Tikva Blaukopf-Singing out water from the rock (Haazinu)

“Write this song for yourselves and teach it to the Children of Israel — put it in your mouths…the mouths of your descendants will not forget it” (Deut. 31.19, 21).

This command to learn Haazinu off by heart lies heavy on my tongue yet the numbers of my Rosh Hashanahs pile up and, although year by year I commit a few more verses to memory, I am a sieve that loses more than it holds. The few nuggets that don’t slither out suffice for a haiku, a limerick, a brief ballad. Not what Haazinu deserves; Haazinu as poetic art is an ode to God, to our and Moses’ relationship with God and to the magnificence of Torah.

Testimonial to God’s power, testimony to the punishment awaiting if we sin, Haazinu is a meta-poetic perspective on the words of the Torah. It contains Moses’ lyrical last words as a leader, his verbal injunction to follow the written words of the Torah (Deut. 31.24, 30). The words form a strange “future perfect” retrospective of “you will have disobeyed me and this will have been your punishment.”

Read the full article on the Times of Israel