Ha’azinu – Jewish Theological Seminary

Our Very Life

onlinelearning@jtsa.edu — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 19:18:55 +0000

At the end of his life, with Joshua by his side, Moses begins his great, thunderous poem, �Ჹ’a��Գ�, summoning the heavens and the earth as witnesses to his powerful, angry message, as God commanded him to do in the preceding parashah, Vayelekh. And yet, in a one-verse reshut, a prayerful, wishful intention, preceding the central portion of his sermonic poem, he says that he wants his words to land lightly: “May my discourse come down as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like showers on young growth, like droplets on the grass” (). Then suddenly, the central angry theme emerges, and he calls the people “unworthy of [God], crooked, perverse” (32:5), “dull and witless” (32:6).

The poem that then unfolds is stunningly beautiful, but the message is harsh, warning of the disastrous consequences of disobeying God. Indeed, its grim telling of the terrible consequences of disobedience accounts for a Sephardi tradition to read �Ჹ’a��Գ� on Tishah Be’av. What are we to do with the anger of �Ჹ’a��Գ� this year, when it falls on the Shabbat preceding our most joyous holiday, Sukkot?

After the poem concludes, Moses explains his and God’s motivation. He says:

Take to heart all the words with which I have warned you this day. Enjoin them upon your children, that they may observe faithfully all the terms of this Teaching. For this is not a trifling thing for you: it is your very life; through it you shall long endure on the land that you are to possess upon crossing the Jordan. (32:46–47, emphases added)

Their lives depend on their obedience! The message of this sermonic poem is both important and urgent, and the people are in danger of ignoring it. Thinking back over kol hadevarim, “all the words,” namely the grand scope of laws expressed in Deuteronomy, from civic laws about regulating the economy and providing for the poor, to the administration of justice, to the conduct of war, to laws governing holiday celebrations, to laws regulating marriage, these do add up to life itself.

The very comprehensiveness of Deuteronomic laws asserts the potential of every volitional act of daily life to possess moral content, and to partake of the Divine. This comprehensiveness teaches that morality is deeply essential to human life, and specifically to life in the Promised Land. Obedience to just laws is much more than conformity: it is the implementation of coherent morality in a society. To risk losing this in the new land was heart-breaking for God and for Moses.

Be strong and resolute, for you shall apportion to this people the land that I swore to their fathers to assign to them. But you must be very strong and resolute to observe faithfully all the Torah that My servant Moses enjoined upon you. Do not deviate from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. Let not this Book of the Teaching cease from your lips, but recite it day and night, so that you may observe faithfully all that is written in it. Only then will you prosper in your undertakings and only then will you be successful. ()

As the people enter the Land, Joshua is taught by God that it is the leader’s role not only to take them into battle, but one day to apportion the Land fairly, and to teach God’s law, and to study it. The ancient modality of learning—disciplined, repetitive recitation—is how sacred texts will enter a person, whether Joshua or the average Israelite, changing neural pathways, laying down a person’s ethical vocabulary. Joshua, the powerful military leader, is instructed to focus on God’s laws, not on military strategy, as he begins the conquest. As a lesson offered on the brink of battle, it is radically civilizing.

A further softening takes place much later, in the period when the Rabbis were inventing Jewish prayer. They expressed their appreciation for God’s teachings and laws in the blessings that precede the Shema, recited morning and evening. The prayer Ahavat Olam, said at night, contains the following statement about the value of Torah u-mitzvot, and how they are to be transmitted:

Ki hem hayyenu ve’orekh yamenu, u-vahem nehgeh yomam valailah

“F�ǰ�&�Բ��;they are our life and the length of our days, and we will recite them day and night”

Yissachar Jacobson notes (Netiv Binah, I: 406) that the first part of this sentence in Ahavat Olam derives from two phrases said by Moses near the end of his life: one in Nitzavim, “For thereby you shall have life and shall long endure upon the soil that the Lord swore to your ancestors . . .” (); and one which we have just seen in �Ჹ’a��Գ� (32:47). The second part of the sentence in Ahavat Olam comes from the passage above from .

These rabbis loved the idea of reciting God’s teaching day and night, not only for the leader, but for every Jew. They loved the process of turning to God through words, and they loved the idea that God offers guidance through words, through learning, and through law, to anyone willing to study. Loving these ideas and practices, they connected the words of Moses and of Joshua and placed them in a context of divine love. They coined the phrase ahavat olam, “eternal love,” to characterize God’s gifts of guidance, structure, and meaning. Ahavat Olam is the love-affirming preamble to hearing the sacred, covenantal Shema emerge from our own lips each night. We murmur this prayer faithfully and gently: as gently as rain on new growth, as dew falling on grass.

Moses’s wish for his words to land gently is finally realized long after he is gone, shaped by Joshua’s experience of God, and by rabbis with their own gift for poetry. From our individual vantage point, with the help of their words abounding in love, we can reach out to God, whose mission was championed by Moses in a dramatic, pain-filled poem, recited to a difficult people at a difficult moment. We can take from Moses’s words the passion he intended, setting aside the anger he produced.

The year is new! May the circumstances that we face in life in this bright new year bring forth from us words of substance mixed with joy, a luxury unavailable to Moses, who led a difficult people in difficult circumstances. May the words we write and the words we say attain the virtuosity of �Ჹ’a��Գ�; and may our lekakh, our wisdom, fall gently as rain and softly as drops of dew, on old loved ones and new, in this blessed new year.

This commentary was originally published in 2018.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Weren’t We Just Forgiven?

onlinelearning@jtsa.edu — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 20:53:29 +0000

This coming Monday night Jewish people around the world will officially conclude the holiday of Yom Kippur, and then immediately engage in one of the most confounding rituals of the year. After a day spent refraining from all earthly concerns, after hours of penitential prayer aimed at inspiring the individual to commit themselves to a year filled with less mistakes, and more mitzvot, after the gates of prayers are closed but before we have broken our fasts, what do we do? We daven �Ѳ�’a�� (Evening Service).

Now, this in and of itself, is not what confounds me—we always conclude our holidays and fast days with an evening service that expresses gratitude for the separation between holy and regular time. No, what confounds me is one paragraph in the evening Amidah, which makes complete theological sense on any other evening of the year, but not on the night which ends Yom Kippur.

As in every weekday Amidah, the sixth berakhah asks God for forgiveness, and it is customary to strike one’s breast (as we do throughout the day on Yom Kippur) as we say:

סְלַח לָֽנוּ אָבִֽינוּ כִּי חָטָֽאנוּ מְחַל לָֽנוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ כִּי פָשָֽׁעְנוּ כִּי מוֹחֵל וְסוֹלֵֽחַ אָֽתָּה: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה חַנּוּן הַמַּרְבֶּה לִסְלֽוֹחַ

“F�ǰ�give us Avinu, for we have sinned: pardon us, Malkeinu, for we have transgressed—for Your nature is to forgive and pardon.”

On all other days, this blessing is a powerful reminder of the countless missteps that befall us every day of our lives. And each day, by asking God for forgiveness, we are being conscious and intentional about the types of people we wish to be. We recount—then we recommit. But on motzei Yom Kippur, this blessing makes little sense. Is it possible that I committed a sin in the last thirty seconds since the gates closed at the end of the ��’i�� service? Shouldn’t this be my most blameless moment of the entire year, and yet, here I am, beating my breast and beseeching God for forgiveness yet again?

I believe that possible answers to this theological challenge can be found in this week’s parashah, �Ჹ’a��Գ�, and in the haftarah for Shabbat Shuvah, which is read on the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

In our Torah portion, �Ჹ’a��Գ�, we read Moses’s final poem to the People of Israel before his death. The poem serves as God’s anticipatory warning to the nation not to forget or forsake the source of their good fortune. “He who found him in a desert region. In an empty howling waste. He engirded him, watched over him, guarded him as the pupil of his eye” (Deut. 32:10). And yet, despite God’s kindness, God knows that eventually the Jewish people will be led astray. “You neglected the Rock that begot you, Forgot the God who brought you forth” (Deut. 32:18). The poem concludes with God’s promise to bring retribution both upon the People of Israel, and ultimately upon the enemy nations of the world, whom God utilizes as tools of divine punishment.

In our Torah portion we learn the truth, that no matter how blameless and upright we might feel in one instant, life has a way of challenging our unfounded notions of perfection and reminding us that we are works in a constant state of progress. Striking our chests during the Amidah which follows Yom Kippur and proclaiming yet again “F�ǰ�give us—God!” is a ritual manifestation of this theology. I may be blameless now, but not for long, not forever.

Our haftarah, from which this Shabbat derives its name, is unique in that it includes writings from three different prophets (Hosea, Joel, and Micah) among the “The Twelve Minor Prophets,” or the “Trei Asar.” The core section, from Hosea, contains a clear message that not only is repentance possible—indeed it is welcomed by God with joy!

שׁ֚וּבָה יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל עַ֖ד יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֑יךָ כִּ֥י כָשַׁ֖לְתָּ בַּעֲוֺנֶֽךָ׃

Return, O Israel, to the ETERNAL your God, For you have fallen because of your sin. (14:2)

אֶרְפָּא֙ מְשׁ֣וּבָתָ֔ם אֹהֲבֵ֖ם נְדָבָ֑ה כִּ֛י שָׁ֥ב אַפִּ֖י מִמֶּֽנּוּ׃

I will heal their affliction,
Generously will I take them back in love;
For My anger has turned away from them. (14:5)

From the words of Hosea we can understand that despite our regular lapses along our path towards self-improvement, God desires a relationship. But this relationship takes work; it requires maintenance and careful attention to ritual. After all, our relationship with God is not merely an instant in time, it is a constant in time. Therefore, even though we just spent an entire day demonstrating to God how seriously we take this relationship, we are nonetheless obligated to maintain the regularity of the ritual, and show that our commitment is continuous, not contingent on a single day of the calendar year.

In his commentary on the opening word of this morning’s haftarah, Shuvah (Return), the 11th-century Spanish commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra adds the following teaching, and in so doing, builds on the lessons discussed above:

שובה: מעט מעט עד השם

Return: little by little to God.

May we all continue our work in progress in the coming year as we return, little by little, to strengthen and deepen our relationship with God.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Making Every Word Count

onlinelearning@jtsa.edu — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 21:56:57 +0000

�Ჹ’a��Գ� is remarkable in two respects: what it says, and how it chooses to say it. My focus here will be the latter, but let’s note with regard to the former that in this, his final address to the Children of Israel before a set of farewell blessings, Moses reviews all of his people’s past, present, and future. He begins by calling on the God who had called Israel into being and called him to God’s service. He reminds Israel that God has chosen them and still cares for their well-being. He prophesies that despite all that God and Moses have said and done, Israel will abandon God, as they had in the past. God will punish them, as in the past, but never to the point of utter destruction. In the end, God and Israel will reconcile. Why, Moses pleads, can you not understand the simple truth that YHWH alone is God, YHWH and no other? If you accept that truth and act accordingly, God will save you from your enemies—and if not, not. Remember these words, he concludes, for they are your very life and the length of your days—whereupon, rather peremptorily, God tell Moses that his days are over. The time for his words is done. Moses must join the forebears who speak no more ().

Throughout the Book of Deuteronomy—the Book of Devarim, of words—Moses has strained to convey a message for which no words, including his, could possibly be adequate. He holds out a promise of a kind of Life, a way called “Mitzvah,” such as the world had never known. How can one describe that which has never been? The words we know cannot measure up to the life we do not know. What does wholeness look like? Who can describe perfect relations to other human beings and to God?

The possibility of that Life ever coming into existence has long depended on Moses’s ability to persuade his people to cross the Jordan and start living it. All he has in order to accomplish that is words. God’s many miracles have never succeeded in changing the hearts and minds of Israel for very long, if they worked at all. Moses’s striking of the rock to draw water from it—in frustrated recognition that words alone could not do the job assigned him—resulted in the punishment that now prevents him from crossing the Jordan with the people. Moses cannot show them the new Life; it does not exist yet, and in any case, he must remain on the river’s far bank. His language will stop exactly where his feet do, and language is all he has.

It should not surprise us, then, that Moses’s final plea to Israel to hear his words takes the form of poetry, the mode in which words are both most precious and most powerful. The meter of �Ჹ’a��Գ� is fixed. The language is elevated and highly metaphorical. The verses often rhyme. The fact that the Torah reaches its culmination in poetry causes us to reflect on the nature and limits of even these carefully chosen words.

Like any other poet who seeks to construct a bridge between the known world, available to memory and experience, and the as-yet unknown world that exists only in his imagination, Moses falls back on simile and metaphor. He talks about that which has never been experienced by telling what it would be like. All through the book, Moses has tried to convince Israel that this unseen Life is, or could be, as real as what they have known: as real as the voice at Sinai, the manna in the wilderness, the repeated salvation from enemies or starvation. He has struggled to convince them of the reality awaiting them on the Jordan’s far side by detailing in the most specific terms possible—the law—what their lives and institutions will be like there. Until now, he has employed a poetry of law. That which people everywhere can know—what happens when oxen gore oxen, debts are due, or sacrifices offered—is used to instruct Israel about a sort of Life as yet unknown to anyone.

Now, in �Ჹ’a��Գ�, Moses employs a poetry of nature—that which is most real, tangible, and enduring—and uses metaphors to get his listeners to feel and touch what awaits them. Heaven and earth, rain and dew, rock, honey, the fruit of the field, milk of sheep, the fat of lambs, the blood of grapes, the eagle and her young, the sun, moon, mountains, hills, sea, iron, brass, corn, wine:all the ageless contours of human existence, the basic givens that surround and ground ephemeral and variable history, are invoked to invest the non-yet-experienced with reality.

But even here, despite the wonder and gratitude that Moses’s words arouse, language cannot reach its object. The words strain after a richness of reality that they cannot catch. After all, they are only words. “A poem should be palpable and mute,” wrote the poet Archibald MacLeish. “Dumb … Silent … wordless … A poem should be equal to: not true … A poem should not mean / But be.” Were poetry able to be that which it “should be,” of course, there would be no poetry. Language which is “dumb, silent, wordless” is not language. If Israel could simply and instinctively have seen and known the possibility for themselves that Moses tries to teach—and, really seeing it, had acted to hear the words into being—there would be no need for Deuteronomy, or for the rest of Torah.

That is not life as we know it. We need the words, the metaphors, the teaching, and the law to direct hearing and behavior. And we need them repeated, again and again; the danger that repetition will dull our senses is matched by the reality that we do not listen well to what we do not want to hear. Moses’s final poem brims over with frustration, disappointment, and perhaps anger. His words are intended as a “witness against” Israel. He has warned them, has done his best to get them to listen. It is as if the nature he invokes has taken its course, despite his best attempts and God’s to have things otherwise. “Jeshurun grew fat and kicked; you grew fat and gross and coarse” (). Success will breed complacency and ingratitude, he warns. Blessed by God, Israel will come to take blessing for granted, turn to worship “no-gods,” and come to believe that “our own hand has prevailed” (v. 27). It will take disaster to bring them to their senses—or rather, to bring them to realize that there remain possibilities beyond what the senses, limited by experience, can grasp. In the end, Israel will return to these words and the behavior they bring in tow.

We read �Ჹ’a��Գ� this year right after Yom Kippur, a chance for reflection that we live at our best in the spaces opened by Moses’s words: loving, creating, building. This year in particular the power of words to raise or lower us is palpable. They can take us far from the simple truth, and serve the will to power rather than the works of kindness or conscience. Even so, the Torah insists, what we do can be adequate to the words Moses offered before he fell silent. One can choose blessing, goodness, Life. Now as ever we can cross narrow rivers, and begin life again on their far side.

This piece was originally published in 2016.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold (��”l) Hassenfeld.

Shabbat Shuvah Torah Reading

onlinelearning@jtsa.edu — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 13:54:35 +0000

The Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is called Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of Return. The Torah portion can vary depending on the timing of the calendar.

For the haftarah, Ashkenazi Jews read and , while Sephardic Jews read and . The first word of the haftarah from Hosea is “Shuvah” (return) and led to the naming of this Shabbat.

Shabbat Shuvah

The Bluebird Inside Our Hearts (Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz): Connecting Shabbat Shuvah with a Charles Bukowski poem

Vayeilekh

The Courage to Hope (Rabbi Ayelet Cohen): The similarities between the Israelites position before entering the land and our experience between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Moses’s Journey, And Ours (Chancellor Shuly Rubin Schwartz): Moses’s response to challenge and the future provides an example for a journey of self-reflection for the Yamim Noraim

The Journey of Life (Rabbi Marc Wolfe): Change is a process

Ha’azinu

Finding God and Ourselves Anew (Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz): “Every year, we are given the gift of finding God anew”

A World Without Teshuvah (Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch)

EXPLORE MORE HIGH HOLIDAY CONTENT

In God’s Image

Elan Kane — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 13:34:09 +0000

What does it mean to be created in God’s image? Or to act in a God-like way? As I reread Parashat �Ჹ’a��Գ�, I was struck by the ways Moses’s song poetically develops God’s care for the Israelites, and I discovered in the vivid and diverse metaphors the beginnings of an answer. From the opening lines, where God’s words are likened to varieties of rain, sustaining and giving life to all, to God as an eagle “who rouses his nestlings” and “bears them along his pinions” (), this God builds up, guides, teaches, and protects. God provides for the Israelites’ physical needs with gifts of abundance, nurturing the people with “honey from the crag” as a mother nurses her child (). The Israelites’ lack of gratitude inflames God’s anger, but God bestows mercy and forgiveness, despite there being no mention of teshuva (repentance). God gives.

God’s benevolence is, according the teachings of Rav Eliyahu Dessler, the key to understanding what it means to be created in God’s image.[1] Dessler (1892–1953) was a proponent of the classical Mussar tradition, a system of self-reflection and ethical character formation grounded in the teachings of Rabbi Israel Salanter. Dessler writes:

When the Almighty created human beings He made them capable of both giving and taking. The faculty of giving is a sublime power; it is one of the attributes of the blessed Creator of all things. He is the Giver par excellence; His mercy, His bounty and His goodness extend to all His creatures. His giving is pure giving for He takes nothing in return. He can take nothing for He lacks nothing, as the verse says, ” . . . If you are righteous what do you give to Him?” Our service to Him is not for His need but for our own, since we need a means of expressing our gratitude to Him. Man has been granted this sublime power of giving, enabling him too to be merciful, to bestow happiness, to give of himself. “God created man in His own image.”

For Rav Dessler, God, as creator of all things, is the “Giver par excellence”; thus, the most God-like act an individual can perform is to give. Too often, we equate giving with loss. If I give to someone else, I will have less. In contrast, Dessler suggests that through giving, we actualize our full selves. We are not giving “away” something, but fully engaging our powers to be God’s agents in the world. The true purpose of existence is to live this life of generosity. Further, “service to God” (i.e., prayer) is not something that God needs; rather, we humans need a means of expressing our gratitude. Prayer reminds us of what we have received and affords an opportunity to be thankful for those gifts. In expressing gratitude, we are acting as a “giver.” Though we cannot give God anything of substance, we can offer thanks.

It is, I think, no coincidence that Ha-azinu is read just before Sukkot, a holiday whose rituals highlight the importance of expressing gratitude and giving. In the parashah, the Israelites enjoy the land’s largesse but forget God’s goodness and turn to other gods. Sukkot is also hag ha-asif (Harvest Festival), recalling the moment in the agricultural calendar when farmers could breathe easily knowing that the last crops had been harvested. Lest they attribute their bountiful harvest solely to their own efforts, they are commanded to dwell in the Sukkah, to acknowledge their own vulnerability and gratitude for God’s protection. We too leave behind the comfort and security of our homes to experience the frailty and uncertainty of life and put our trust in God.

On Sukkot, we are commanded to be joyful, and we create that experience by sharing the sukkah with visitors real and symbolic. The Zohar (Emor 103a) teaches that seven distinguished leaders (ushpizin) join the righteous in the sukkah, with a special invitation extended to one of them each night. According to the Zohar, the food one would have offered the ushpizin should be given to the poor instead: that is the only way to merit the presence of ushpizin in your sukkah. Indeed, according to Maimonides, when one feeds the poor on Sukkot and other major holidays, God rejoices. It used to be common practice to invite the poor to share a Sukkot meal, and nowadays many donate to food pantries and soup kitchens.

This year, as we celebrate Sukkot in the wake of flooding, fire, plague, and political turmoil, we are mindful that many in our own communities and across the world do not enjoy the blessings of food, clothing, shelter, and other basic necessities. But cultivating a habit of giving encompasses more than transforming our abundance into gifts for the needy. It requires us to rethink our orientation to others and interrogate our own desires and drives. When is my giving simply a cover for self-interest? How can I receive in a way that also gives back—through gratitude and care for the giver? May we move into Sukkot with this new understanding of the power of the act of giving, knowing that when we give, we are living b’tselem Elohim and fulfilling our purpose in the world.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

[1] I am grateful to my colleague Rabbi Eliezer Diamond for introducing me to the writings of Rav Dessler.

The Poetics of Loss

Stacy Firestone — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 18:49:03 +0000

Growing up, books were always present in our house, arranged by topic in large bookshelves. Arieli Press, an Israeli fine arts publishing company, was founded in 1922 by my grandfather, Yosef Arieli (��”l), a master printer and an author. My father, Ariel Arieli (��”l), and extended family were all involved in the printing business in some capacity. Printing has been regarded as a way to disseminate knowledge in a democratic way and it has been especially precious to the Jewish people who believed that spreading knowledge is Avodat Kodesh—holy work, akin to Moshe teaching Torah on Har Sinai.

In addition to many museum catalogues, books of great Israeli artists, photography books commemorating the wars and celebrating Israel’s achievements, Arieli Press frequently printed poetry books in memory of soldiers killed in the many wars Israel fought with its neighbors. Growing up, I read these emotionally difficult books, filled with writing by the fallen soldiers and their families and friends, and through them learned to appreciate the succinct yet expressive language of poetry. I was, therefore, eager to explore the specific command given to Moshe by God to address the people of Israel this last time with a poem.

In the previous Torah portion, Moshe is instructed by God to speak to the people of Israel: “Therefore, write down this poem and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, in order that this poem may be My witness against the people of Israel” (Deut. 31:19).

Moshe not only addresses the people of Israel in the poem, he chooses to direct his last verses to heaven, and earth, making his speech powerful and eternal as the first verse of the portion claims: “Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter!” (Deut. 31:1). According to Hizkuni, Rabbi Hezekiya ben Manoah, a 13th-century rabbi, Moshe calls the forces of nature to witness his last address before his death to give it additional power and alludes to the story of creation. He continues with the retelling of the history of his relationship with the people of Israel since becoming their leader. Moshe summarizes God’s justice and compassion, and the failings of the Israelites. He touches upon both the punishment the Israelites will face and their ultimate redemption.

Why does God ask Moshe to reiterate the relationship between God and Israel, for the last time, in a form of a poem? What is the power of poetry? The 18th-century Hasidic rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev believed that songs are an integral part of all religious service. He argued that singing makes Torah not only close to one’s heart but also unforgettable. Poems can be more powerful and memorable than prose and at the same time more accessible and retainable. The 19th-century commentator Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv) emphasizes the richness of poetic language. The vibrancy and resonance of a poem come from the way it is written; with few words and intricate syntax, the speaker can say much more than in prose. The Netziv adds that poetry forces the reader to dive deeply into the written verses and discover allusions, hidden meanings, and connections.

Moshe’s poetic language in �Ჹ’a��Գ� inspired other artists to compose their own poems citing its verses. In 1937, a soviet poet and lyricist, Vasili Ivanowitz, and Dimitri Pokras, a composer, refer to the metaphor of God as an eagle protecting a Jewish army fighting against the Nazis by spreading his wings and protecting them from all evil. A more recent arrangement for verse 13 “He fed him honey from the crag, And oil from the flinty rock” composed by Gil Aldema, a neighbor of my family’s in Givata’im, became a popular song still heard in camps, religious services and performed by dance troupes all over the world.

Another notable example is the poem Mineged (“From Afar”) by the beloved Hebrew poet Rachel Bluwstein (1890–1931). Rachel suffered from tuberculosis and was forced to relinquish her dream of building Kibbutz Degania; she moved to Tel Aviv where she eventually succumbed to the illness. In Mineged, she invokes the dramatic and tragic end of the Torah portion when Moshe is instructed by God to climb up the Nevo Mountain and look at the vast Land of Israel, all the while knowing that he will never cross the river to reach the promised land. “Ascend these heights of Abarim to Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab facing Jericho, and view the land of Canaan, which I am giving the Israelites as their holding” (Deut. 32:49). In Rachel’s poem, standing on Nevo becomes a symbol for her own unfulfilled yearnings and a metaphor for the essential human experience of loss and shattered expectations.

Rachel refers to the same wings mentioned in Moshe’s poem, but for her, these wings are bringing neither help nor hope. She is standing on one shore, lonely and deperate. Moshe and Rachel are mourning the future they will never experience: Rachel will never return to Degania and will never see the Kinneret (Lake of Galilee) she loves so much. Moshe will never cross the Jordan river and will never enter the promised land. They both experience defeat.

Attentive the heart. The ear listening:
Is anyone coming?
Every expectation contains
the sadness of Nevo.

One facing the other—two shores
Of a single river.
The rock of fate:
Ever far apart.

Spread your wings. See from afar
There—no one is coming,
To each his own Nevo
In a land of plenty.

As I read the poem this year, I cannot avoid thinking about the tragic situation that overwhelms us today, living during a pandemic and suffering the effects of COVID-19. We are all sheltering in place, nostalgic for the lives we used to live. Contemplating the lives we had to abandon is our Nevo. We lost the lives we used to lead and our future is, right now, unimaginable. There is a cliff of separation between our current lives and the lives we lead. As we are going into the beginning of the school year and the holidays season, we face huge deviations from our regular practices; we are also looking at a future that holds many secrets and surprises. Our beloved routines will never be the same and the future is obscure.

For educators, this abyss is incredible exasperating. Teaching by definition relies on close connections, on creating relationships, and on seeing and being seen. With all the advancement of technology, teaching through Zoom is hardly a satisfactory replacement. I long for the day I can sit in the classroom with my students, studying with them as we all did for many years. I miss my students and I miss the interaction with people around me.

And as we approach this holiday season, I pray that crossing the abyss and returning to normalcy is just around the corner. I want to wish you much health, safety, and happiness, and may the day when we can once again celebrate together with families and friends arrive soon.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

This is My Decree

Stacy Firestone — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 16:01:34 +0000

After surveying the 40 years of wandering in the desert; after reviewing and expanding the laws that God had given the Israelites during that period; and after repeating the terms of the covenant between God and Israel with its promises of a long and prosperous life in their own land if they fulfill God’s commands and its threats of impoverishment and expulsion if they fail to fulfill them, Moses now sums up his message in a poem designed to be memorized and recited regularly so that it might easily and reliably be transmitted from generation to generation. The poem, which occupies most of this week’s parashah, was intended to be an educational tool. Memorizing it and reciting it would keep the terms of the covenant alive in the minds and hearts of the Israelites forever.

Those of us who attended public school in the 1940s and 1950s were educated at the end of a period that began in prehistoric times with oral literary composition, when people were educated by memorizing things, particularly poetry. Well I remember the panic that would transfix a junior high school class when the teacher announced that she or he was about to call on individual pupils to recite the 20 lines of Tennyson or Macaulay that had been assigned us. The panic was temporary, but the lines that we memorized as children or teenagers were fixed in us permanently. In later life, those lines have sometimes provided a message that we needed to hear or a form of expression for feelings or ideas for which we failed to find words of our own. Likewise in Hebrew school, we were drilled to memorize the prayers and passages from the Bible in Hebrew. Tedious work it may have seemed at the time, but it had the lasting effect of making us comfortable with the Hebrew language and at home among the fundamental texts of the Jewish tradition. An educator with his eye on the future of his people, Moses knew that his poem was more likely to last in the minds of future generations than any abstract enunciations of lofty principles or any class discussion of the pros and cons of the covenant.

Poetry continued to be one of the major forms of Jewish literary activity in later generations as well. Hebrew poets in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages produced a vast quantity of poetry on biblical themes, expanding the stories and laws of the Bible as the authors of the Talmud and Midrash did, but expressing these expansions and elaborations in Hebrew verse. And since Moses spent his last day declaiming and teaching poems (�Ჹ’a��Գ� and the following poem containing Moses’s final blessings), it is only appropriate that Moses’s last day became the subject of a number of poems composed during this period when Hebrew poetry flourished.

A poem by Pinehas Hakohen, who lived in Tiberias in the eighth century, explores Moses’s resistance to the prospect of death by imagining a dialogue between Moses and God.* It is a delight to observe this nearly perfect servant of God behaving exactly like one of us ordinary mortals when faced with extinction. Moses has just heard God’s command to go up on the mountain on that very day and die, (Deut. 32:48) and he protests:

I will not die!
Why should I die?
O God, just tell me,
What complaint have You with me?

Moses may be the man of God (33:1) who split the sea, stood on Mount Sinai, and shepherded his people through the desert for 40 years, but in these lines he sounds like any one of us in his denial and in his demand for an explanation of the great mystery of death. Confronted with death, Moses is just a man who wants a little more time. He reviews his life, looking for sins for which God may be punishing him, and for each, he offers an explanation or an excuse in hope of a reprieve. “If,” he says to God, “you are punishing me for killing the Egyptian who struck an Israelite slave (Exod. 2:12); well, I actually had a good reason for that,” and he goes on to offer his excuse. But that excuse is of no interest to God, whose answer, like the decree itself is a riddle:

This is not this.
Why this? Not this!
Go up, Moses and die.
This is My decree.

Stanza by stanza, Moses raises six possible reasons for the decree, and for each he has an excuse or an explanation. God rejects each in turn: None of these acts was actually a sin, and some were even praiseworthy. Each of Moses’s protests begins with the opening lines quoted above; each of God’s responses ends with His maddening riddle and its unanswerable climax: This is My decree.

We readers might view Moses’s list as the things that weigh on his conscience as he reviews his life. He views his death not as the fate of all mankind but as uniquely his fate; he racks his brains seeking a cause in his own behavior and an excuse in his intentions.

With the sixth and last suggestion—his behavior at the rock—Moses comes very close to the truth as the Torah tells it: God sentenced him to die and not enter the Land of Canaan as punishment for his behavior when he was ordered to satisfy the Israelites’ thirst by bidding a boulder bring forth water. (Num. 20:2-13) To this item, God replies:

I have sworn and it is inscribed.
For this it has been decreed,

At last the maddeningly vague word “this” that was repeated so insistently in the refrain has acquired a specific meaning. “This” is the episode of the rock. But we still do not know just what Moses did wrong on that occasion; the text of the Torah is unclear on that point and it is disputed by commentators ancient and modern. Not only does the poet make no attempt to clarify Moses’s sin, he seems to taunt Moses—and us readers—by harping on the word “this,” and ending with the theme of the divine decree:

Here is this!
Know that it is for this,
For this, Moses, die!
For my decree is that you will die.

We were told all along that Moses will die on account of God’s decree, but not why God made the decree. Now, though Moses has at least identified the occasion that brought about the decree, we have only the vaguest idea of the reason.

Every aspect of the composition of the poem until this point is designed to stress that God’s decree is God’s decree—inscrutable and irreversible. Moses has hit a blank wall. He will never know the reason for his death. And in this respect he is exactly like the rest of mankind. We die for no reason other than God’s decree.

Moses now appears to accept this principle, but he is not ready to accept his death, for he has one ambition that is still unfulfilled: to see the Promised Land. In this too he resembles the rest of us. We hate the idea of our own extinction, but our hatred for that inevitability is exacerbated by the thought that we will never know what happens next in the story in which we have participated throughout our lives. What will become of our children and grandchildren? What will become of our city, our language, our country, the world? What technological development is next? What medical discovery? Is God so ungenerous as to deny us even a glimpse of that future?

Moses begins each of the remaining four stanzas with an altered version of the opening lines:

If for this I die,
Let me enter and die!

He bargains with God: Let me enter the Land, live there for a year or two and then die! God makes a counteroffer: If you insist on entering the Land, do so, but then I will block the Israelites from entering and they will have to wander the desert forever. God knows that Moses could never doom his people to eternal exile. Moses then suggests that God let him enter the Land through underground tunnels so that God could evade his own oath that Moses would never cross over the Jordan river (Deut. 31:2). God counters that Moses’s life span was decreed long ago to be 120 years, no more and no less. Moses offers to enter the Land as a servant while Joshua leads the people in his place. God now begs Moses not to bargain with him: To resist is not worthy of Moses’s stature or his reputation as man of humble piety. He must know that God does not decree death lightly. He should accept his fate with dignity, in a spirit of submission.

Unable to abandon his desire to see the Holy Land, Moses reaches for the fantastic. He begs: “Transform me into a fish in the Jordan so that I might at least glimpse the Holy Land while swimming; transform me into a cloud so that I might glimpse the Holy Land from above.”

God has had enough; He puts an end to the entire argument with a speech that humanizes Himself without conceding an iota of His transcendence. God confesses that He has found Moses’s speeches beautiful, but He demands obedience. He will make Moses’s death a sweetness rather than the horror that it is for ordinary men, for Moses will die by the divine kiss. God regrets His own decree, but His decree it is, and even God is bound by it.

What more consolation could a man on the point of death want than these touching words?

An end to beautiful words,
Speech without blemish!
Yield to my power.
Die at the kiss of my mouth.
Beloved and trustworthy friend despite this—
Do not go on saying this.
Sorry I am that I decreed this,
But what can I do? Decreed is this.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

*The poem may be found in the edition of Pinehas’s complete poems by Shulamit Elizur (Jerusalem, 2004,559-69); one stanza appears in Hebrew and English in T. Carmi’s Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, 269-70. Only the rites of Corfu and Rome carried on the recitation of this poem into modern times, as part of the service for Simhat Torah. A discussion of the poem may be found in Shulamit Elizur, Shirah shel parashah (Jerusalem, 1999), 332-41.

Our Very Life

Stacy Firestone — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 22:04:57 +0000

At the end of his life, with Joshua by his side, Moses begins his great, thunderous poem, �Ჹ’a��Գ�, summoning the heavens and the earth as witnesses to his powerful, angry message, as God commanded him to do in the preceding parashah, Vayelekh. And yet, in a one-verse reshut, a prayerful, wishful intention, preceding the central portion of his sermonic poem, he says that he wants his words to land lightly: “May my discourse come down as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like showers on young growth, like droplets on the grass” (Deut. 32:2). Then suddenly, the central angry theme emerges, and he calls the people “unworthy of [God], crooked, perverse” (32:5), “dull and witless” (32:6).

After the poem concludes, Moses explains his and God’s motivation. He says:

Take to heart all the words with which I have warned you this day. Enjoin them upon your children, that they may observe faithfully all the terms of this Teaching. For this is not a trifling thing for you: it is your very life; through it you shall long endure on the land that you are to possess upon crossing the Jordan. (32:46–47, emphases added)

Be strong and resolute, for you shall apportion to this people the land that I swore to their fathers to assign to them. But you must be very strong and resolute to observe faithfully all the Torah that My servant Moses enjoined upon you. Do not deviate from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. Let not this Book of the Teaching cease from your lips, but recite it day and night, so that you may observe faithfully all that is written in it. Only then will you prosper in your undertakings and only then will you be successful. (Josh. 1:6–8)

Ki hem hayyenu ve’orekh yamenu, u-vahem nehgeh yomam valailah

“F�ǰ� they are our life and the length of our days, and we will recite them day and night”

Yissachar Jacobson notes (Netiv Binah, I: 406) that the first part of this sentence in Ahavat Olam derives from two phrases said by Moses near the end of his life: one in Nitzavim, “For thereby you shall have life and shall long endure upon the soil that the Lord swore to your ancestors . . .” (Deut. 30:20); and one which we have just seen in �Ჹ’a��Գ� (32:47). The second part of the sentence in Ahavat Olam comes from the passage above from Joshua (1:8).

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).