Photo credit: Richard Allen Greene, LBC student
My parents sold their house in the spring, the house I grew up in. I had been storing keepsakes there, and so when I visited them this summer I shipped five boxes of stuff back to London, including, as far as I can tell, every letter ever sent to me – several thousand of them, going back to a Snoopy Valentine that my brother gave me around the time he learned to write his name.
Mixed in among letters from ex-girlfriends, high school and college and kibbutz friends, former teachers, my childhood rabbi and my parents, are many, many letters from my Grandpa Marvin, who I was very close to, and who was an assiduous correspondent after he retired to Florida when I was 10. His letters are the same over and over again, about how hot Florida is and how much our hometown baseball team, in his memorable word – stinks. And, over and over again, how much he loves me and how proud he is of me.
Grandpa Marvin died in 2007, as unexpectedly as it can be when a 90-year-old man dies.
So these are now letters from beyond the grave, a remarkable archive and a treasure to me.
Our parashah this week, Ha’azinu, is structured as much the same thing: a message from beyond the grave.
The preceding portion, Vayeilech, ends on a cliffhanger: God foretells that – in the future, after Moses has died – the Israelites will break their Covenant with God, and God dictates a poem for Moses to deliver as a warning and an explanation for the punishment that will follow.
Vayeilech ends as Moses is about to recite the poem to the people, so parashat Ha’azinu opens cold as Moses begins to speak.
“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 Ha’azinu on Tishah Be’av,” writes Lilly Kaufman, an alumna of the JTS rabbinic and cantorial programs.
Plaut suggests that the poem may date from a time when the nation has “suffered a series of major disasters,” but before the time of the destruction of the northern kingdom, since it contains no mention of exile.
And it explains those disasters in the only way theologically possible for a people who believe in an all-powerful, all-merciful God – indeed, the God who, in the parashah, says “There is no God beside me. I deal death and I give life, I wounded and I will heal.” (Deut 32:39, Plaut translation)
If things go badly in a world governed by an all-powerful, merciful God, then it must be because of something WE have done.
As Kaufman puts it, those disasters are “Consequences – terrible consequences for disobedience.”
And those consequences get very bloodthirsty indeed. If the opening words of Moses’s poem – “Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter!” (Deut 32:1) remind us of invocations to the muse in Homer, the end of the poem – with its talk of flashing blades, arrows drunk with blood and God’s sword devouring flesh – sound more like Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a hit man spewing invented Bible verses about the Lord raining down vengeance before he kills people.
Jewish Theological Seminary’s Lilly Kaufman wrote about Ha’azinu in 2018, and asked: “What are we to do with the anger of Ha’azinu this year, when it falls on the Shabbat preceding our most joyous holiday, Sukkot?”
This year we have an even more painful question to ask.
This is the last parashah before the first anniversary of October 7.
What are we to do with the anger of Ha’azinu THIS year?
Can we accept – can we believe in any way – that what happened in the kibbutzim of the Gaza Envelope or at the Supernova Festival was a consequence of anything the people of Israel did?
Lilly Kaufman again, wrestling with the anger of the poem, focuses on the words that follow it:
“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,” Kaufman writes.
True, but for me the verse that follows carries even greater meaning.
Once Moses has delivered the poem as God instructed, God issues another command, a shocking one: God tells Moses to go up Mount Nebo, “And die on the mountain,” in Robert Alter’s powerful translation.
Go up Mount Nebo and die.
And since this command comes the very day – b’etzem ha-yom – that Moses proclaims Ha’azinu to the people of Israel, you might think that these are his last words to them.
But they are not.
For there is still one final parashah awaiting us in Torah, V’zot ha-bracha – “And this is the blessing.”
In the next parashah, Moses will bless each of the tribes of Israel, individually. The blazing anger of Ha’azinu is not the last word from Moses. His final words call the various tribes to live and not die, to rejoice. Many of them, he says, are blessed. And one, Benjamin, is beloved of the Eternal.
Ha’azinu is not the end. Not the end of the Torah, not the end of Moses’s life, not his last words.
Moses’s last words are words of encouragement, of succor, of blessing, of love.
Like my Grandpa Marvin’s letters.
Richard Allen Greene, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.