Weekly Parshah Commentary

We’re sending this week’s parshah commentary early, for readers who will be offline for Rosh Hashanah. There will be no Shabbat Reading List this Friday, in recognition of the holiday.

This week’s parshah, Haazinu, is composed almost entirely of a poem delivered by Moses. It begins with a stirring assertion of divine perfection and justice; Moses praises God for guarding the people and leading them through “the wasted howling wilderness.” But the poem quickly takes a much darker turn, rebuking the people for descending into decadence, for “forsaking the God who made them” and “despising the Rock of their salvation.” Castigating verse then follows castigating verse. Other nations visit destruction, anger, vengeance, and slaughter upon the Jewish people, whom God has “sold” and “delivered” into the hands of their enemies. Devastatingly, God claims responsibility for all of this tragedy, declaring, “See now that it is I! I am the One, and there is no god like me. I kill, and I grant life; I wound, and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand.”

So unrelenting is our parshah’s admonishment that its reading necessitates an exception to an otherwise unbroken custom: Throughout the year, Maimonides writes, “whoever is called to read from the Torah begins [the section] with a positive matter and concludes with a positive matter.” But, he continues, in the case of Haazinu, this is not so, since “these are verses of rebuke, intended to motivate the people toward repentance [teshuvah].” As later authorities note, this exception is especially apt given that this parshah is always read in the weeks surrounding Yom Kippur—most often, as it is this year, on the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

The poem concludes as abruptly as it begins, with a return to the Torah’s narrative mode: “And Moses came and spoke all the words of this song in the ears of the people.” But perhaps more jarring than this sudden genre shift is the fact that the text itself refers to the poem as a song (“shirah”)—a neutral or even positive term—rather than as a lament (“kinah”). Indeed, according to the Talmud, it was actually sung by the Levite musicians as part of the Shabbat liturgy in the Jerusalem Temple, suggesting that this grim dirge harbors a message that is ultimately joyous.

Where, then, is this joy to be found? The Lubavitcher Rebbe suggests that it lies in Haazinu’s paradoxical framing of all tragedy as divine, and therefore somehow part of something meaningful. “The deeds of the Rock are perfect,” we read at the outset of the poem, “for all His ways are justice, a steadfast God without wrong, true and equitable is He.” At this moment of catastrophic violence and terror, this might seem cold comfort. Indeed, joy may appear unattainable or even irresponsible. But it is precisely at such times that we must take up this verse’s invitation to shun nihilism—to trust in the enduring promise of redemption, and thereby keep the flame of joy alive amid the darkness.

The personal work of teshuvah depends on a similar tension. To reorient toward virtue depends first and foremost on a bitter recognition of our own failings. Yet, the Hasidic masters warned, acknowledging this pain should not lead us to self-flagellation, nor to despair, but rather to a joyful return to God. The complexity of teshuvah, so aptly reflected in Haazinu’s poem, is also eloquently expressed in a powerful Zoharic aphorism: “Weeping is affixed in one side of my heart, and joy is affixed in the other.”

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.