Listen, O heavens, and I will speak!

                     (Deuteronomy 32:1)

Tishrei 12, 5779/September 21, 2018

"Listen, O heavens, and I will speak! And let the earth hear the words of my mouth!" (Deuteronomy 32:1)

We all have our favorite song. The song that lifts us up. The song that makes us dance. The song that makes us cry. Couples have their song. The one that was playing when their eyes first met, when their hearts first met. Old friends have favorite songs from back in the day. Families share favorite songs. Nations have national song lists. We all have songs that get inside our heads and just won't go away. What all these songs share is ownership. We make songs our own. They describe us. They are part of us. We hum tunes and quote lyrics as a way of expressing ourselves, as a way of life. Songs touch our souls.

Ha'azinu, this week's Torah reading, is comprised of the song that Moshe wrote on the day of his death, fulfilling G-d's final commandment to him: "And now, write for yourselves this song, and teach it to the Children of Israel. Place it into their mouths, in order that this song will be for Me as a witness for the children of Israel." (ibid 31:19) The song of Ha'azinu is a terse distillation of all that the nation of Israel will experience till the end of time. The verses of Ha'azinu are also the penultimate verses of the Torah, itself a majestic song, from it first word to its last, read, or more accurately, sung each week of the year according to traditional melodies and cadences. It is the song of our lives. Our song.

Torah records, early on, the world's first musician: "And his brother's name was Yuval; he was the father of all who grasp a lyre and a flute." (Genesis 4:21) Yuval was the son of Lemech, the tenth generation of man. But the music of the Torah, in fact, the music of creation, began long before that. The greatest composer of song, of course, is G-d, whose entire creation is the perfection of harmony and the breathtaking beauty of melody. G-d is the writer of such hits as "In the Beginning," "Let There be Light," "Let Us Make Man," "But of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil You Shall Not Eat of It," "It is Not Good that Man is Alone," and "Where are you?" And it was G-d who sang "Make for Yourself an Ark," "Go Forth From Your Land," and "Avraham! Avraham!" It was G-d who inspired His children to sing the Song of the Sea, it was G-d who placed the gift of song in King David's heart and on his lips, and it was G-d whose presence fills the Song of Songs. G-d's playlist is endless and contained in it is a song dedicated to each and every one of us.

Little wonder that song inspires prophecy and little wonder that many of the Hebrew prophets employed music as an aid in attaining prophecy. And little wonder that, in the perfectly timed rhythm of the Hebrew calendar, parashat Ha'azinu is read on the Shabbat preceding the festival of Sukkot. In the time of the Holy Temple, during each of the intermediate days of Sukkot, the Nisuch Hamayim, the Water Libation Ceremony, took place. Each day the ceremony took place in the early morning, and each day it was followed by twenty four hours of music and song, sung and danced to in the very courtyards of the Holy Temple, inspiring sublime joy and, not infrequently, inspiring prophecy, most notably the prophecy of Yonah, who was carried away by song all the way to the distant city of Nineveh.

-The Temple Institute