Stuttering, the curious speech impediment that causes a few percent of the mostly male population to succumb unpredictably and unwillingly to occasional muteness, most recently received attention with the Oscar-winning film The King's Speech, the story of Britain's wartime King George VI. The discussion engendered by the film reminds us that the origin of stuttering remains mysterious. None of the purely physical theories—involving brain function, genes, or speaking technique—has yielded a clear explanation. Psychoanalytic theory offers more interesting clues: It observes that stuttering often begins after an early childhood event, and it builds on the general observation that most stutterers do not stutter when they speak alone.
These observations are particularly interesting from the Jewish perspective, because Moses himself likely stuttered. Indeed, the story of Moses may hold a key to the origins of stuttering.
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