Moses' Tongue

As a child I had a habit, frequently ineradicable among young stutterers, of preferring the weak vowel. Instead of saying "da-da-daddy," for example, I would say "duh-duh-daddy." The English-language term schwa—sometimes called the "murmur vowel"—names this uh sound.¹ My teachers in Hebrew school taught me that schwa was related to sheva, which is the sign in written Hebrew "placed under a consonant letter to express [what Jewish grammarians regard as] the absence of a following vowel sound," and, they always emphasized, it was "an arbitrary alteration of shāw', emptiness, vanity."² As such, the schwa recalled for me the Mosaic commandment that we should never speak lashav (vainly) about adonai (God):

Lo tisa etshem-adonaieloheycha lashav ki lo yenakeh adonai et asher-yisa etshmo lashav. [Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.].³

Does this commandment mean that one should not use the name of God for any frivolous or malicious purpose or in magic? Or does it outlaw using God's name in guaranteeing commercial contracts? Or does it only prohibit "swear words"? In Hebrew school, my friends and I compared this Mosaic commandment with the prophet Ezekiel's complaint about the vanity of false prophets (Ezek. 13:6–9). But, as a young stutterer, I took Moses to mean something like, "Don't use the schwa vowel." And for me, that meaning amounted to "Don't stutter." This was a regulation that, once internalized, all but assured that I would stutter.

My most unbearable stuttering experience in Hebrew school was the unavoidable one at the beginning of every class. I would be called upon to announce my presence during the alphabetical roll call. Mr. Teicher—a stern and always disapproving teacher—would begin to read out the roll in predictable, inexorable sequence. There was plenty of time for me to anticipate my failure. I trembled fearfully, more and more, until my name, me-ir, came up. "Me-ir, are you present?"

Every stammering schoolchild rehearses the phrase, "I am present," in his head—over and over and over again—during the hours-long minutes before his turn comes up. (Stutterers who have difficulty saying their own names sometimes resort to changing their names to easily pronounceable ones. Soon afterward, however, they discover that their new, once easily pronounceable names, have now become difficult to pronounce.) Not a few stutterers—including many who have gone on to prominence in the field of stuttering therapy—dropped out of school on account of their stuttering.⁴ And many young scholars who stutter do not go on to do graduate work because they fear that they will fail oral examinations—even as I failed fourth grade in elementary school.⁵

In Hebrew school, I would try, always unsuccessfully, to answer, in Hebrew, ani poh ("I [am] present"). But the schwa—a-a-a-a-ani—was too much for me; and my fear of stuttering helped precipitate the failure I feared. Stuttering at Hebrew school was so difficult an experience for me that I often played hooky all day in order to avoid being there at all. (Many stutterers play hooky.)⁶ On such days, I would hide out from Mr. Teicher at the local French-language library. I would read the Five Books of Moses and identify with Adam, who hid among the trees when God called to him: "Where are you?" (Gen. 3:8). And I would especially read over the passage in Exodus where God calls out "Moses, Moses" from the burning bush in Midian (Ex. 3:4).

Moses had a severe speech impediment of his own. Yet somehow Moses managed to get out a magnificent answer, hineni ("I am here"), when called. I knew that it was more difficult for Moses, as a stutterer, to answer hineni even than it was for Abraham to say hineni when...