This week’s parsha, parshat Ha’azinu, falls on Shabbat T’shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Reading the parsha earlier in the week, I was so excited to think that I had finished the Torah, that everything had happened and I had completed a year of reading each parsha, and writing a drash on it. However, when I went to look at the Torah to look something up for Torah study, I was surprised! There is a whole extra parsha after this one. Needless to say, I was slightly disappointed. But alas, in all the shuffle of the High Holidays, something had to get confused and forgotten. This is a small thing and I’ll take it.
In thinking that this is the last parsha of the Torah, I was intrigued to find that it ends with Moses going up on the mountain and dying. God tells him to do like Aaron, go up the mountain and be gathered to his kin. Moses knows, and is reminded, that Moses broke faith with God and is therefore able to see the land from a distance, but not from up close. In my world, that was how the Torah ended. A rather apex-like ending, but an incomplete one (stay tuned for next week, where the parsha is actually the last parsha in the Torah and I get to experience my excitement all over again!).
Instead, we have the continuation of an epic story. God told us last week to write down God’s words in a poem, as a reminder to the people. The words should serve as a witness to what will happen to the people if they go astray. In that song, we get four parts. The first past is God establishing God’s loving relationship with the people. The second sees the people rejecting God in favor of other deities, with other peoples. Next, God decides to decimate the people. Lastly, God relents, recognizing that if God did destroy the people Israel, other people’s might feel they were the cause of that destruction. God is humanized. In this poem, meant to guide us away from joining to the deities of other people, God in fact becomes more benevolent. Yes, God’s anger is apparent and fear is instilled in one’s heart from reading this epic poem. But God is showed as being caring, as considerate, as aware of the place of the people in the greater scheme of things. In short, God still cares about us, about the Jewish people.
As we find ourselves in the Days of Awe, the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are made aware of our place in history. We are made aware that God can choose to not care, to destroy us anyway (if God destroyed us, we wouldn’t be around to worry about who destroyed us!). We know that God’s hand is powerful and that God is our rock. Yet we see that God, like a benevolent parent, sees that we will slip up, that we will go astray, that we will miss the mark, whether in large or small ways. But God will not leave us completely. God will not abandon us to walk on our own, nor will God completely forget about us as God’s people.
A midrash on the parsha reflects God’s attitude.
The Holy Blessed One at times appears, and at times does not appear;
at times hears, and at times does not want to hear;
at times responds, and at times does not respond;
at times may be addressed, and at times may not be addressed;
at times may be found, and at times may not be found;
at times is near, and at times is not near.(Midrash Tanhuma, Ha’azinu 4)
I would like to argue that God is, at this time, at God’s most apparent, most able to listen and respond, most patient and ready to be addressed, most present and most near. At this time, may we discover a way to demonstrate to God that we appreciate God’s presence in our lives, and find ways to come closer to God, to not warrant the harsh punishment or decree that God does discuss in this parsha. “God avenges the blood of God’s servants,” our Torah writes in Deuteronomy 32:43. Let us warrant that God avenge us, let us warrant that God listens to us.
Shabbat shalom!
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