Parashat Ha’azinu
Photo: Bald eagle by Solomon Greene
The morning blessings are among my favourite parts of our services. In a world where many of us often feel beset with troubles on all sides, pausing each morning to thank God for what is good in our lives feels life-affirming.
No matter how good or how bad we may think our lives are, no matter what challenges or difficulties we face, there is much to be grateful for.
Whether it is something as basic as having clothes to wear, or as profound as the blessing of sleep and the privilege of waking to a new day, making us pause to acknowledge the goodness of simply being alive may be among our tradition’s greatest gifts to us.
Among those morning blessings, in many traditions, is thanking God for making us b’tselem Elohim, in the image of God.
That, of course, is a reference to the primeval creation story, when God seems to muse aloud:
‘Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness…’ (Gen 1:26, Robert Alter translation.)
The phrasing is extremely challenging from a Jewish religious point of view, raising the question not only of whom God is speaking to, but who, exactly, is the ‘us’ God is speaking about?
Whether the answer is that God is speaking to the heavenly hosts, as some of our rabbis suggest, or that God is using the Royal We, as others opine, the broader thrust of the verse is clear: We humans are created in the image of God, and in one of the morning blessings, we thank God for that.
Our Torah portion this week, Ha’azinu, makes me question whether that is in fact something to thank God for.
The God of Ha’azinu comes across as violent, blood-thirsty, jealous, capricious and warlike, sometimes one after another, sometimes all at once.
The second-to-last portion in the Torah, Ha’azinu, consists primarily of Moses’s recitation to the Children of Israel of a long poem warning that after he dies, the people will turn to idolatry, enraging God. Although it is sometimes called the Song of Moses, the poem is presented not as the work of our greatest prophet but rather as the word of God, told to Moses as a warning to deliver to the nation.
The Torah: A Modern Commentary links the Song linguistically to the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and indeed its often wrathful tone echoes those later books.
The great translator and scholar Robert Alter suggests it may be even older, perhaps dating back to the 11th century BCE, the time of the judges. He notes that the poem includes rare terms of uncertain meaning, archaic grammar (even by Biblical standards!) and some archaic syntax.
If either theory is true, then the Song of Moses is a very ancient text, preserved over centuries and ultimately incorporated into the Book of Deuteronomy by later authors or editors.
That also appears to be true of two other major ‘songs’ in the Tanakh, Miriam’s Song of the Sea and Deborah’s Song in the Book of Judges. All three songs portray God as a warrior – indeed the Song of the Sea, a part of the daily morning service in some congregations, explicitly calls God ‘ish milchamah’, ‘man of war’.
In other words, the most ancient surviving parts of our writings are praises of a God of battle.
Do we want to be thankful for being like such a God?
A God who, in the words of our portion this week, says:
‘I will sweep down evils upon them,
my arrows spending against them
wasted with famine, withered by blight and bitter scourge,
and the fang of beasts I will send against them,
with the venom of creepers in the dust.
Outside will the sword bereave
and within chambers – terror.
Both youth and virgin,
suckling and gray-haired man.
I would have said, “Let Me wipe them out,
let Me make their name cease among men.”’ (Deut. 32: 23-26, Robert Alter translation)
Not only is this a violent God of war, but a spiteful one, whose threat quoted above is a response to provocation from the Children of Israel:
‘They provoked me with an ungod… and I, I will provoke them with an unpeople.’ (Deut. 32: 21, Robert Alter translation)
And further, it is not out of mercy or lovingkindness that, later in the poem, God decides to wreak violence on Israel’s enemies rather than on Israel. It’s because God doesn’t want the nations of the world to think that they overran Israel through their own powers. It’s an echo of the successful argument that Moses uses to stay God’s wrath after the Golden Calf in Exodus: If you destroy your people out here in the wilderness, the nations of the earth will think you were not able to take care of them.
Coming up in our weekly Shabbat morning Torah reading cycle this year barely 36 hours after the end of Yom Kippur, Ha’azinu would appear to present a God who is everything modern Jews are not meant to be, doing things we’ve just been repenting for: engaging in tit-for-tat behaviour (or threats thereof, at least), being violent, acting out of concern for what others think rather than what is right.
But is this a full picture of the God of Ha’azinu? Of course it is not.
As Alisa Braun of the Jewish Theological Seminary observes, Ha’azinu also presents an image of God who ‘builds up, guides, teaches, and protects.’ Writing in 2021, Braun focused on the opening third of the Song of Moses, ‘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.”’ (Deut 32: 2 and 11, JPS translation.)
The God of Ha’azinu also appears to be a mother figure to Israel, giving birth to the nation and suckling it with honey and oil. (Deut. 32: 13) The Torah: A Modern Commentary suggests that this God is both a mother and a father, complementary figures who complete each other.
On closer look at our parashah, then, this God is a very complex figure indeed – nurturing but also jealous, warlike but also loving. In other words, a God very much like us. A God in whose image we are made.
Richard Allen Greene, LBC rabbinical student