by Rabbi Lavey Derby
Shabbat Shuvah
Ha’azinu
Deuteronomy 32:1-52
Hosea 14:2-10; Joel 2:15-27; Micah: 7:18-20
At the end of his life, as he stands on the boundary between the here and now and the Land of Promise, Moses, our teacher, who complained that he was “slow of speech and heavy of tongue,” bursts into song!
After a lifetime of beseeching, arguing, legislating, and speaking for God, Moses crafts his final words into what is the longest section of poetry in the Torah.
Perhaps at this moment in his life Moses experienced an elevated consciousness that could only be expressed in poetry, in the language of mystery, symbol and allusion, in which truth can be hinted at but not explicitly spoken.
The song itself tell the epic saga of Israel, describing the love of God for our ancestors and God’s munificence to us in the wilderness, bringing us on eagles’ wings from the wasteland to a land of milk and honey. It foretells our rebellion against God as we become spiritually blinded by an overabundance of blessing, and records the dire consequences of our actions — “I will hide My face from them and … [they will know] the sword without and the terror within.”
Finally, the song offers hope for redemption as God promises to overcome the rule of strict justice with overflowing compassion. Thus the song of Ha’azinu reflects the theology we have come to expect from Deuteronomy and from the prophets: sin is a rebellion against God which must be punished, yet hope for God’s compassion and redemption is ever-present.
The Sifrei, the compilation of rabbinic midrash on Deuteronomy, recognizes a transcendent element in the song of Ha’azinu and specially praises it: “Great is this song, as it embraces the present, the past and the future, this life as well as the World to Come.” Our Sages seemed to intuit that Ha’azinu is a vision intertwining the here, the now and the not yet.
The Sefer Ha-Hayim, a 17th century manual for Jewish spiritual care of the dying, tells us that as a person lies on his or her deathbed, the upper worlds descend to meet the lower world and all the gates of vision and blessing are opened.
Occasionally, when I am sitting with someone who is dying, that person will begin to reflect on their life, observing the whole of life unfold as one flowing, organic story. They begin to speak from some interstitial plane, weaving the past with visions of an unknown future for themselves and their family. In one moment, they know all moments.
The poet William Blake offers this description of such sight: “To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower; hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour.”
Could that gift of sight might be available to us as well? Could we see the seamless wholeness of our lives? Moses, in his final burst of song, offers a path to this way of knowing.
Each moment of life is distinct, yet also interwoven with every other moment. Each experience flows inextricably into the next, and the next. What has happened and what is yet still to come is all part of the same flow, the same life.
In this life, we will know new beginnings filled with great promise. We might travel through periods of empty wasteland, guided and cared for by a loving hand. In finding our promised land, we may become forgetful, lack grace and gratitude. We will surely come to know disappointment, difficulty, tribulation and suffering.
And even then, when we fear God’s face has turned away forever and in our hearts the terror shakes us, we still will dream of hope and redemption.
If we can cherish the entirety of our lives, and embrace it all with love and acceptance, our moments of joy together with moments of suffering, then we can do what Moses knew to do.
We can sing.
Rabbi Lavey Derby is the senior rabbi of Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon.
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