Haazinu - 2022/5783 - The Sounds of Silence

 And in the naked light, I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never shared

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence (From Simon & Garfunkel)

 

As the Torah approaches the end of the story, now coming full circle from the creation of the world, a new creation is about to happen – the creation of a nation returning to and living on its ancestral land.

And God has told Moses the future – the people will enter the Land and stray from the covenant, but a song will remind them of God, the covenant, Exodus, Torah, creation and everything else God wants them to remember. 

The song is this week’s Torah portion and it begins, like the Shema, asking for attention…

Hear, O, heavens, and I’ll speak, Listen, Earth, to the words of My Mouth

But will the people hear and listen?

Or will they hear without listening, like in Simon & Garfunkel’s song?

 

Moses teaches the song to the people.

But as Menachem Chizkuni explains, the song calls heaven and earth to witness, why?

“This is a direct continuation of the last verse in the previous portion, Vayelech, in which he had announced this poem/song to the people. He now calls on the eternal heaven and earth to act as witnesses to what he had to say, seeing that he, as a mortal, cannot do so anymore.”

 

Moses can only speak, he can only plant the seeds…but will the people listen, internalize, and permit the seeds to grow in their hearts? 

 

This is an apt message in these days right after Yom Kippur.  For 10 days we lived in suspended animation, between ourselves of the past year and the selves we want to shape in the New Year.

We acknowledged our wrongdoings, we chanted them together, and the teshuvah journey goes on.

But now, just like the ancient farmers who came to Jerusalem at Sukkot to pray for a successful crop in the new year of planting, planting that begins right after Sukkot, we pray the seeds of teshuvah we planted in our hearts will germinate, grow, and flourish in the new calendar year, 5783.

It’s telling that the next verses of the song speak about God’s words acting like rain and dew, floating down and nourishing the soil of our souls.

And with this image I wonder if Paul Simon, who wrote the song, a son of Hungarian Jewish parents, was inspired by our parsha, listen to the verse toward the end of the song:

 

Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

 

 In the song, there’s no response, only silence.  In real life though here is always a delay between our speaking and someone else hearing and responding.  Good communication skills require us to clarify and make sure we’ve heard correctly, to rephrase what we heard in our own words before we respond.

 

In a way, this skill, of clarifying, checking in to make sure we’ve heard correctly, is the story of all Jewish history after this moment, the story of our ongoing relationship to God, and of Jewish communities all over the world.  We want to keep the line open, but, there’s lots of interference on the line, and the call often gets dropped, and sometimes we get disconnected for an extended period of time.

Sukkot is our reminder of this reality.  When we go into the Sukkah on Sunday night, a structure that is fragile and exposed to nature, we’re reminded of how uncertain the journey often is.

 

With another horrific attack on a school, this time in Thailand, we are reminded, again, about the fragility of life, and with the mounting tension between Israel and Lebanon about disputed sea rights in the Mediterranean, we’re reminded about the thin line between compromise and conflict, and with reports about Russia potentially using tactical nuclear weapons, we’re reminded about how the wicked crave silence around them so they can cause harm to others and the earth without remorse.

 

In these perilous times, may our teshuvah and the song we read today, help nudge the world back toward a place of milk and honey, a place of newness and unlimited potential, a place of hope, and calming sunsets, a place where plants and people grow, evolve, and both see, hear, and listen to know the humanity in one another.