Fetterman’s Stroke and Moses’ Stutter: Will Verbal Flubs Prevent Entry to the Promised Land?

I watched John Fetterman debate my friend of 15 years, Dr. Mehmet Oz, on Tuesday night and I came away with a deep respect for Fetterman. Having suffered a stroke in May he could have found excuses not to debate. He had to have known he would stumble badly. He had to have known that a bad performance, which was almost inescapable, could cost him the whole election. And he definitely knew that Dr. Oz, who has already mocked his diet as causing the stroke, would attack his gaffes mercilessly.

But still he ploughed ahead.

Let me be clear. Fetterman is not my candidate. Who is? Well, it would have been Dr. Oz until his campaign became a values-abomination, replete with election denial, AR-15s blazing, and genocide denial. And still, I cannot and will not endorse Fetterman because he supports President Biden’s Iran deal and the Iranian government is evil incarnate.

Still, I’ve come to harbor a deep respect for Fetterman. Here is a man who tattooed the dates that citizens of his town of Braddock were murdered by gun violence. I respect that a lot more than Dr. Oz playing Rambo and firing assault rifles on TV. Here is a man who married an undocumented immigrant who reached out to him and with whom he fell in love. And here is a man, above all else, who had a serious stroke but decided to fight on.

Let me tell you why that matters to me. My father had a stroke in December of 2019 and died in May of 2020. We tried every form of rehab for him. But the stroke was catastrophic and he was 87 years old. Still, I remember my father’s courage in trying to learn how to walk and speak, even as his body failed him. Yes, my last memories of my father are of his immense stamina and courage.

Fetterman, the father of three young children, is obviously not nearly as incapacitated, thank God. He has been campaigning all over Pennsylvania, and as the debate performance showed, his strength has not left him in the slightest.

What has left him is his eloquence. At the debate he struggled with words. He had to pause to find words. He repeated himself. But there he stood: the gentle giant, stubborn and refusing to capitulate to Dr. Oz’s fusillade of words.

Last week we Jews celebrated Simchas Torah, the most joyous day of the year, where we complete the reading of the Torah after a full year. And yet, the last reading is quite sad, detailing as it does the death of Moses and how he climbed Mount Nebo, alone and forlorn, his Maker refusing to allow him into the promised land.

And then the Torah says the most amazing words, that always gives me chills down my spine as I read them: “And there never again rose another prophet in Israel like Moses who God knew face to face.”

But wait? Moses was the greatest prophet? How so? He had a terrible stutter. He mushed words together. He fumbled sentences. He struggled to express his thoughts. His speech was so challenged that he had to appoint his brother Aaron as his spokesman.

How could a man like that be the greatest of all prophets?

Because great leadership is not about great oratory. Great leadership is about three things: moral clarity, moral courage, and decisiveness. First, you have to know right from wrong. Second, you need the strength to persevere while you’re attacked for your beliefs. And third, you have to make the tough decisions and take righteous actions to express your beliefs in deed.

Because great leadership is not about great oratory. Great leadership is about three things: moral clarity, moral courage, and decisiveness.

Moses had all three of those qualities, which is how he brought the tyrant Pharaoh to his knees. The very first story the Torah tell us about Moses was that as Egyptian prince he wandered among the Hebrew slaves one day and saw a helpless slave being beaten to death by an Egyptian taskmaster. And the Bible says so beautifully: “And Moses looked this way and that way, he saw there was no man, and he smote the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.” The meaning is not that Moses looked around to see if he’d be caught. Rather, he looked within himself. This way, the Jewish side. That way, the Egyptian side. Which would he choose? To stand up for justice for the poor impoverished Jews? Or to embrace his privilege as being of the Egyptian aristocracy. And then he saw, if he could not make up his mind, if he stayed on the face, “there was no man,” he wasn’t even a man. He was nothing. So he became decisive; having exhibited moral clarity and moral courage, he smote the Egyptian and saved the life of the slave.

I don’t know John Fetterman. I have no idea if he is a righteous man, although I am extremely impressed that he chose to give up his own life of privilege and went to serve in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a working class town. But what I do know is that his stutters and verbal fumbles on the debate stage did not push me down but rather lifted me up, even when he expressed policies with which I completely disagree.

In August Dr. Oz’s campaign put out a statement mocking Fetterman for having had a stroke. “If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly.” I was disgusted and sickened with the statement and I immediately wrote to Dr. Oz “At long last, has the campaign lost all decency?”

To his chief advisor Larry Weitzner of Jamestown Associates, I wrote, “Did the campaign just mock Fetterman’s stroke? My father died of a stroke.”

Weitzner, one of the principal architects of the new, Maga-extreme, assault-rifle shooting, election-denying Oz, wrote back to me, “Fetterman spin. Did your father lie about it and try to run for Senate after? That’s what Fetterman is doing. It was not mocked.”

But yes, of course it was mocked, and the Dr. Oz campaign had already lost all decency when they first denied the fact of the Armenian genocide, which Dr. Oz continues to deny to this day.

I don’t know if John Fetterman will make it to the promised land. Like Moses, he may be denied leadership and left on the other side of the Jordan river. He may lose this election because of his stroke. But I will never forget that one shining hour in Pennsylvania when a stroke survivor went head-to-head with a world-famous TV host and showed the power of human will to triumph.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whom The Washington Post and Newsweek call “the most famous Rabbi in America,” and whom The Jerusalem Post lists as one of the fifty most influential Jews in the world, and The New York Observer called the most famous Orthodox Jew in the world, has just published “Good Mourning: Finding Meaning in Grief and Loss.” Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.