Parashat Ha’Azinu Deuteronomy 32:1-52
Dear TBE Community,
One of my favorite themes of the festival of Sukkot is the focus on impermanence. Not because I like impermanent situations. I love a real, solid house, to decorate it and make it a home, to keep an address for several years, to become part of an environment, a community.
But Sukkot reminds us that life often throws impermanence at us, that we must enjoy things as long as they last, even or especially when they don’t last as long as we wish. People we love will come into our lives and leave them again, an unobstructed view of the ocean might one day be blocked by a new building, a landmark that has looked the same for centuries might one day fall to ruins. New trees grow and new friends come. A new address becomes familiar. One day there is peace and the next day there is war and then again hope for more tranquil times, and the fear of losing them again. Much as we like to create permanent, lasting situations, life IS impermanent. And yet, we can find shelter and joy in the fragile, flimsy moments, under a roof of bamboo and palm fronds, exposed, yet not too much, to the vicissitudes of nature (though granted, the California sukkahs can be much lighter than the east coast sukkahs…).
We often say that the time leading up to the High Holy Days is the time of soul searching and reflection. And that is true of course. But the days after Yom Kippur and the days of Sukkot are the days where our introspection really unfolds, where we get to digest the intensity of the Days of Awe.
Most of Parashat Ha’Azinu consists of a long poem; Moses’ finale, after his prose in the previous parsha, now as poetry.
Moses came, together with Hosea son of Nun, and recited all the words of this poem in the hearing of the people. (Deuteronomy 32:44)
In fact, Parashat Ha’Azinu famously leaves it open to interpretation whether “this poem” refers only to Moses’ most recent words, or the entire Torah, which has prompted a long and rich discussion through the millennia, from the Talmud to today.
As a nod to Moses’s poetry, for this first Shabbat after Yom Kippur, I am sharing one of my first poems inspired by Torah, after riding my bicycle one afternoon along the East River, in New York
May your Shabbat be peaceful and calm, may you continue to enjoy the Days of Awe.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Julia Knobloch
The State of Things
On the day after Yom Kippur, I ride my bike along the waterfront.
Pious men build their sukkah before sunset.
Will they invite me to be their guest?
Priests and prophets are oblivious of emptiness.
The past is with me, an unhappy house
in my old neighborhood in Buenos Aires.
Across the river, platinum flickers.
There is a difference between dream and vision.
I want to describe the moon behind olive trees,
sunflowers against a black sky.
I want to keep the light that fills my bedroom
with the memory of a vacation home.
I want to fix what is broken before I can let it go.
The rabbi said one embrace can heal the world.
No one asks for forgiveness at the waterfront.
Longshoremen dance in Amsterdam.
The factory is gone.
I hear laughter in the rain.
I don’t have the words for a poem I need to write.
Pious men smoke and squint at skinny girls.
A string puppet plays the violin.
The Argentine bard’s name was
He who comes from faraway lands to say something.
I smell my hair in the evening wind.