Bearing Witness: Language and Mortality Parshat Haazinu/Shabbat Shuva Romemu/Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses September 26th, 2020/8 Tishri 5781

(2) Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, For you have fallen because of your sin........(5) I will heal their affliction, Generously will I take them back in love; For My anger has turned away from them. (6) I will be to Israel like dew; He shall blossom like the lily, He shall strike root like a Lebanon tree.

(10) But Moses said to the LORD, “Please, O Lord, I have never been a man of words, either in times past or now that You have spoken to Your servant; I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” (11) And the LORD said to him, “Who gives man speech? Who makes him dumb or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD? (12) Now go, and I will be with you as you speak and will instruct you what to say.”

(1) Give ear, O heavens, let me speak;

Let the earth hear the words of my mouth! (2) May my discourse come down as the rain,

My speech distill as the dew,

Like showers on young growth,

Like droplets on the grass.

(3) For the name of the LORD I proclaim; Give glory to our God!

(4) The Rock!—His deeds are perfect,

Yea, all His ways are just;

A faithful God, never false,

True and upright is He.

(5) Children unworthy of Him—

That crooked, perverse generation—

Their baseness has played Him false. (6) Do you thus requite the LORD,

O dull and witless people?

Is not He the Father who created you, Fashioned you and made you endure!

(7) Remember the days of old, Consider the years of ages past;

Ask your father, he will inform you,

Your elders, they will tell you:

(13) Shout, O heavens, and rejoice, O earth! Break into shouting, O hills! For the LORD has comforted His people, And has taken back His afflicted ones in love.

(1) האזינו השמים HEAR YE HEAVENS that I warn Israel, and be ye witnesses to this matter; for so I have told them that ye will be witnesses (cf. Rashi on Deuteronomy 31:28). Similar is the meaning of ותשמע הארץ (i.e. the verb has the force of an imperative: AND LET THE EARTH HEAR). And why did He call heaven and earth as witnesses against them? Moses thought: “I am a being of flesh and blood (mortal); tomorrow I shall be dead. If the Israelites will once say, ‘We have never accepted the covenant’, who can come and refute them?” Therefore he called heaven and earth as witnesses against them — witnesses that endure forever (Sifrei Devarim 306:15). And a further reason was that if they should act worthily, the witnesses might come and give them their reward: the vine might yield its fruit, the ground give its increase, the heaven bestow its dew; while if they should act sinfully, the hand of the witnesses might first be against them (Rashi uses a phrase similar to that used of human witnesses; cf. e.g. Deuteronomy 13:10): “and He will restrain the heaven, that there be no rain, and the earth will not give its increase; and you shall perish quickly” (Deuteronomy 11:17) — through the attacks of other nations (Tanchuma 5:10:1).

(44) Moses came, together with Hosea son of Nun, and recited all the words of this poem in the hearing of the people. (45) And when Moses finished reciting all these words to all Israel, (46) he said to them: Take to heart all the words with which I have warned you this day. Enjoin them upon your children, that they may observe faithfully all the terms of this Teaching. (47) For this is not a trifling thing for you: it is your very life; through it you shall long endure on the land that you are to possess upon crossing the Jordan. (48) That very day the LORD spoke to Moses: (49) Ascend these heights of Abarim to Mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab facing Jericho, and view the land of Canaan, which I am giving the Israelites as their holding. (50) You shall die on the mountain that you are about to ascend, and shall be gathered to your kin, as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his kin; (51) for you both broke faith with Me among the Israelite people, at the waters of Meribath-kadesh in the wilderness of Zin, by failing to uphold My sanctity among the Israelite people. (52) You may view the land from a distance, but you shall not enter it—the land that I am giving to the Israelite people.

(1) על אשר מעלתם בי BECAUSE YE TRESPASSED AGAINST ME — i.e., because you made the people to trespass against Me. (2) על אשר לא קדשתם אותי BECAUSE YE SANCTIFIED ME NOT — i.e. because you brought it about that I was not sanctified; I said to you, ‘Speak to the rock!” They, however, smote it and had therefore to smite it twice. Had they, however, spoken to it, and it had given forth its water without being smitten, the Name of the Heaven would have been sanctified; for the Israelites would have said, “How is it with the rock which is subject neither to reward nor to punishment, for when it acts meritoriously it receives no reward and when it sins it is not punished? It fulfils so obediently the command of its Creator! — how much the more should we do so!”