The greater part of the Torah reading of Haazinu consists of a 70-line “song” delivered by Moses to the people of Israel on the last day of his earthly life. The song calls heaven and earth as witnesses that Israel has been warned so that when punishment comes it should not be a surprise. The Parsha concludes with God’s instruction to Moses to ascend the summit of Mount Nebo, from which he will behold the Promised Land before dying on the mountain. “For you shall see the land opposite you; but you shall not go there, into the land which I give to the children of Israel.”
Let’s read the first few verses of the parsha:
Deu 32:1 “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak, and let the earth hear the words of my mouth.
Deu 32:2 May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like gentle rain upon the tender grass, and like showers upon the herb.
Deu 32:3 For I will proclaim the name of the LORD; ascribe greatness to our God!
Deu 32:4 “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.
The following is based on an article by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
In the glorious song with which Moses addresses the congregation, he invites the people to think of the Torah—their covenant with God—as if it were like the rain that waters the ground so that it brings forth its produce.
God’s word is like rain in a dry land. It brings life. It makes things grow. There is much we can do of our own accord: we can plow the earth and plant the seeds. But in the end, our success depends on something beyond our control. If no rain falls, there will be no harvest, whatever preparations we make. So it is with Israel and so it is with us. We must never be tempted into the arrogance of saying: “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.”
The sages, however, sensed something more in the analogy. This is how Sifrei puts it:
Let my teaching fall like rain: Just as the rain is one thing, yet it falls on trees, enabling each to produce tasty fruit according to the kind of tree it is—the vine in its way, the olive tree in its way and the date palm in its way—so the Torah is one, yet its words yield Scripture, Mishnah, laws and lore. Just as showers fall upon plants and make them grow, some green, some red, some black, some white, so the words of Torah produce teachers, worthy individuals, sages, the righteous and the pious.
There is only one Torah, yet it has multiple effects. It gives rise to different kinds of teaching, different sorts of virtue. Torah is sometimes seen by its critics as overly prescriptive, as if it sought to make everyone the same. The midrash argues otherwise. The Torah is compared to rain precisely to emphasize that its most important effect is to make each of us grow into what we can become. We are not all the same, nor does Torah seek uniformity. As a famous mishnah puts it:
When a human being makes many coins from the same mint, they are all the same. God makes everyone in the same image—His image—yet none is the same as another.
The rabbis taught: If one sees a crowd of Israelites, one says: ‘Blessed be He who discerns secrets’—because the mind of each is different from that of another, just as the face of each is different from that of another.
We would have expected a blessing over a crowd to emphasize its size, its mass: human beings in their collectivity. A crowd is a group large enough for the individuality of the faces to be lost. Yet the blessing stresses the opposite—that each member of a crowd is still an individual with distinctive thoughts, hopes, fears and aspirations.
In short, this emphasizes the other side of the maxim E pluribus unum (“Out of the many, one”). It says: “Out of the One (Torah), many.”
The miracle of creation is that unity in heaven produces diversity on earth. Torah is the rain that feeds this diversity, allowing each of us to become what only we can be.
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