Parashat Ha'azinu
Remember Your Rock, Your Creator
Moshe poetically
reminds the Children of Israel of the importance of remembering God who created
them.
By Rabbi Avraham Fischer
The following article
is reprinted with permission from the Orthodox
Union.
The panoramic poetry of Ha'azinu embraces all of the Jewish
past, present and future. Israel is warned that sin will be punished through
the scourge of the other nations, but that Hashem will never completely abandon
His Chosen People. Rather than referring to specific incidents, the poem's use
of the imperfect tense alludes to repeated events, thus making it
supra-historic--beyond the limits of history.
The multiple layers of meaning in Ha'azinu invite a variety
of interpretations. The following is one such example (Deuteronomy 32:18):
tzur y'lad'cha teshi,
vatishkach e-l m'chol'lecha
Although the second part of the verse is the subject of some
discussion by the commentaries, a straightforward translation is possible:
. . . and you forgot G-d Who produced you.
This speaks of how the Children of Israel, unmindful that
they are indebted to Hashem for their very existence, forget Him and embrace
any of the various "new gods" that each era generates. The imagery is
reminiscent of a child who neglects his parent. Time and again, we have been
guilty of this type of ingratitude.
It is the first part of the verse that we will analyze here.
Typically, the poetry of the Tanach
(Bible) is chiastic, meaning that the two parts of the verse say essentially
the same idea in different words. A number of commentaries understand the first
part of our verse this way, as we shall see. Still, it is possible that the
first part of the verse contains a different idea.
tzur y'lad'cha:
tzur, usually
understood as "rock," is often identified with Hashem, the Rock of
existence; it would then parallel e-l
(G-d) in the second half of the verse.
The Sifrei
(Tannaitic legal commentary) and Ibn-Ezra
(12th century Spain), however, quote the verse from Isaiah 51:1,
"look to the rock from which you were quarried," there, tzur refers to the Patriarchs. According
to this interpretation, the people first ignore their noble origins, and this
leads to forgetting Hashem.
teshi
Most commentaries, starting with Rashi and Ibn-Ezra, say
that tav-shin-yud derives from the root
word noon-shin-hei, which means
"to forget" or "to release." Both the noon and the hei are weak
letters grammatically and drop out, the hei
in this case replaced by a yud.
Ibn-Ezra gives other examples of this kind of substitution: tav is the prefix for the second person
in the imperfect tense. The resultant word, t'shi,
becomes teshi.
For examples of noon-shin-hei,
we might compare Jeremiah 23:39 and Genesis 41:51, where Haketav V'hakabbalah (Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg, 1785-1865), explains
that this verb means "to loosen one's focus on an idea," which is
followed by forgetting (shin-chaf-chet,
as in vatishkach). Thus, our verse
charts a downward course, in which the people first allow themselves to be
distracted from Hashem, and then they forget Him entirely.
Hirsch does not accept Ibn-Ezra's grammatical analysis,
especially because the loss of the noon
should result in the addition of a dagesh
(dot) in the shin. Thus, he posits a
different root for teshi, shin-yud-hei, which he connects with shai, a gift of allegiance. Hirsch's
translation thus reads:
The Rock had hardly brought you into the world,
And you gave your allegiance--offering to others,
And forgot G-d while He is still forming you.
Haketav V'hakabbalah cites R. Wolf Heidenheim (1757-1832), who
agrees that the root here is shin-yud-hei.
Unlike Hirsch however, he classifies this root with others in which the shin is dominant, surrounded by other
weak letters (such as noon, yud and hei). The prevalent idea in all of
these is "to relinquish," so the reading of the first part of the
verse is parallel to the second:
The Rock Who bore you, you ignored/ and you forgot G-d Who
produced you.
A radically different approach, found in the Midrash
(Sifrei, Bamidbar Rabbah) and quoted by Rashi, is to regard the tav of teshi as part of the root, rather than the prefix for the second
person in the imperfect tense. The word would thus be based on tav-shin-shin (a word which does not
otherwise appear in Tanach), meaning "to weaken." Two possible
interpretations, which do not view the verse as structured chiastically,
follow:
1. Torah Temimah
(Baruch ben Yechiel Michel HaLevi Epstein 1860-1942) understands teshi as a noun. He reads the verse:
The Rock bore you, weak one; but you forgot G-d Who produced
you.
2. Rashi, quoting the midrashim above, explains that the
Children of Israel weakened the power of Hashem by forgetting Him: whenever
Hashem begins to benefit them, they anger Him through their infidelities,
"weakening" His power. The Sifrei cites two examples of Israel's
fickleness: After the splitting of the Sea, the people sang praise and thanks
to Him, but soon thereafter they complained, "Why have you taken us out of
Egypt?" (Exodus 17:3); and, at Sinai, the people pledged their complete
loyalty to Hashem, yet forty days later they built the golden calf.
The most difficult aspect of this last interpretation is the
notion that the people can weaken the power of Hashem. Yehudah Loew ben
Betzalel, known as the Maharal of Prague (c. 1525-1609), in his commentary on
Rashi, Gur Aryeh, notes that it is
not Hashem Himself Who is weakened, G-d forbid, since that is impossible;
rather, the effect of His power is weakened by their sins. Although Hashem
desires to give, if those meant to receive are unfit, then His power--meaning
His manifestation in the physical world--is not realized. This, concludes the
Maharal, is a very marvelous notion.
And so it is. If by not being suited to receive Hashem's
goodness, we are able to diminish the degree to which He is apparent in the
world, then the converse must also be true. When we obey Him, He bestows of His
bounty, and we become His partners in perfecting the universe.
