Rabba Daphne Lazar Price
This week’s Torah portion is Va’era: Exodus 6:2 — 9:35
Parashat Va’era is a story about power and about being heard. This is striking because its central human figure, Moses, repeatedly insists that he is not a man of words. He describes himself as “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue,” unfit to speak before Pharaoh or persuade a people crushed by slavery. And yet, the narrative insists: Redemption will unfold first through speech. God speaks to Moses. Moses speaks to the Israelites. Moses and Aaron speak to Pharaoh. Pharaoh resists. Suffering intensifies.
Words, and the refusal to heed them, become the battleground.
From the outset, speech is bound up with authority. God does not initially redeem the Israelites through spectacular miracles, but through language that demands response. Moses must speak, even when speech feels inadequate, risky or destined to fail. Pharaoh’s power, by contrast, is sustained through refusal to believe, listen and acknowledge reality. He treats the Israelites’ suffering as a nuisance rather than a reality that needs to be rectified.
This is how oppression works. Pharaoh does not simply disagree with Moses; he renders Moses’ words irrelevant. He gaslights Moses by oscillating between brief acknowledgment and renewed denial, a pattern that allows Pharaoh to appear responsive while maintaining control. Listening without action becomes another tool of domination. When Moses’ speech is discounted, Pharaoh’s power remains untouched.
The Torah is also clear that silence is not always a choice, nor does it always connote a derogatory or negative response. When Moses first delivers God’s message of liberation to the Israelites, they cannot even hear him, and so are unable to respond “because of shortness of spirit and labor.” (Exodus 6:9) They are literally rendered speechless. Their inability to respond is not framed as spiritual failure, but as trauma. Crushing labor constricts not only bodies but voices. Hope itself becomes unspeakable. Oppression succeeds not only by silencing dissent but by exhausting people until speech feels impossible.
A contemporary reading sharpens this insight, reminding us that marginalized voices have long been held to impossible standards of credibility and composure. Va’era legitimizes fractured speech and silence alike, modeling leadership that amplifies rather than disqualifies vulnerable voices. Its warning is stark and timely: When testimony is ignored, pain becomes the language, and apathy itself becomes a tool of oppression.
Seen this way, Moses’ struggle is part of the story’s moral architecture. Moses speaks haltingly and imperfectly. Aaron becomes his mouthpiece, not to replace him, but to amplify him. Leadership expands in response to vulnerability. Authority is redistributed rather than withdrawn. This challenges a leadership model that prizes rhetorical dominance and individual charisma. Justice, Va’era suggests, does not emerge when the “best speaker” wins, but when communities build structures that ensure silenced truths are heard.
Pharaoh represents the opposite model: leadership as the power to define reality. He decides which words matter and which do not. Testimony becomes negotiable, truth becomes expendable and the end result is escalation. Each time Pharaoh refuses to listen requires greater force to break through denial. Each dismissal increases the cost paid by the vulnerable. Va’era offers a chilling lesson: When speech is ignored, silence and suffering become the next language.
The contemporary resonance is impossible to miss. Whose voices are believed today? Whose experiences are minimized, questioned or dismissed as inconvenient? How often are survivors expected to speak clearly, calmly and repeatedly in order to be taken seriously, while those in power remain the loudest voices while retaining the right not to listen?
Reflecting on Pharaoh’s reactions to Moses’ and Aaron’s words, Parashat Va’era insists that ignoring speech and suffering is not neutral. It is an active force that perpetuates harm. It delays justice and hardens leaders and their systems against making positive change.
Read this way, Parashat Va’era is a call for trauma-informed leadership: leadership that understands silence as data, treats testimony with humility and resists controlling whose voices shape the narrative. Liberation does not begin with eloquence. It begins with listening and with the courage to cede power so that truth, however fragmented, can finally be heard.
Rabba Daphne Lazar Price is the executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance and an adjunct professor of Jewish law at Georgetown University Law Center.
