The Holy One answers Moses' protest about his lame speech with a question that has echoed through three thousand years of Jewish reflection. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders it with startling cosmic sweep: Who is he who first put the language of the mouth into the mouth of man? or who hath appointed the dumb or the deaf, the open-seeing or the blind, but I the Lord?
Notice what the Targum adds. The Hebrew asks simply: Who has made man's mouth? The Aramaic expands: who first put the language into the mouth? The very capacity for speech — grammar, vocabulary, the impossible leap from breath to meaning — is a divine gift. And just as God gives speech, God also appoints its absence.
Disability as Theology
The verse is theologically daring. It insists that deafness, blindness, and muteness are not accidents but appointments. The sages of the Targumic tradition read this not as a justification of suffering but as an argument for humility: the Holy One who made Moses' stammering mouth can also open it, if He chooses.
The deeper move is rhetorical. God does not deny Moses' disability. He does not say, Your mouth is fine. Instead He says: Your mouth is Mine. The issue is not whether Moses can speak. The issue is whether the One who shaped the tongue can be trusted to work through it.
The takeaway: the Jewish imagination has always included the stammerer, the deaf, the blind, not as exceptions to the covenant but as witnesses to its Source. Moses' disability does not disqualify him. It qualifies him — because it strips away any illusion that eloquence belongs to the speaker rather than to the Maker.