Ha’Azinu
Deuteronomy 32:1-52
Hosea 14:2-10; Micah 7:18-20; Joel 2:15-27
This week’s Torah portion, Ha’Azinu, constitutes the last parashah of the Torah to be read in full on Shabbat morning. We will later conclude the Torah on Simchat Torah before turning back to Genesis to start the entire journey again. And yet the story of the Torah never really comes to an end.
Think about the full context of our narrative. Genesis gives us the story of the universe and all of humanity before narrowing in on Abraham and his descendants, through the settlement of Joseph and his brothers in Egypt. The following four books of the Torah aim toward a final resolution of settling the descendants of Abraham in the land of Israel. In fact, all of Deuteronomy constitutes the final speech of Moses as the people are perched outside of the land, about to go in.
And then, just as the Israelites’ dream is about to come to fruition, as the climax of our story is finally within reach … we roll back the scroll and start all over again. The narrative of our weekly readings is never resolved. It is truly the never-ending story.
While our tradition’s failure to resolve this narrative may seem odd, there is as always a lesson to be learned. Turning back to the beginning of our family story, we meet Abraham, who moves first from Ur to Haran before being called by God to travel to the land of Canaan. Even after Abraham follows God’s instructions, the journey is not over. The land is desolate and Abraham leaves for Egypt before returning later to the land God has promised him.
In the story of Abraham, we meet our progenitor as someone who is always on the move, whose life is always in flux. In Genesis 14:13, Abraham is introduced for the first time as the ivri, the Hebrew. Rashi, the great 11th-century commentator, argues that the word ivri comes from the word la’avor — to cross over, from the other side of the river. In Bereshit Rabbah (42:8) Rabbi Yehuda adds, “This teaches us that the entire world was on one side, and [Abraham] was on the other.”
Both comments support a common takeaway — the nomadic Abraham and his descendants are marked with constant movement and an unquenchable thirst for incremental improvement. Abraham’s son Isaac moves from well to well, founding biblical cities as he goes. Isaac’s son Jacob flees his ancestral home before returning many years later, renamed as Israel, or “one who wrestles with God,” after struggling with a mysterious being at the foot of the Yabok river (yet another moment of crossing over).
It therefore makes perfect sense for the foundational scripture of a people who are always on the move to never actually end. What our book lacks in structural symmetry it makes up for with dynamism and optimism for a better future. Surely this parallel was noticed by generations of our ancestors, who struggled through 2,000 years of diasporic existence marked by constant movement to areas of decreased oppression and greater opportunity.
In this way, our constant movement has steered us far away from complacency, toward the ideal of tikkun olam. The fact that we pause every seventh day to enjoy the fruits of our labor is a reminder that for the other six days, we are instructed to better ourselves and continue our lives in motion.
This message of constant incremental improvement and a lack of self-satisfaction is further highlighted in this season. This Shabbat we will pause to return to ourselves with Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of return, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We create for ourselves an impossible mission: to avoid transgression in the year ahead. Each of us is bound to fail, whether in the first minute or somewhere further down the line.
And yet the goal is not perfection but rather improvement — to be just a bit better this year and to leave the world in hopefully a better to place. To move, grow, mature, cross over, improve and advance along our journey of life. As Rabbi Tarfon instructs us in the oft-quoted verse from Pirke Avot, “It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it.” Such is the credo of the people of constant movement.
Rabbi Jonathan Jaffe is a rabbi at Reform Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. He can be reached at [email protected].