TorahParsha

Save the World

for Ha'Azinu 

 

i

The people of Babel fear they will scatter across the world.

So they build a tower to Heaven.

They build this tower in a valley, extending the valley to the sky: they reshape the earth.

But God disbands them.

 

ii

Before Moses dies,

God shares His lesson of how, if the people wish to stay on the Land,

they must listen to God.

 

God opens His lesson

calling Heaven and Earth to bear witness,

speaking like storms upon the vegetation.

 

God does not speak of a disembodied technological landscape.

He speaks of nature and history and our lives

and the religious lives we build

as all one world.

 

iii

In technology we hope to save ourselves

from the world we are given,

from the world God gives us.

But technology will not hold our world together.

 

The responsibility we take

toward God’s world

will hold our world together.

 

___

Shabbat Shalom,

Abe

Why God comes in poetry

for Parshat Haazinu
 

 

i

God creates the Heavens and the Earth

and sees the desolatation of the universe

and looks into infinite darkness

and utters: Let there be light.

 

ii

Before Moses dies

God gives him a poem

to share with the people.

*

The poem calls Heaven and Earth

to bear witness to God’s words.

The poem speaks of how God took Israel

from a desolate land

and it speaks of God’s battle against wickedness

throughout time.

 

iii

This poem that Moses shares

follows the nature of poems,

encapsulating the vastness of everything

into the smallness of life.

A desolate universe

becomes a desolate people.

The Heaven and Earth that hear God speak

against the Cosmic Darkness

become the Heaven and Earth that hear Moses speak

against wickedness—

against the darkness that people make.

 

iv

Now consider how the Rabbis call the Torah a poem.

Of course this is so:

it is the writing through which all there is

enters our lives

and the writing through which our small lives

encompass all that there is.

 

v

Then to accept Torah

is to accept the responsibilty of poetry:

the responsibility of holding up a whole universe

within a life.

 

___

Shabbat Shalom,

Abe

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