When Moses protests against God and tells him that he cannot continue as a spokesman for the people Israel because he is 'slow of speech and slow of tongue', God responds and says: "Who gives a man speech? Who makes him dumb or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I the Lord?"
If Moses were living now, who would listen to the voice of God? When we see people who have disabilities, to our sadness, we view them as broken people, and so many of us have no use for broken people. We have a need to be perfect. How many marriages break apart when one of the spouses ends up in need of surgery or develops a chronic condition that makes the spouse less desirable in the market place.
When we thin of God, we do not think of a God Who makes the deaf and dumb, who creates high blood pressure and diabetes. When we think of God we think of the beautiful people that he has created, the good looking, the super smart. We think of the loveliness of Hollywood and the genius of Harvard. Yet when God defined his power to Moses who was so down because he stuttered, God admitted that He was the cause of the stutterers of the world. God admitted that He created the blind and the dumb and the deaf.
In a sense God said that all people, no matter their disability are important before God. He held that disability and imperfection do not make one less human. Indeed, before God there can only be imperfection.
We have forgotten that. Because men can do wonders like fixing noses and giving sight to the blind, we often forget that people with big or small noses, blind or sighted people are people just the same. The spark that makes them human does not develop differently in people with disabilities unless people force the ugly and the disabled to be a subset of humanity.
Perhaps the lesson of ugliness and beauty that God teaches in this sedrah is greater than the miracles and plagues that He performs. The latter lasted but moments, the former are always with us. We have learned how to embrace the miraculous, but the ordinary we at times scorn and reject.
That's not the lesson that God taught Moses. And indeed, that is not the lesson that the Israelites learned. God taught them that they might be considered slaves in the eyes of the Egyptians, but they are no less human before the Almighty.