Rosh Hashanah: Parshat Haazinu; Deuteronomy 32:1-32:52 By: Rabbi Denise L. Eger

This is a week filled with Torah. The New Year comes to help us change our lives for the better. It allows us to use this season to look closely at our ways and provides a window of opportunity to examine, repent and change that which causes havoc with our day to day ability to fulfill our Covenant with God.

We will hear the call of the Shofar this week. The shofar will through its tekiah, teruarh, shevarim, tekiah blasts ask us to change for the better. The shofar will urge us to confront that which most of the past year we ignored. The Shofar will call us home to the Jewish people and to our covenant with God.
This year Shabbat Shuvah—the Sabbath of Repentance where we will read this week’s parasha—Haazinu, begins as the second day of Rosh Hashanah ends. We will enter the Sabbath with the sounds of the shofar still ringing in our ears from the morning worship just a few hours previously.
Parshat Haazinu is a beautiful piece of poetry in the pentultimate parasha of the Torah. Moses composes this song and it is his last address to the People Israel before he ascends Mt. Nebo to look over the Promised Land. It is then that God will gather him up and Moses will die atop the mountain. But this address to the nation in the form of poetry is a powerful warning to the Children of Israel. While Moses will literally be able to look at the Promised land from atop Mt. Nebo and not be able to cross over the Jordan River with them, this poem of warning is perhaps is Moses’ metaphorically gazing at the future of the People in the New Land.
Moses, who has led the people for more than forty years, knows their strengths and weaknesses. He knows they always need to be reminded of their story and their roots. And so the poem briefly recounts how God lifted this nation up from slavery, protecting Israel and finding a home for them. But Moses’ also warns the people strongly what will happen when they settle the land and become indifferent to their history and to the miracle of their relationship with God. Moses foresees the difficulties that will come when the Children of Israel forget their relationship with God. Moses’ also predicts and tries to make the people aware however, that even at their most desperate hour, when their false gods won’t come to their rescue, God ultimately will. And it is God alone that is the Supreme Being. It is here in this week’s parasha, Haazinu that we come to know Moses’ prophetic voice.
This message is no less timely for the Israelites than it is for us at Shabbat Shuvah. We too may have allowed ourselves to forget our covenant and the blessings that God has granted to us. We may have “forsook God… and spurned the Rock of …support.” (Deut. 32:15). Reading these words on Shabbat Shuvah reminds us that we have a chance to invite God back into our lives for the New Year. This Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we can turn our idolatry or our indifference around and re-establish the link to our people and our God.
That is the message of the High Holy Days and it is certainly the message Moses wants us to focus on in his poem. God will not write us off even though both God and Moses know that we will stray at times. Our task then and our task now is to know that we can come back to this covenant and then to do so!
May the New Year help us find our way home so that in this New Year we can cross over to the Promised Land of repentance, healing, and a New Year of joy, health, prosperity and peace.