By Michael R. Mantell, Ph.D., in El Cajon, California
There’s a line at the beginning of Ha’Azinu that I’ve always found interesting. Moses says, “May my teaching drip like rain; may my speech flow like dew.”
Why rain? I think the answer has something to do with how we actually change.
We’re now in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, with Sukkot just ahead, so we’re spending a lot of time thinking about the past year. What went well, what didn’t, and where we might have fallen short. We hear a lot about teshuvah during these days, and sometimes I think we make teshuvah sound easier than it really is. We say we’re going to change something, and for a little while we’re very serious about it. Then life gets busy and we fall back into the same habits.
Maybe Moses’ comparison to rain gives us a different way to think about it. Rain doesn’t change the landscape all at once. It falls into the ground and gets absorbed. You may not see anything happening. But if there is a seed underneath, eventually something begins to grow.
People are a little like that. Sometimes a piece of advice stays with us for years before we really understand it. Sometimes we hear the same words repeatedly and then, for whatever reason, one year they hit us differently. Something happens in our life, and suddenly an idea we thought we understood takes on a different meaning.
The words were always there. We just weren’t ready for them. That’s why I think the soil matters as much as the rain. Yoram Dahan, in his Ness HaTorah, points out that Moses compared B’nei Yisroel to the earth and the Torah to the skies, as, he notes, “we are always receiving everything from the Torah just like the rain falls onto earth and nourishes every part of it.” We on earth are always happy to receive a blessed rain, and always happy to receive the Torah and Hashem’s blessings.
Moses spends much of Ha’Azinu reminding the Jewish people to remember. Remember where you came from. Remember what you’ve been given. Remember what happened when you lost your way. That kind of remembering isn’t easy.
It’s easy to remember the things other people did to us. It’s much harder to remember our own behavior when we weren’t at our best. The conversation where we said too much. The person we didn’t call back when we said we would. The apology we kept putting off. The time we were so convinced we were right that we couldn’t hear what somebody else was saying. Holier than thou is not holy. Those things are uncomfortable to remember. But if we don’t remember them, there’s not much chance we’ll change them.
I also think Ha’Azinu is realistic about the fact that people forget when things are going well. When we’re comfortable, we can start believing that we got here entirely on our own. We stop noticing how much we’ve received from other people. We stop paying attention.
And then something happens that wakes us up. That’s part of what makes these ten days important. We have a chance to wake up before another year gets away from us and live our purpose. Look at the first words of Ha’azinu. The gematria of the words, “Heavens and I will speak,” is 613. Moses tells us to “Give ear to the 613 Mitzvot.” This is our true purpose on earth, to elevate our soul by keeping the mitzvot.
There’s an idea from Rabbi A.L. Scheinbaum whose discussion of Ha’Azinu in his book Peninim on the Torah that I find helpful here. He uses the example of a tailor cutting a piece of cloth. If we were watching the tailor without knowing what he was making, we might look at those cuts and think he was ruining the fabric. The tailor knows what he’s making. We don’t see the whole thing. Life can feel like that sometimes.
Ha’Azinu calls the Jewish people Yeshurun, a name connected to being upright or straight, and then says, “Yeshurun grew fat and kicked.” “וַיִּשְׁמַן יְשֻׁרוּן וַיִּבְעָט” “Yeshurun grew fat and kicked…” (Devarim 32:15). There is an irony in that: even a people called “upright” can lose their way when life becomes too comfortable. Prosperity can make us forget how much we have received and forget that we are not entirely responsible for everything we have. “Yeshurun” is itself a name expressing the greatness and righteousness expected of the Jewish people. The tragedy described by Moshe is precisely that a people possessing such a lofty identity can become complacent when prosperity comes.
In other words, the danger is not poverty but prosperity without gratitude. When Yeshurun becomes “fat,” comfortable, successful and materially secure, it can begin to “kick,” meaning it may forget the very Source of its blessings and distance itself from Hashem. Success would best produce greater hakaras hatov, not independence from Him. Ha’azinu would seem to emphasize that when things go well, we can easily forget that our success is ultimately from Hashem.
Something happens and we don’t understand it. A relationship changes. Something we were counting on doesn’t work out. We have a disappointment or a loss, and we wonder what we’re supposed to make of it. Sometimes we never really get an answer. But there is another question we can ask: What am I going to do with it?
I think that’s an important part of teshuvah. We can’t control everything that happens to us. We can have some say in what we do afterward.
A difficult experience can leave us angry and closed off. It can also teach us something about ourselves. It can make us more patient with someone else. It can make us appreciate something we had taken for granted. It can show us a part of ourselves that we hadn’t been willing to see.
That doesn’t mean that everything that happens is somehow good, or that we are supposed to find a reason for every painful thing in our lives. Sometimes things hurt, and they hurt for a long time. But even then, eventually we have to ask what we’re going to do with what happened.
And that brings me back to the rain. Some things come into our lives quietly. A thought. A conversation. Something we read or hear. Other things get our attention because they hurt. Either way, something has reached us. The question is, what happens after that?
I don’t think the point of these ten days is to become a completely different person by Yom Kippur. Most of us aren’t going to do that. We know ourselves too well. Maybe the goal is to notice one thing. Maybe there’s somebody we need to call. Maybe there’s an apology we’ve been avoiding. Maybe there’s a habit we know isn’t good for us. Maybe there’s something we’ve been holding onto that we need to let go. Maybe we need to listen to someone instead of preparing our answer while they’re talking.
Whatever it is, it probably won’t change because we made a promise on one particular day. It will change because we keep coming back to it. That’s what rain does. It comes back.
And maybe that’s what we’re doing during these days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We come back. We look again at the year that passed. We listen again. We try again. We may not understand everything that happened this year. We may not understand why some things worked out and others didn’t. But we can still ask ourselves what we learned from it, what we want to carry forward, and what we want to leave behind.
Moses asks that his words, his lessons, be like rain. Maybe the question for us is whether we’re willing to let those words sink in. And then, perhaps, give them a chance to grow.
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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.