HAAZINU
Haazinu, Listen (from the same root as ear) is the next to last parsha of the Five Books of Moses. It consists of only one Chapter (32), 52 verses in all and has two parts. The first part (32:1:43) is a poem/song that Moses speaks to the people. Recall that in the last parsha he said that he would give them a poem/song in order to remember the key messages. The second part of the parsha has Moses telling the people to remember what he said (32:46) and then being commanded by YHVH to ascend Mount Nebo where he can see Canaan and where he will die.
So what are the people supposed to remember as Moses kind of summing up the teachings of YHVH?
YHVH is the most powerful God. All others are false Gods. He has chosen Israel and they will prosper to the extent that they follow him, and they will suffer to the extent that they deviate from all that has been laid in front of them. He is the great warrior God who can lay military waste to all the enemies of Israel.
This is a nice summary of the meta message beyond all the details in Deuteronomy.
There are no laws or any reference to laws in the presentation. I would have expected something like “remember the ten commandments and follow them to be holy.” After all Moses has spent a ton of time delivering and implementing laws. Then there is the lack of any explicit references to Egypt or the revelation at Sinai. Nothing like, “remember, I am the one who saw your oppression in Egypt, visited plagues upon Pharoah, liberated you from slavery, drowned Pharoah’s army and then showed myself to your parents at Mount Sinai in all my glory.” What could be more persuasive than the revelation, which the population would have heard about from their parents.
I want to discuss the following four themes:
The appeal to the more than human world as metaphor or literal?
Wilderness as birthplace
Cyclicality
The spiritual tension between being settled and wilderness
The parsha begins with an appeal for the more than human world to listen to Moses. “Listen skies so I may speak and let the earth hear what my mouth says.” (32:1). Then it switches to a plea that the people receive his teaching like the more than human world receives life giving rain. “Let my teaching come down like showers, let my saying emerge like dew, like raindrops on plants and like rainfalls on herbs.” (32:2). It is tempting to treat these as mere metaphors, metaphors that have weakened over time. They have weakened because we feel (wrongly), less and less dependent upon rain from the sky and we are more and more disconnected from the more than human world.
But what if this weren’t a metaphor at all? What if we see Moses as asking for the participation of the more than human world in conveying his final teaching? Invoking the skies and the earth, I would suggest, is a way to cover the entirety of the more than human world. If this is a metaphor, then Moses is simply asking his human audience to listen attentively in a poetic way. But if it is not just a metaphor, then he is including the more than human world as part of his audience and he is asking his human audience to let the words literally penetrate to their very cells, as rain does in plants.
A literal reading of this opening verse implies that what Moses has to say is for the whole world, not just the human world. It implies that the world can listen—or not, just as we humans can listen—or not. It implies a great continuity between humans, skies, earth, rain, dew, plants. It’s easy for us to read these verses metaphorically; that’s what we have been trained to do because we tend not to believe that the more than human world can have any agency.
What difference would this make for your life if you read these verses literally? Have you ever listened to a teaching like a thirsty plant listens to the drip, drip of life giving dew covering its leaves? Here’s a practice: go outside somewhere away from the human world and just listen for five minutes. Where did you give ear (where was your attention drawn?)
The parsha portrays wilderness as the birthplace of the people. “YHVH found it [the people] in a wilderness land and in a formless place, a howling desert. He surrounded it. He attended to it, he guarded it like the pupil of his eye. As an eagle stirs its nest, hovers over its young, spreads its wings, takes it, lifts it on its pinion, YHVH alone led it, and no foreign God with him. (32:10-12).
We might interpret these verses as YHVH comes first. This fits our sense of a creator God who creates everything. As inheritors of monotheism, we think the divine is preexisting and everywhere.
But the text says YHVH found the people. So that sure sounds like there was an existing people who came to adopt YHVH as their God, maybe based on some combination of an ancient covenant with the patriarchs of Genesis and the miracles of Exodus. We see in the history of religions that nations under crisis are sometimes willing to have different Gods in the pantheon take steps forward and become primary Gods. We even see this in Babylonian mythology where Marduk takes over from Enlil after he kills Tiamat (a female Goddess who gives birth to the other Gods).
There’s also a possible view that there’s a sort of cocreative process here where the people create YHVH as the sole God to worship through their embracing of him, while this adoption of YHVH forms a group of incoherent tribes into a coherent nation, Israel.
Note that the traditional monotheistic belief of God preceding all is very different than our pagan ancestors who believed that deities were limited. Our ancestors believed deities were limited geographically, limited in terms of their power, limited in terms of relationships. The people in what we call South America had never heard of YHVH and would have regarded praying to him as just weird, as we saw from their initial response to the idea of praying to Jesus in the advent of European colonialism.
Now if we say that the divine is not tethered to a particular people, I wonder if that compels us towards arguing that the divine is some kind of impersonal force—and that for sure is different than what our ancient ancestors who wrote the Bible believed. (though not so different from what Maimonides tended to believe, at least as I read him).
The formlessness of wilderness is decisive in creating new selves. Transformation demands, in a certain sense, formlessness. We have to give up who we are in order to let something radically new emerge within us. Sometimes what is radically new hovers around us, waiting for us to open ourselves to it so that it can land and become part of us. It is my experience that if I want to be reborn to something new, going out to the wilderness makes it much easier than sitting within settled civilization.
How do you understand which comes first, the people or the divine? How do you understand the idea that the relationship is a co-creation? How do you think about the possibility of wilderness being the birthplace/source of radical transformation?
The relationship between linear time in our lives and cyclicality is one of the great mysteries. On one hand, we live our lives in a linear way from birth to death; those of us who are elders will never be children or adolescents again, for instance, and at a certain point we have, to quote Bill Clinton, more yesterdays than tomorrows. That is inevitable and inescapable. On the other hand, cyclicality is equally a defining feature of our lives. The seasons turn, the trees whose leaves rain down to the ground in the fall will grow new leaves come Spring.
Haazinu is the second to last parsha of the five books. It looks like it might simply be the end of a part of the story. It is the death of Moses and the end of the wandering of the people who will enter the land in the next book of the Hebrew Bible, the book of Joshua. And yet, there are two hints of the cyclicality which lies deep in our bones and is the experience of all beings.
Recall 32:10-12 which talks about YHVH finding the people. “YHVH found it [the people] in a wilderness land and in a formless place, a howling desert. He surrounded it. He attended to it, he guarded it like the pupil of his eye. As an eagle stirs its nest, hovers over its young, spreads its wings, takes it, lifts it on its pinion, YHVH alone led it, and no foreign God with him. (32:10-12). Both the words “formless” and hover” appear in Genesis 1:2 and then not again until these verses. “When the earth had been shapeless and formless, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and God’s spirt was hovering on the face of the water” (Genesis 1:2). Why does our text bring us back to the first parsha of the 5 books? This is a deliberate connection. This linguistic connection gives a sense of completing what had been started in the very first parsha.
And yet it is not just back to the beginning of Genesis, it is forward to Genesis. After all, in just a few short weeks we will read the parsha that includes this very verse and these very words talking of a formless place and the divine hovering over that formless place.
I don’t think we are being offered any answers about the mysteries of linear and cyclical time. But we are being invited to dwell with this mystery and absorb it into our bodies as we end one circle around the 5 books and begin another.
A comparable mystery, at least to my way of thinking, is the mystery of death. I look at the trees that I can see from the bench I sit at each morning. There are living trees that grow leaves, capture sunlight, bring up nutrients from the earth and send them back down. There are standing skags that can’t do that because they have no leaves, because they are “dead.” And yet they support more life of other beings than the “living” trees. Then there are the “dead” trees laying on the ground that support even more life and some of which might become blessed to be nurse logs from which new living trees sprout. What is life and what is death? This doesn’t seem to clear to me sometimes.
What are some personally meaningful examples of linear time? What are some personally meaningful examples of cyclical time?
“And Jeshurun [Israelites] got fat and kicked—you got fat, you got wide, you got stuffed and it left God who made it and took its saving rock for granted.” (32:15). The divine blessed Israel with rain in season and everyone prospered and Israel got fat and happy and forgot about the divine. That’s the message.
I think it is a human thing to get fat and happy as chronological adults. Adolescents tend not to be fat and happy because they don’t feel settled, and that’s developmentally appropriate. But adults are supposed to do the work of the society, the day to day activities that raise the kids, take care of the elders and let the adolescents have their years of angst and seeking. And we adults can only do the work of society if we are not caught up in adolescent wandering; if we are, in a word, settled.
Does getting settled, fat and happy necessarily mean turning your back on the divine? In our discussions of this question, people said they feel most settled when they feel connected, so the exact opposite of the text’s complaint about our ancestors. Folks argued that when they lost the connection with the divine, that’s when they became unsettled. I have a lot of sympathy for this argument.
What about when society is unjust, as our society is. Feeling settled and being able to focus on doing the work of society is a blessing, but how much of our comfort is based on living in denial about the roots of our material comfort and the cost of our prosperity to most of the rest of the world, both human and more than human. Does the fact that our society kills species every day without a thought mean that we shouldn’t be happy and settled?
Our vision should be to create a world in which the adults are settled and happily do the work needed for the society to prosper. A calf can run this way and that, kicking up their legs every hour, until they fall fast asleep, exhausted. A momma cow has to find food and water for her and her baby, has to follow the herd to make sure that she and her baby are safe. The challenge for us in the modern world is to be settled, remember the divine and seek justice. Not easy.
For me, I think we can only be both settled and connected to the divine if we have gone into the wilderness and become crystal clear on our unique purpose in the world. Then we need to successfully embody and manifest this unique purpose. This usually entails refresher periods in the wilderness. Embodying and manifesting our true purpose is not easy.
Settled life is the real testing ground. If we cannot successfully bring our transformation from the wilderness to the village, then our transformative experiences are a great high, but ultimately irrelevant. Wilderness and settled life need to be mutually reinforcing.
Moses, interestingly, is the exact non example of how to be settled and remember the divine because he never settles. He was never at home in Egypt, never at home in Midian, and never reaches the Promised Land. He lives his life in the wilderness, an eternal vision quest, never reaching home.
How do you think about the relationship between being settled and giving ear to the divine? What’s your experience of the balance between settled life and the wilderness?
QUESTIONS
What difference would this make for your life if you read these verses literally? Have you ever listened to a teaching like a thirsty plant listens to the drip, drip of life giving dew covering its leaves? Here’s a practice: go outside somewhere away from the human world and just listen for five minutes. Where did you give ear (where was your attention drawn?)
How do you understand which comes first, the people or the divine? How do you understand the idea that the relationship is a co-creation? How do you think about the possibility of wilderness being the birthplace/source of radical transformation?
What are some personally meaningful examples of linear time? What are some personally meaningful examples of cyclical time?
How do you think about the relationship between being settled and giving ear to the divine? What’s your experience of the balance between settled life and the wilderness?
