Parashat Ha'azinu, Deuteronomy 32:1 - 32:52

The month of Tishrei is a journey beginning with forgiveness, proceeding towards reconciliation, and leading towards reunification as the season draws to a close.

Poetry: you either love it or hate it. Most people prefer their poetry in combination with music. This is a trait shared by people with disparate tastes, for example, lovers of opera, fans of musical theater, and rap aficionados. Words and music are equally important.

A smaller group enjoys the words of poetry that evoke a spiritual musicality in and of themselves. "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry." So wrote Emily Dickinson to her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

How does one explain poetry? English speakers often think of rhyme and meter (which, if you think about it, works very well in defining song lyrics as well). According to Robert Frost, "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." In a more recent yet equally poetic explanation we learn that:

One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy of language. Poets are miserly and unrelentingly critical in the way they dole out words to a page. Carefully selecting words for conciseness and clarity is standard, even for writers of prose, but poets go well beyond this, considering a word's emotive qualities, its musical value, its spacing, and yes, even its spatial relationship to the page. The poet, through innovation in both word choice and form, seemingly rends significance from thin air.

What is Poetry? Grasping at the Indefinable, Mark Flanagan, About.com

The elements of this definition work well with the poetry we find in the Torah. Of particular interest is Flanagan's comment about the "special relationship to the page." When one unfurls a Torah scroll, two poems are immediately recognizable on account of their layout: Shirat Hayam, the Song at the Sea found in Exodus, and Moses' poem in parashat Ha'azinu, Deuteronomy 32, which we read this Shabbat. The former is written in three narrow columns whose significance have been the subject of numerous midrashim; the latter appears in two narrow columns in the Torah scroll.

Beyond the beauty of the layout, there are additional features that make biblical poems powerful. This poetry does not fall into our popularly held belief that poems should rhyme. Rather, their organizing principle is what is called "poetic parallelism," in which the first and second half of the verse convey similar ideas but in different words:
May my discourse come down as the rain,
My speech distill as the dew,
Like showers on young growth,
Like droplets on the grass. (Deuteronomy 32:2)

There are a variety of elements that contribute to the power of biblical poetry:

In this small body of literature are preserved the oldest expressions of Israel’s faith. It reveals a conception of God at once intuitive and concrete, born of vividly direct experience and participation in his mighty acts, a conception devoid of the sophistication and formalism which result from centuries of theological speculation. The language of the poems is rich and exuberant, the imagery is picturesque, the figures of speech extravagant. The compositions are marked by a strong rhythm, with a regular musical beat, frequently organized into strophes of considerable complexity. Altogether, they are the product of the most dynamic and creative era of Israel’s literary enterprise.

Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry,

Frank Moore Cross, Jr. and David Noel Freedman, p. 1

All these elements are found in Ha'azinu. Particularly striking are descriptions used to convey an understanding of God’s relationship with Israel:
He found him in a desert region,
In an empty howling waste.
He engirded him, watched over him,
Guarded him as the pupil of His eye.
Like an eagle who rouses his nestlings,
Gliding down to his young,
So did He spread His wings and take him,
Bear him along on His pinions…
He set him atop the highlands,
To feast on the yield of the earth;
He fed him honey from the crag,
And oil from the flinty rock… (Deuteronomy 32:10-11, 13)

Certainly the description of God found at the beginning of the poem is one that resonates with us both for its strength and familiarity: The Rock! — His deeds are perfect,/Yea, all His ways are just… (Deuteronomy 32:4). The symbol of God as a rock, with all the power and stability that it denotes, is found numerous times in Ha'azinu. (This was the subject of last year's study on the parashah.)

This image works well most of the time, such as during the High Holy Days that have just ended; but now, as we approach Sukkot, another image comes to our awareness, that of the pliable sukkah that denotes God's protective covering spread over us. Sukkot is the holiday of redemption and when that time arrives, God's sukkah of peace will encompass all humanity. Why is this time always at a future date? What's preventing it from happening now?

Answer: Rocks. We'll get to that in a moment.

One of the beauties of poetry is how it can make you see things in a new light. Such is the case with the image of the rock as presented by the Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch:

Even rocks crack, I'm telling you,
and not on account of age.
For years they lie on their backs
in the heat and the cold,
so many years,
it almost creates the illusion of calm.
They don't move, so the cracks stay hidden.
A kind of pride…

Pride, Dahlia Ravikovitch, translated by Chana and Ariel Bloch

The God described so vividly in Ha'azinu is a strong, steadfastness, and protective partner. This is the God we face on the High Holy Days. The God we encounter on Sukkot still bears these traits but exposes the gentle suppleness seen in both the sukkah and the lulav. It is a flexibility encouraging us to take a step, make a move, to bend.

We are the ones exhibiting the rock-like stubbornness so eloquently described by Ravikovitch. Yom Kippur may be over but the opportunity to make changes in our relationships still exists. The month of Tishrei is a journey beginning with forgiveness, proceeding towards reconciliation, and leading towards reunification as the season draws to a close.

…Years pass over them as they wait.
Whoever is going to shatter them
hasn't come yet.
And so the moss flourishes, the seaweed
whips around,
the sea bursts forth and rolls back --
and still they seem motionless.
Till a little seal comes to rub up against the rocks,
comes and goes.
And suddenly the rock has an open wound.
I told you, when rocks crack, it comes as a surprise.
All the more so, people.

Pride, Dahlia Ravikovitch , translated by Chana and Ariel Bloch

No need to crack, just bend. We have until Simchat Torah.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Michal Shekel