Ha’Azinu
Deuteronomy 32:1–32:52
Samuel II 22:1–22:51
“Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; let the earth hear the words I utter! May my discourse come down as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, Like showers on young growth, like droplets on the grass. For the name of the Lord I proclaim; Give glory to our God!”
This is it. The last words that Moses gets to impart to the people before he dies and they go on to their unimagined but surely perilous and exciting future in the land of the promise.
It is interesting he begins by asking the heavens and earth to listen, not the people. Invoking the dew, he returns the world to the state of creation where the land was fertile but nothing had yet grown. As the rain falls, it nourishes the world, a fine layer of moisture to nurture the new growth, the new people, starting off into a new land.
Yet this new growth is tempered in the eye of the planter by the previous season’s weeds. It will be a hard harvest, says the farmer, and in fact we know this from before, where the same witnesses are called to validate the contract between God and the people: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that you will surely perish quickly from the land where you are going over the Jordan to possess it. You shall not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed” (Deuteronomy 4:26).
It is disheartening to read every year that in the midst of the bounty to come, there will be complacency, waywardness and sloth. No matter how much honey flows from the crag, and oil from the flinty rock, curd of kine and milk of flocks are given, there is still to be a lack of gratitude, even perhaps because there is too much beneficence from the Divine hand.
Is this inevitable? Will the loving parent always spoil the child and create rebellion? Moses knows this to be possible, again calling heaven and earth to witness for him: “For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I have commanded you. In days to come, disaster will fall upon you because you will do evil in the sight of the LORD and provoke God to anger by what your hands have made” (Deuteronomy 31:28–29).
There is seemingly no way out, and though the world will never again be destroyed by flood, the people will destroy themselves time and time again.
And time and time again, God will lift from the throne of justice, and return to the seat of mercy. In choosing to change their ways, the people can change the future. And it is precisely the future that Moses invokes:
“This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). The inclusion of the children is key here. No one wants to be the last person on earth, or the last generation. Even if one does not raise a child, there is a legacy we wish to leave — a better world, a world beautified, fed, peaced by our hands, our poems, our travail.
We all wish not to have lived in vain. We all want to have had the chance to cultivate our gardens, to leave behind more succulent fruits, to take advantage of the amazing gifts that we have been given, to choose and nurture life, that we may live.
So perhaps it is not so sad that Moses never gets to walk the land promised to the people, the people he has been cultivating. He will see the beds prepared for his seed, knowing they will grow even without him, that his work and his joy in them will live on, in spite of the loss.
And so must we move to look forward, especially at this time of harvest and hope, of return and rebirth — not to the regret of what we cannot accomplish, but to the pleasure of what we have, the hope of our own transformation, and the promise of new life. Shanah Tovah!
Rabbi Elisheva Salamo is the spiritual leader of Keddem Congregation in Palo Alto.