Making Sense of the Sedra: Bo
The average person will speak 123 million words in a lifetime. But what if there were a limit?
Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, a play by Sam Steiner that opened recently in the West End starring Aidan Turner and Jenna Coleman, imagines a world where we’re forced to say less. It’s about what we say and how we say it; about the things we can only hear in the silence; about dead cats, activism, eye contact, and… well, lemons.
It is an interesting proposition; if we each had a daily word limit, would we have to really think hard to ensure we always say what we mean and mean what we say?
In Judaism, the power of speech is incontrovertible as the Torah begins with God himself speaking and the physical world coming into existence. What distinguishes human beings from the other creations is that God blew the breath of life into us and we became a living being. Targum Onkelos, the Aramaic translation and commentary, renders “living being” as “speaking soul”, inferring that speech is God’s unique gift to us. The Hebrew word davar means both ‘a word’ and ‘a thing’, implying that what is said has a concrete significance and so we are conscious that our words create our reality in this world. For this reason, the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan,1839-1933) dedicated his life to teaching us to be responsible for what we say, as it is clear that words have the capacity to build as well as to destroy.
In parshat Bo, so as to ensure that we always remember the Exodus from Egypt, we are instructed to speak about it with our children and to tell our national story to the next generation. In addition, the mitzvah of tefillin is intended to act as a physical reminder of God miraculously redeeming us from slavery and also “in order that God’s teaching may be in your mouth”. (Shemot 13:9)
On a literal level, we can understand that the intent here is for us to verbalise Torah on a daily basis so that we not only learn its lessons, but also develop familiarity with it, ensuring that it is as much part of our routine as eating. However, HaKtav VeHaKabalah (Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg, 19th century) provides a deeper insight by suggesting that “in your mouth” means generating a mindset where the Torah’s words are important to us. There is an expectation that, amongst all the other matters that we speak of regularly, God’s teachings should be seen as at least as valuable in our eyes and something worth talking about.
There is a Kabbalist idea that we each have only a finite amount of words to use during our lifetime and if we kept that in mind every time we open our mouths, perhaps we would be more careful in choosing the words that come out. At the very least, we know that when we speak words of Torah or discuss our heritage and tradition, those words are the best use of our allocation.
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