How Devarim Rabbah Heals the Tongue and Fills the Empty Space

Two short passages near the opening of Devarim Rabbah read Deuteronomy as a meditation on speech that has been healed and a divinity that fills even the empty places of the world. The first opens with a halakhic puzzle about which languages a Torah scroll may use, then moves into a parable about Moses, whose mouth was once heavy and who only began to speak when the Torah cured him. The second tracks how generations of speakers, from Yitro to Naaman to Rahav and at last to Moses, each set the Holy One a little higher and a little wider.

The two midrashim sit side by side in Devarim Rabbah for a reason. The first passage argues that the tongue itself is something Torah builds. The second passage argues that no earlier speaker reached as far as Moses, and that his theological courage earned a corresponding testimony from on high.

How a Halakhic Question About Greek Becomes a Parable About Healing

The midrash opens with a legal puzzle. May Jews write a Torah scroll in a foreign language, as they cannot do for mezuzot and tefillin. The sages allow the wider liberty for scrolls, and Rabban Gamliel narrows it to one foreign tongue, Greek. Bar Kappara grounds the leniency in a verse about Noah's sons, reading the blessing that Yefet would dwell in Shem's tents as permission for the words of Shem to be spoken in the speech of Yefet. Israel descends from Shem, the Greeks from Yefet, and a single phrase becomes the warrant for a tradition of Greek scrolls.

What looks like a procedural ruling becomes the threshold to a wider claim. The Torah's language, the midrash continues, is so dear that it heals the tongue. A verse from Proverbs identifies a healing tongue with a tree of life, another identifies the tree of life with Torah, and the chain turns Torah into a kind of medicine.

Why the River of Eden Is Also a Cure for Speech

The midrash then leaps to the world to come. In the future, the Holy One will lift trees out of the Garden of Eden whose excellence is that they cure the tongue. Ezekiel's vision of a river flowing from the sanctuary supplies the proof. On the banks of that future river grow trees whose fruit is food and whose leaf is medicine. Rabbi Yohanan and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi read the verse two ways. One treats the leaf as ordinary medicine. The other treats it as a remedy for the mute, so that anyone who has lost speech and tastes the leaf will at once articulate matters of Torah. The phrase from Exodus about tablets inscribed on both sides folds into the picture, since the trees on the riverbanks echo the writing on the tablets.

Why Moses Is the Proof of His Own Doctrine

Rabbi Levi closes the parable by collapsing it onto a single biography. Before Moses received the Torah he had said of himself that he was not a man of words. After he received the Torah his tongue was cured and he began to speak. The opening verse of Deuteronomy is the evidence. The shepherd who once stammered before a burning thornbush has become the orator of a forty year sermon. The first witness to the healing power of Torah is the man who carried it down the mountain.

How Each Generation Placed the Holy One a Little Higher

The second passage shifts to the line in Deuteronomy that names the Holy One the God in heaven above and on earth below, with no other. The rabbis read it as the climax of a long ladder. Yitro had said only that the Holy One is greater than all the gods, language that still leaves room for other gods. Naaman, after his cleansing in the Jordan, acknowledged the Holy One only on earth within Israel, saying nothing about heaven. Rahav, watching the spies in Jericho, declared the Holy One present in both heaven and earth.

Moses goes one step further. He places the Holy One even in the empty space of the world. The midrash hangs this reading on the final phrase of the verse. There is no other. The apparent voids, the regions where nothing else dwells, are also full. Rabbi Hoshaya draws the consequence with the verse from Proverbs about giving a woman from the fruit of her hands. Moses attested that there is no other besides the Holy One, so the Holy One attested in turn that no prophet has ever risen in Israel like Moses.

Why Preservation Belongs to the Tongue and to the Verse

The two passages together place an unusual weight on preservation. The first preserves the doctrine of Torah's healing by permitting the scroll to travel into Greek without losing its medicinal power. The second preserves the doctrine of the unbounded Holy One by anchoring it in a single verse of Deuteronomy that the rabbis treat as the high water mark of biblical theology. The remembered chain from Yitro to Moses keeps the doctrine of an omnipresent Holy One available to readers who have never seen the empty space they are being asked to fill with him.

Mercy becomes the same kind of preservation. Israel complains about the verse promising long life for a small kindness, since an accidental killer is often slain before his time. Moses agrees the complaint is just, the Holy One agrees with Moses, and the cities of refuge are designated to make the promise true. The architecture of refuge protects the verse from being mocked by its own contradictions.

What the Final Sermon of Moses Conserves

Deuteronomy in this telling is the book in which the Moses who could not speak finally speaks, and in which the speaking reaches everywhere the Holy One has gone. The healing of the tongue is the personal version. The placing of the Holy One in the empty space is the cosmic version. The cities of refuge are the legal version. The Greek translation is the diasporic version. The midrash treats Moses' sermon as a single act of repair that begins with his mouth and ends with the empty regions of the world.