By Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D.
EL CAJON, California — This week’s parasha begins with “Listen, O heavens, and I will speak! And let the earth hear the words of my mouth!”
הַאֲזִינוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם וַאֲדַבֵּרָה וְתִשְׁמַע הָאָרֶץ אִמְרֵי־פִי
The parsha immediately draws our attention to two key words, two essential capabilities, to key gifts, hearing and listening. To see that though, depends on two other facilities, vision and sight. Let’s understand this in the service of our striving to live a more fully engaged life, with more openness and receptivity to the world around us.
We heard the Shofar, we say the Shema “Hear O Israel…,” we hear a d’var Torah, but do we listen?
You see, hearing is a passive sensory experience, simply perceiving noise, vibrations, jangle, echo. Listening is an active choice of paying attention, assigning meaning to what we hear, necessary to promote and advance our learning. Ha’azinu differs from sh’ma, the verb familiar from the Shema we say daily. Where sh’ma means to hear, ha’azinu points to a more empowered listening, an experience that requires intentional effort and purposeful persistence.
Seeing, Rashi tells us, similarly, can be understood to involve passive sight, seeing what is in front of us, while vision is the gift of seeing possibility, with deep understanding, clarity and empathy.
Moshe offers us a very moving, inspirational, and quite dramatic moment in history in his song, his last gift to us, to help us grasp the core values he wants us to understand, to live by and to continue to pass along to future generations. Ha’azinu is not just Moshe’s song. It’s yours.
When we listen to the depth of this song, we learn what the Ramban reveals to us – the song is really about our never-ending relationship with Hashem. Despite all our suffering throughout history, despite what may seem like his rejection of us due to our rejection of Him, nevertheless He loves us deeply and our relationship with Him endures. He does what it takes to continually remind us of our relationship with Him. Ha’azinu is a song of a relationship that continues forever.
Moshe appears to offer several warnings to us but the one that captured my attention is about prosperity and privilege. Both carry trials, and both rest fully on the way we think about each one. Moshe warns us about the spiritual risks of comfort and success. Often, it is not pain but prosperity that dulls our sensitivity. When we’re comfortable, we stop listening. When we’re self-sufficient, we stop looking upward. But spiritual maturity means cultivating gratitude with humility, and success with responsibility.
Perhaps you are familiar with the mashal of the two students who tell their Rabbi that they have a desire to strengthen their ability to live with hardship. Their teacher sends them to a man who has lived with adversity his entire life – orphaned, homeless, nearly no food for nourishment. The boys never saw such poverty, and shaken, they asked the man how he could possibly live with such misfortune and suffering. The man answered simply, “I don’t know. Nothing bad ever happened to me.”
Moshe teaches us a critical lesson which we can apply in our lives to begin anew this year. When we find a mindset of balance, when we remain steady and resilient amongst the many different blessings of all types we’ll face in the coming year, we’re off to a healthy new beginning. We see in Ha’azinu that the most difficult challenges we face may be the best source of growth. Setbacks are only setups for magnificent comebacks, the parsha appears to be suggesting.
Ha’azinu has roots related to the Hebrew word, moznayim מֹאזְנָ֫יִם, or scales. How will you create equilibrium in your life this year between the blessings of challenge and ease, between the blessings of financial strain and abundance, between the blessings of shortage and surplus? How will you share your blessings? How will you see that everything that occurs happens FOR you, not TO you? That’s worth singing about.
Are we listening, deepening our relationship, can we bring our vision to see what could be when we take Moshe’s heartfelt cry to us and live by his words, or are we dulled and stultified, with a deaf ear and a closed mind, simply hearing the din of the Torah reader, merely seeing activity on the bima in our synagogue? When we hear, we engage our mind. When we listen, we engage our heart. To feel truly inspired, we need both. This is the essence of “emotional intelligence.”
Haazinu presents a striking question: who is it really speaking to? If we assume it’s directed at the generation that left Egypt, the one known for its complaints and wavering faith, we run into a problem: by the time Moses delivers this song, that generation is essentially gone. But if the message is for those born in the wilderness, raised in freedom, then the scope seems to stretch far beyond their immediate lives or actions. It is written for us. If someone truly wants to live a full, deep, and authentic Yiddishkeit, it’s not enough just to listen to the Torah with his ears and go through the motions of keeping mitzvos. He has to truly open his heart and mind, to listen deeply and understand what the Torah is really asking of him.
Nachmanides offers a compelling take. He doesn’t just see Haazinu as a rebuke, but as a sweeping prophetic vision, one that spans Jewish history from the moment the people enter the land of Israel all the way to the final redemption.
Looking closely at the language and tone of Haazinu, it feels less like a historical address and more like a message meant for all generations, for you and for me. It speaks to the entire Jewish people, not just then, but now, and always. It reminds us that the road to redemption isn’t linear or perfectly cyclical. Rather, it moves in a spiral, marked by repeated missteps and moral failures, but also by growth, kindness, vision, and ultimately, hope. We can imbue our lives with holiness, and to do so requires that we use the gifts of vision and listening, not just seeing and hearing.
As we build, decorate and dwell in our Sukkot, as we wave the arba minim, the Four Species, the Lulav and Etrog, what will we envision, what will we listen to around us that can elevate our experience? Will we grow through, or will we merely go through, the motions? Sure, words can be more precious than gold, but only if we listen to those words and only if our vision allows us to truly see gold in words.
Ha’azinu tells us there is always a song that we can sing if we will listen and use the depth of vision to see that. Long after the Shofar has stilled, we can continue to listen, not merely hear its alarm to awaken and remain visionary.
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Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D., prepares a weekly D’var Torah for Young Israel of San Diego, where he and his family are members. They are also active members of Congregation Adat Yeshurun.