In Parashat Haazinu, it says in Devarim 32:44: “Moses came, together with Joshua, son of Nun and recited all the words of this poem in the hearing of the people.”
Nothing touches the soul more than a good song or poem. There are no better words to express what GOD told Moses so I’d like to read His words to you. Listen carefully and see if you hear anything in these powerful words that will elucidate what the world is experiencing today. Keep in mind that Israel represents humanity before the Creator.
“Listen well to my words from the heights of heaven to the lowest places on earth. In the same way that dew freely rises from the ground to water the youngest of plants, may my words freely bring living water to your souls. For I cry out the name of YHVH and attribute greatness to our GOD. He is the ROCK and His works are perfect, without guile since all His ways are justice. He is a faithful GOD with no injustice in Him. He is just and straight. His children, however, have become corrupt; a morally stained, twisted and perverse generation. How will GOD deal with them, a people who have lost all common sense and wisdom? Isn’t He the Father who created you, who fashioned and established you?
Remember the days of old and consider the years of ages past. Ask your parents and the elderly who will tell you that Elyon, the Most High GOD, apportioned the earth and set up the borders of every nation in accordance with Israel’s numbers. The portion for YHVH is His people; GOD’s own possession is Jacob.
He formed them in the desert, in a howling wasteland; GOD made sure their clothes and sandals lasted forty years and guarded them as the apple of HIS eye. Like the eagle that stirs up her nest and hovers over her young, so did GOD spread out His wings and carried them. GOD alone guided them without any foreign god. He flew them to the heights of the earth to feast on the produce of the field and nursed them with honey from the rocks and oil from the flinty rock, with butter and milk from the choicest lambs, with rams of Bashan, male goats and the finest of wheat, and where they drank wine from blood-red grapes.
Then Yeshurun grew fat and kicked; you prospered and became thick and gross. They forsook the GOD who made them and spurned the Rock of their support. They enraged GOD with foreign objects and vexed Him with abominations. They sacrificed to the Sedim, to false gods that they had not known; new gods who were the latest fad, which your fathers did not recognize. You neglected and forgot the ROCK who gave birth to you.
YHVH saw and was vexed because His sons and daughters spurned Him. GOD said: I will hide My face from them and let’s see how they end up because they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful. They have roused Me to jealousy with what are non-gods, provoked me with their vanities, so I will anger them with a non-people and irritate them with a foolish nation.
For a fire has flared in My wrath and burned to the bottom of Sheol; it has consumed the earth and its produce and set ablaze the foundations of the mountains. I will sweep misfortunes on them and deplete My arrows on them. The wasting famine, ravaging plague, deadly pestilence, and the teeth of beasts will I let loose upon them, with venomous crawling things of the dust. The sword shall deal death outdoors as shall the terror indoors to young man and virgin alike, the nursing baby as well as the aged. I thought that I would reduce them to nothing, make their memory cease from among mankind, were it not that I dreaded the taunts of the adversaries and their enemies who might misjudge and say, “Our own hand has prevailed; None of this was fashioned by יהוה!
For they are a nation void of counsel, lacking in all discernment. If they were wise, they would understand this, gain insight into their future: “How could one chase a thousand, or two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had given them over and יהוה had delivered them up?” For their rock is not like our Rock in our enemies’ own judgment. For their vine is from Sodom, from the vineyards of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of gall; their clusters are bitter. Their wine is the venom of serpents, the cruel poison of vipers.
I have it all put away, sealed up in My storehouses. “Vengeance is Mine” and recompense at the time when their foot shall slip. Their day of calamity is near, and the things that are to come upon them make haste.
For the Eternal will vindicate GOD’s people and avenge His servants when He sees that their might is goneand neither slave nor free remains. It will be said: ‘Where are their gods, the rock in whom they sought refuge, who ate the fat of their offerings and drank their wine offering? Let them rise up and help you and let them shield you!’
See, now, that I, I am He; there is no god with Me. I put to death and I make alive; I have wounded and I heal; no one can deliver from My hand. For I lift up My hand to heaven and say: ‘As I live forever, when I sharpen My glittering sword and My hand takes hold of judgment, I will wreak vengeance on My foes; I will deal with those who hate Me. I will make My arrows drunk with blood and My sword shall devour flesh with the blood of the slain and the captives, from the long-haired chiefs of my enemy.’ O nations, sing aloud of God’s people! For He will avenge the blood of His servants, wreak vengeance on His foes, and cleanse the land for His people.”
Did you recognize the pattern of how God acts with His people? He begins by reminding us of Who He is and who we are. He always refers us back to the story of the exodus and our forty years in the desert when we had to fully depend upon Him. He set down the guidelines for a good relationship with Him and warned us, in detail, of what would happen when we stray from His protective covering.
Yeshurun, another name for Israel, means the upright one, from the Hebrew word yashar. But Yeshurun grew fat and became thick and gross. He warns us about what will happen when we become prosperous and forget Him. The issue is not about becoming prosperous; it is about forgetting Him. GOD doesn’t beat around the bush or try to assuage our delicate sensitivities. Thick has the connotation of being slow of thought and behavior and kicking reminds us of a stubborn child who kicks when he doesn’t want to do what he’s told. God is reminding us that we turn our backs on Him and we constantly refuse to trust the Rock who never turns His back on us.
God is a loving father who is more interested in protecting His children from evil than in being accepted by us so He allows us to reap the consequences of our disobedience. Then once we’ve suffered enough, and all our might is spent, He steps in and then He wreaks havoc upon our enemies saying, “Vengeance is mine.” It sounds like a very strange process but if we look at the history of the Jewish people in every land we lived, this is the exact formula. When will we ever learn?
We may question why we are blamed for everything bad that happens on this earth, especially when we are a people so small in number in comparison with every other nation. This shows us just how important we are in the sight of GOD…not because of who WE are but because of who He is, yet we keep insisting that it is our strength and our might that will win the war that is being waged against us once again.
If we look at pictures or videos of the Sinai desert, it is astounding that anyone could survive even one week there, let alone forty years. It took a supernatural intervention for that to be possible. If we look at the map of Israel today, we are a speck in the midst of our enemies. It is taking a supernatural intervention to keep the Israelis alive while hundreds of rockets are being launched at us from every direction.
Verses 16 -18 speak to my soul because I had turned to so many other gods in my early years. When it says they sacrificed to Sedim, translated as demons, this could refer to the Assyrian winged bull god, Sedu. All our prophets warned us of the consequences of playing the harlot with foreign gods, with other nations, or the latest ideologies or fads. We are a naturally curious and spiritual people but GOD is reminding us not to turn our backs on the only GOD who can cover us with HIS protective wings. No statue of a winged bull can do this.
It is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t read the Torah about what has happened to our people over the ages and it is so easy to blame GOD and the other nations, but the Torah is so clear. It lays the blame where it belongs and we have to admit our part in it. Now before Yom Kippur, this is the perfect time for that. Who are the unfaithful children? We may think we are a good, religious and holy people but why does the Torah tell us the opposite? Every religion, including Rabbinic Judaism, has turned its back on the Written Torah telling us that we need to rely upon their commentaries and the interpretations of their esteemed sages. Why? It’s complicated perhaps because man doesn’t want to hear GOD’s simple truth. We prefer our truth.
GOD separated the people Israel from the nations beginning with Abraham, choosing them for a special purpose… to be the example of what it is like to be protected by a loving father and to be given guidelines that would bring life and not death. Adam and Eve showed us the consequences of breaking the one guideline that they were given; now we are living the consequences of breaking the Ten given to us at Mount Sinai. We all need to turn back to them. Being chosen has nothing to do with the value of a person or a nation. We are all equal in GOD’s eyes. He created us all. Because of our disobedience to our calling, in Haazinu GOD threatens to replace us with a people who are considered to be fools. Foolish denotes a lack of wisdom, wisdom that can only come from GOD and His Torah.
At the end of this portion, before ascending Mount Nebo to die, Moses made this farewell plea to his people: “Take to heart all the words with which I have warned you this day. Order your children to faithfully observe all the terms of this Torah. For this is not a trivial thing for you: it is your very life; through it, you shall long endure on the land that you are to possess upon crossing the Jordan.”
It is the same today as it was when Moses spoke these words to our people. Today is Shabbat Shuva, the Sabbath of returning to Him. As we enter His Moedim, the season of GOD’s Appointed Times, let us search our hearts; let us do true teshuva and let us return to the Mighty GOD of Israel who gave birth to us, let us turn to His Torah and learn how to apply it to our lives. Then we can watch what the LORD of the armies will do to protect us from our enemies!
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach
Peggy Pardo