Moses and James Earl Jones: Speaking the Ineffable

James Earl Jones had one of the most recognizable voices in cinema. His powerful, sonorous delivery in iconic roles like Darth Vader and Mufasa is beloved by generations of fans. When he passed away in September 2024, many of the tributes to his memory celebrated his voice, which CNN described as “uniquely conveying through speech instant authority, grace, and decorum”.

But as a child, Jones struggled with speech so much he later described himself as mute during that phase of his life. After his family moved to Michigan when Jones was around five, he developed a profound stutter. He spoke briefly and basically to his family, and refused to speak to strangers entirely. It was not until his English teacher introduced him to poetry in high school that Jones discovered his love of performance, participating in poetry competitions, recitals and plays.

In an effort to reconcile the image of the stammering youth with the legendary voice audiences know from his performances, people sometimes claim that Jones “overcame” his stutter. In a 2013 interview, Jones set the record straight: “I still stutter,” he said, “but I’ve learned how to use it, how to work around it.” The stammerer and the orator are, in fact, one and the same.

This apparent paradox is familiar to us from Jewish tradition. Moses is among the most famous orators of Tanakh. He confronts Pharaoh, leads the Israelites in song at the sea, and relays God’s commandments to the people in the wilderness. “God spoke to Moses, saying: ‘Speak to the Children of Israel…’” opens so many verses as to be almost a cliche. The bulk of Deuteronomy is one massive valediction speech from Moses to the people.

And yet, Moses is - by his own admission - “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (Ex 4:10), “a man of uncircumcised lips” (Ex 6:12). He has a speech impediment - one that looms large enough in his mind that he fears it makes him unfit to serve as God’s spokesman to the Israelites, much less Pharaoh. We know that Moses is capable of great feats of rhetoric and oratory - but like James Earl Jones, he sees himself as an inarticulate stammerer.

The exact nature of Moses’ speech impediment remains mysterious. Diagnosing characters in Tanakh is always a crapshoot. “Uncircumcised lips” is clearly figurative (or anatomically implausible). Some commentators have suggested a stutter or a cleft palate. A well-known midrash claims that as a baby, Moses placed a burning coal in his mouth, guided by an angel. But my favourite theory comes from my friend the Jewish educator Tal Spinrad.

Spinrad reminds us that Moses was born at a time when Pharaoh had decreed that every newborn Hebrew boy was to be thrown into the Nile. He points out that the Torah tells us explicitly that the infant Moses was hidden for the first three months of his life (Ex 2:2). But babies, of course, make noise. They cry. And the only way to hide an infant is to silence it - swiftly and urgently, perhaps even violently. When the alternative was death, one imagines that the baby Moses was silenced in ways that left lasting psychological damage.

(Tragically, the question of the lengths one may go to to silence a crying baby that poses a danger to life has recurred throughout Jewish history - most prominently during the Shoah when groups of survivors in hiding sometimes had to make the impossible choice to smother a crying baby so it wouldn’t reveal their hiding place. The 13th century rabbi Menachem HaMeiri, judged this to be Halachically permissible, giving the baby the legal status of a rodef, a murderous pursuer.)

According to Spinrad, then, Moses’ speech impediment is trauma-induced. Much like James Earl Jones, who stopped speaking after his family abruptly moved from Mississippi to Michigan when he was a small child, the lengths Moses’ family went to to forge a better life for him also left lasting scars. Spinrad envisions Moses growing up in the Egyptian court, his Israelite origins an open secret, always on the lookout for conspiracy. Moses is hypervigilant - to use an old joke, he is an observant Jew. Even as a prince, he is not safe to act with impunity. He looks around for witnesses before killing the Egyptian taskmaster and hides the body, and flees once he learns that the matter is known, rightly assuming that his life is in danger (Ex 2:12-15).

Moses has uncircumcised lips. He was born among conditions where the rituals of infancy, from brit milah to gently soothing a baby could not be maintained. And he feels poignantly the mark this has left on him. He fails to circumcise his own infant son; his wife Zipporah does it for him in a cryptic, fragmentary episode set during Moses’ return to Egypt. His childhood trauma has left him unable to speak to the experience of the Israelites. He remembers that before fleeing Egypt, he tried to break up a fight between two Israelites, only to be met with scorn and hostility. The Israelites, who know he killed the taskmaster, see him not as their saviour but as just another violent Egyptian. Moses’ first attempt speaking with Pharaoh ends in disaster, and things only get worse for the Israelites, who curse Moses and Aaron. At the start of Parashat Va’eira, Moses delivers his message to the Israelites - and they don’t listen. Moses, hopeless, asks how he could possibly speak to Pharaoh. He has “never been a man of words” (Ex 4:10).

How do we reconcile this inarticulate Moses of uncircumcised lips with the great prophet, beloved by all Israel? How do we reconcile the stammering James Earl Jones with the titan of stage and screen? The answer, I think, is threefold. First, we must recognize different kinds of speech and accept that a person can excel at some while struggling with others. Second, we must replace the narrative of “overcoming” disability with the rhetoric of “navigating” it. And third, we must understand that the greatness does not exist in spite of the disability, but oftentimes because of it.

There is a world of difference between communication and performance. James Earl Jones stuttered in conversation, but learned to recite poetry and soliloquies with astounding fluency. Moses is slow of speech and slow of tongue, but both of the great songs in Torah are his. As a neurodivergent person myself, I have a completely different speaking style when I am engaged in conversation from what I am like when I am delivering a speech or reciting a poem.

Neither Moses nor James Earl Jones ever became great communicators. Jones never stopped wrestling with his stutter. Moses fails to convince Pharaoh - who is ultimately coerced by the extensively credible threat of divine retribution. In fact, Moses never learns to speak to the people on their level - while he is passing on God’s word, they build the Golden Calf! The people frequently complain. Korach instigates a rebellion. Moses is a terrible diplomat - but he is a peerless prophet.

Moses and James Earl Jones do not overcome their disabilities. Rather, they learn to use them, to play to their strengths. James Earl Jones spoke about how he could not watch his own recordings, for fear that his old stutter would return - even as he used his complex, dynamic relationship with the rhythms of speech to deliver award-winning performances. As for Moses, he begins to employ his brother Aaron as a helper, to compensate for his weak points. Aaron is Moses’ prophet, we are told, taking Moses’ word to Pharaoh and to the people. It is Aaron who knows how to build interpersonal relationships among the community, to deal in shades of grey. God does not heal Moses of his speech impediment, but gives him the support he needs to succeed.

On a personal note, I identify with Moses here. I know myself to be articulate, an excellent public speaker - and yet I have struggled with a form of rhotacism since I was a child. Even after speech pathology, as a teenager, I often felt ashamed when introducing myself, because people would mishear me when I told them my own name. In my early twenties, I started having panic attacks, during which I would go nonverbal. The experience was terrifying - I could articulate everything I wanted to say clearly in my mind, but I lacked the motor control to move my lips and tongue to get the words out. And this lack of motor control felt like a personal failure of self-disciple and emotional regulation.

Moses feels similarly. He knows that he must speak to Pharaoh; he has been commanded to do so directly by God. And yet he cannot - his lips and tongue are treacherous. He pleads with God, despairing of the hopelessness of his situation. The pressure on him is enormous.

And that is why Moses is uniquely qualified for the task for which he has been called. Aaron knows how to negotiate with other people - as Kipling put it, “to talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings nor lose the common touch”. But Moses’ job, ironically enough, is the same as Pharaoh’s: to liaise between the people and the Divine.

This is, in essence, the prophetic vocation. And it is a thankless task. As Heschel describes it, the prophet is one who must speak, and who cannot speak - who knows that their words will not be heeded, but cannot bear to keep them contained.

The four letter name of God is sometimes called the Ineffable Name, because of the Jewish taboo on speaking it. Ineffability is the inability of something to be expressed or articulated. Through their struggles with speech, both James Earl Jones and Moses engaged intimately with ineffability - and it transformed their expression in ways that changed the world.

In the words of Douglas Adams: “Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

Ken Yehi Ratzon.

Raphael Morris (he/they) is an AuDHD rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He feels privileged to be part of an intellectual tradition where his preferred modes of cognition, learning, and communication are not just tolerated but actively valued. In his spare time, he enjoys wiki walking, Talmud, long rambling conversations and anything else tangential.