About this episode
My mother tongue was no tongue at all, but a pair of hands. My parents were both deaf, so my first language was American Sign Language. I didn’t think much about it at the time; when you’re a kid, your parents are just your parents and your life is just your life. It is only in retrospect that I have come to appreciate how profoundly the experience of growing up in a Deaf family, and spending my early years signing as well as speaking, has shaped my relationship to language in general. So when I came upon a deaf character in the Torah, of course I took notice. To be more precise: the character is in the Torah, but his deafness we learn from a wild story in the Talmud. How the Talmud arrived at that connection is a wild story of its own.