When the Stutter Speaks Louder Than Words

In the mid-1800s, a controversy erupted regarding Moses’s character. The newly published Mishnah commentary of Rabbi Israel Lipshutz (1782-1860), the Tiferet Yisrael, tells the story of an Arabian king who had heard of Moses’s fame and commissioned a talented artist to visit Moses and make a perfect portrait of him. When the artist brought back the portrait, the king gave it to his best physiognomists, who could tell a person’s character simply by looking at their face. The physiognomists told the king that the face was of a man who was “entirely wicked, arrogant, greedy, capricious, and suffused with every known vice.” Shocked by this assessment, and certain that the artist had failed to portray Moses properly, the king went to visit Moses. Immediately, he saw the artist had gotten Moses’s portrait perfectly, so the king assumed the physiognomists had failed.