

Tzipporah seizes a flint, circumcises their son, and ends by announcing “You are a bridegroom of blood to me.”

The mysteries are many. Here is one possible insight.

While doing a Bibliodrama on the life of Tzipporah, a couple of the participants brought to light something interesting. We noticed that at the well in Midian, where Tzipporah first meets Moses, Moses steps in to help Yitro’s seven daughters, who are harassed daily by shepherds who drive them away.

We are told Moses “stood up and helped them, and watered their flock” (Ex. 4:17). Participant Esther Goldenberg noted that Moses was fleeing from Egypt, where he had killed a man. When he comes to the well, he wishes to rectify his violence and chooses to act more peacefully, intentionally helping the young women in a non-violent way and not interacting with the shepherds at all.

Now let’s see how this plays out in the circumcision story. Uri Etigson pointed out to me we notice that in Ex. 4:25, Tzipporah takes up a flint, in Hebrew צר, comprising two of the four letters of her name צפרה.

The other two letters of her name are פה meaning “mouth.” So one message of this story might be to present two paths – the way of the flint (violence) and the way of the mouth (non-violence).

We see Tzipporah taking upon herself the violence that Moses has long rejected, after his murderous deed forty years before caused him to have to flee his home. This may be one explanation for why Moses did not circumcise his own son during these forty years in Midian – he went to the other extreme and did not even want to engage in this important ritual act.

In their coupling and its dynamic, Tzipporah find she must take up the slack to fill the void left by Moses’ shadow side – his inner violence that we later see emerging from time to time in his flaring anger at different points. This does happen inside couple relationships, that one partner becomes a certain way in order to compensate for a repression or unbalancing in the other.

“The way of the mouth” encapsulates Moses’ future mission in Egypt. There, he and Aaron will speak for God before Pharaoh, whose name breaks down to פה רע meaning “bad mouth”.

As a person with a speech impediment (“heavy of mouth and tongue”), Moses cannot take words lightly, each word comes at a cost. So much so that he does not think he can speak at all, and G-d has to reassure him that He Himself will be with his mouth, and that Aaron will be his spokesman. (Ex. 4:10-17, where the word “mouth” is mentioned repeatedly). Yet we do see Moses speak later, many times. He is not justified in his overcaution. He can do this.

It is surely no coincidence that Moses initially describes himself as being “of uncircumcised lips” (Ex. 6:12, 6:30). Perhaps, suggests Uri Etigson, by circumcising their son, Tzipporah is also “circumcising’ her husband’s lips, allowing him to speak much more fluidly than he ever could have imagined when he took on the mission. 

The Staff and the Hand

Moses starts off his mission as God's emissary using his staff. Along with Aaron's staff, it was the instrument of the signs he was to do in Egypt - turning into a snake, bringing on the plagues.

However, if you look carefully, from the moment the plagues begin, the staffs become interchangeable with the hand.

Plague of BLOOD:
And the Lord spoke to Moses, Say to Aaron, Take your staff, and stretch out your hand upon the waters of Egypt… that they may become blood…

Plague of FROGS:
And the Lord spoke to Moses, Say to Aaron, Stretch forth your hand with your staff over the streams, over the rivers, and over the ponds, and cause frogs to come up upon the land of Egypt

And so on:

LICE = "staff"

HAIL = "Stretch out your hand" (but Moses stretches his staff)

LOCUSTS = ditto

And at the Splitting of the Sea - staff, hand, hand, hand, hand.
(And the battle with Amalek - staff, hand, hands)

What is going on here?

It seems as if God started off with the staff intentiionally. Either because a staff is more impressive and would grant Moses and Aaron more respect. Or perhaps because people's attention would be more drawn to a staff as a symbol of God's power.  Also because they would, at the outset, not attribute the powers to Moses and Aaron, something God did not want to happen.

But then it begins to not matter when the hand is used instead. In fact, the hand takes over at the sea. 

Based on responses I received at a Bibliodrama session, we could suggest that the staff was educational at the beginning, but then after that God wanted them to see that it didn't matter if it was a staff OR a hand, because all of it was from God. And that is the main thing, not to start attributing false power to an object (we run into this risk later with the Ark of the Covenant too, when it is taken into battle).

Masculine/Feminine

One more idea is that the staff is a very masculine (phallic) symbol, in the positive sense in that it makes this happen and can be used for dramatic and violent effect - but also in the negative aspect of masculinity i.e. in being rigid, authoritarian, and punishing.

The hand however is feminine in being soft, human, flexible and fluid, able to take on infinite different shapes, and connected not only to itself but to the entire whole (i.e. the body). 

Therefore the move from staff to hand represents the transition from the masculine to the feminine mode, in a very subtle way that was before its time, and only becoms clear to us today as we reclaim "the moon's lost light".

(It takes a while for Moshe to understand this. He continues to use his staff, though God is commanding hand).

And yet, once again, ultimately it matters not if it is masculine (staff) or feminine (hand), for all are instruments for God's power and light. 

* Thank you to my Bibliozoom group for helping me develop these ideas.

Serving God in the Moment

After the devastating plague of locusts, Pharaoh hurriedly calls for Moses (Exodus 10)

24. And Pharaoh called to Moses, and said, Go, serve the Lord; only let your flocks and your herds stay; let your little ones also go with you.

25. And Moses said, You must give us also sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.26. Our cattle also shall go with us; there shall not a hoof be left behind; for we must take it to serve the Lord our God; and we know not with what we must serve the Lord, until we come there.

These last few words are interesting. It's true that Moses might simply have been giving Pharaoh some kind of excuse, to explain why they needed to take all the cattle with them. However, there is also a deeper truth in the words "we know not with what we must serve the Lord, until we come there."

For a while I studied with a teacher of the Yemima method. One of Yemima Avital's fundamental principles was that every moment has its diyuk - its precise and right action. The aim and skill in life is to live each moment as rightly as possible, bearing in mind all factors. You cannot predict the diyuk in advance, based on yesterday's diyuk or your imagination or logic. It is only in the moment that the true diyuk emerges. To me, these words of Moshe's point to that. We need to come as prepared as possible because service of God is not (or not simply) by pre-prescribed laws, but rather also according to the call of the moment.

Those of you familiar with the Myers-Briggs test will recognise the P here, rather than the J. Come prepared by all means -  but don't plan out every second, remain flexible.

Rebbe Nachman has a teaching that also helps us to remain in the present and focus on the avoda of the present (Likutei Moharan 272:1 translated by Sefaria):

“Today! if you heed His voice.” (Psalms 95:7) 

A very important rule in Avodat Hashem is to only focus on what one has to do today. Whatever it may be a job, work, learning... One should always only focus what he has to do that day and not think ahead and look at everything he has at once. Focus on what you need to do at that moment alone.

When someone wants to improve in his Avodat hashem, of he doesn't take this advice and try to focus on everything he has to do not just today but the next day and the next week it will seem like a burden and too hard to follow. But when he only focuses on that day, that moment alone it will feel much easier. And he will be much better off.

And it's very important to not delay it and say, I will start tomorrow or later because all we have to do in this world is to focus on what we should be doing right now. That's why the pasuk said היום אם בקולו תשמעו to דוקא listen and start improving ourselves right now, one step at a time with whatever we have to do right in front of us right now.

Moshe's life journey taught him not to plan. He took every day as it came, listening for G-d's intructions for that day. Planning for the future didn't work out for him - he never entered the Promised Land, though that was the original plan. On any given day in the desert, he did not know if the pillar of cloud would begin moving again. Yet he was able to spend a full 120 years in this mode. This is the mode of faith.

The Precise Thing for Every Moment

In Bamidbar chapter 27, God tells Moses that his life is drawing to a close. Moses’ concern, upon hearing this news, is not for himself but for the people. They will need a new leader. He says to God: 

16. Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation,

17. Who may go out before them, and who may go in before them, and who may lead them out, and who may bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep which have no shepherd.

Wait a minute! Isn’t there a person who has been groomed for the leadership for the past 39 years - Joshua? He was placed in charge of the battle against Amalek. He was the only one Moses took with him (at least partway) up Mt Sinai. He was at the Tent of Meeting with Moses. He was one of the only two good spies. Isn’t it obvious that he is to be the successor, having been mentored by Moses, having spent all these years learning from him, and being the only Israelite with the military experience necessary to conquer the land?

So why does Moses phrase it as if there is no specific candidate, and his request is for God to choose “someone”? Does Moses really expect God to reply, “Ok, appoint Joe Shmoe.”

I’ve been pondering this question and for me, the point emerging from this one brief interchange is that we should never think we know God’s will. Even Moses, the prophet who “knew” God better than any human, needed to humbly acknowledge that God’s will is connected to a larger picture that we can never fully fathom, and therefore there may be surprises. Moreover, even if God’s favour seemed in the past to have been leaning towards Joshua, that doesn’t mean that at this moment it is still the same.

Important to note: This does not mean that God is capricious and acts on whims. What it means is that life is dynamic. Every moment comes with new energies, new strategies, and new mindful behaviour. As the verse is Psalms says, “Today, if you listen to his voice” and as Rebbe Nahman of Breslov points out, “This is to remind us that we must do our living in the present, in today. Every day, every hour has its own specific work, regardless of the past.”

This is a lesson I learned from Yemima Avital, creator of the Yemima method (see my article here for more): that every moment has its diyuk, its precise action. So Moses, accordingly, did not make assumptions and he waited to see what God’s will was in the now. 

We too need to become aware that whatever was right in the past might not be right for now – but if we plug into our intuition, do a clarification process, pray, we will hopefully discover what that precise right thing actually is.

Joshua: Son and sacrifice

Joshua is an enigmatic figure. He is present in a number of stories in the Torah and yet slips under the radar, such that people are not able to, off the cuff, recall much about him except for his being one of the “good spies” and eventually taking over from Moses.

We know nothing about his childhood or background apart from the fact that he is the son of a man named Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim. But there is a fascinating midrash from Yalkut Shimon that suggests a very formative incident:

Rabbi  Eliezer said: For all those years in which Israel sat in Egypt, the Ephraimites sat securely, tranquilly and serenely, until Nun, a descendant of Ephraim, came and declared, “The L-rd has appeared to me and commanded me to take you out.” [He felt/He did it due to the] pride in his heart that they were of royal descent and great warriors; and they got up, took their sons and daughters and exited Egypt. Then the Egyptians arose and killed all their warriors.

In this narrative, where Joshua as a young man experienced this tremendous failure on the part of his father, and perhaps his death, we could understand it if he began to see his teacher and mentor Moshe as a surrogate father figure. Moshe clearly trusts him, appointing him to be the military leader in the battle against Amalek. But we have stronger indications of a bond that is more akin to father and son.

When Moses climbs Mount Sinai, he takes only Joshua with him (although Joshua seems to vanish immediately, with Moses ascending alone – Ex. 24:13,15). Moses tells the elders “Wait here until we will return” (Ex. 24:14) in language very reminiscent of the Akeda story in which Abraham says to his servants, (Gen. 22:5) “Stay here with the donkey… and we will return to you.” Yet Abraham is misleading them. He cannot be sure that “they” will return; according to God’s command, only he will come back.  

In suggesting “And we will return”, Moses is referencing that foundational Jewish story. This does two things: (a) He is placing himself and Joshua in a father-son type relationship (b) He is placing Yehoshua into some kind of sacrificial role. But what that is unclear.

The sacrifice theme continues much later when Joshua is finally officially appointed as Moses’s successor. Moses lays his hands upon him, an action associated with sacrifices.[1] However, Joshua is not to be “sacrificed” in the sense of being put to death. How is he a sacrifice then? The answer I can think of would be that He is a sacrifice in the sense of something pure and worthy, being offered up to God’s service. The intertextuality here hints to us that he has the purity both of Isaac and of the animal at the altar.

Moses’s own children are not worthy successors; Joshua functions as his surrogate son. For Joshua, Moses replaces his failed father Nun, unlike him being someone who genuinely hears God’s voice, correctly and accurately, and leads the people into life, not death. It may even be, as is so often the case, that this early trauma propelled Joshua into his role, spurring him to take on responsibility and leadership so as to fix the crack that opened in his soul.

* * These ideas emerged during a Bibliodrama on Joshua in Efrat, August 2022, based on insights by Rabbi David Debow and others. Yael Valier was the first to suggest the connection between the language of the Akeda and that of the scene at Mt Sinai, but she takes it in a slightly different direction. Her own interpretation of the connection of Sinai with Akeda is that it is intended to indicate the selection of Joshua at this moment for something "big", just as Isaac was being selected for something important – with the others (Ishmael, Eliezer) being told to “remain behind”. 

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[1] God says “lay your hand” and yet Moses lays both hands. It seems as if Moses deviates from the details of the divine command. The Talmud (Menachot 93b) discusses the discrepancy between one hand and both hands, and there Resh Lakish concludes that in the context of animal sacrifice, it is the same thing and the language is interchangeable. He explicitly excludes this case, when the hands are laid upon Joshua; but the idea suggested in this blog would allow him to include this case too in the same category, of "animal sacrifice" so to speak, in a metaphorical sense. Which saves Moses from the charge of not properly fulfilling the divine command.