Moses is one of the paradigms of leadership that we find in the Torah, with David or Joshuah. But to become the national leader of the People of Israel and to take a group of slaves and lead them to become the People of Israel, Moses has to learn a lot. If we recall his first conversation with the Holy blessed one, we will find one of the first lessons in leadership.
During the revelation by the burning bush, when the Holy One, blessed be, shows the signs that Moses will have to perform before the Children of Israel, so they believe him, transforming his stick into a snake, his own leprous hand and taking water out from the river, and it becoming blood (Shemot, 4:1-9).
«Moses said to the Lord, “I beseech You, O Lord. I am not a man of words, neither from yesterday nor from the day before yesterday, nor from the time You have spoken to Your servant, for I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue.” But the Lord said to him, “Who gave man a mouth, or who makes [one] dumb or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? So now, go! I will be with your mouth, and I will instruct you what you shall speak.» (Shemot, 4:10-12).
Ovadiah ben Jacob Sforno tells us Moses’ reluctance to take the initiative and get the ball rolling. When Moses says he’s «heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue», he is admitting that he is not a man of words and that he is unskilled in the ways of eloquence and ordered speech, to speak properly before a king, as he is being asked to do. «Neither yesterday», when he was a stranger in a strange land, «nor the day before yesterday»m when he was at Pharaoh’s palace, «nor from the time You have spoken to Your servant», even when his intellect and power of speech were exposed to the light of God, he didn’t attain the gift of learned speech. Why? Because, says Sforno, Moses’ vessels of speech were unprepared, so he was incapable of learning how «to sustain with words him that is weary» (Isaiah, 50:4 – Ovadiah ben Jacob Sforno, Commentary on the Torah, translated and commented by Rabbi Raphael Pelcovitz, p. 299).
In any given leadership situation what first comes to mind when looking for volunteers to do something is, usually, do the task by ourselves. As we say in Catalan, «if you want to be properly served, you have to make your own bed». The problem is that the Holy One, blessed be, can’t intervene directly sometimes. If the goal is to take out the Children of Israel from Mitsraim, with everything that it takes, the spokesperson to Pharoh must be Moses.
And who is the best master than the Master, that who makes the human mouth; the one who «will be with your mouth» to prepare the vessels of speech and «instruct» you a «learned speech» (Isaiah, 50:4 – Ovadiah ben Jacob Sforno, p. 299)? With the Holy One, blessed be, and through Aaron at the beginning, Moses will be converting this «heaviness of speech» into «learned speech.» The same prophetic ability which allows him to look into the flaming bush turned into intelect capable of communicating with the creating principle. From being a goat shepherd to becoming a national leader.
To teach someone to be able to fend off by themselves, to speak in front of a «select» audience, or to develop new abilities to, in a way, delegate tasks to them can seem counterintuitive. Even more in times of need. When we need things to be done quickly, we tend to do them by ourselves, because «by the time I teach it to you, I would already finish it myself, so let’s not lose time…». We may be losing a little bit of time, but the real thing is that we are losing an opportunity.
In the beginning, everything was hard for Moses. He had not only to overcome his difficulties with words. We will see him again, later, committing the same first mistake of every leader, in parashat Yitro: doing it all by himself.
Not only the necessity of the moment is important, but the final goal to achieve. If the idea was to take out the Children of Israel from Mitsraim, Moses had to learn how to speak first.