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Deuteronomy 32:1 - 52 · Shabbat, September 19, 2026 · Shabbat Shuvah
Moses is standing before all of Israel on the last day of his life. He has already said goodbye. He has already handed leadership to Joshua. He has already written the Torah down and given it to the priests. But there is one final thing he means to leave. Not another sermon. A song. He gathers the people and begins with a single word - "Ha'azinu" - "Give ear." He calls the heavens to listen. He asks the earth to hear the words of his mouth. The choice is deliberate. Moses knows that tomorrow he will die, and if Israel later denies what they agreed to at Sinai - that they would live by this Torah and keep this covenant - he will not be there to answer. So he calls as witnesses the two things that will still be here long after him. Heaven. Earth. The permanent things.
The song itself is one of the most striking passages in the Torah. Its subject is compressed history: what will happen to the people once they are in the land. They will be brought to a place of astonishing abundance - vineyards, olive oil, honey from the rock, wheat and cream and milk. They will grow prosperous, and in the growing they will forget who brought them there. They will turn to other gods. And the consequences the song describes are not abstract. Hunger. Plague. The sword. Exile. God "hides His face," meaning the sense of divine presence withdraws, and the people are left to face the world alone - overrun by enemies who mistake their own strength for the real cause of Israel's fall. But the song refuses to end there. It has one final movement, in which God turns back toward the people, holds the nations that oppressed them accountable, and gathers Israel home. The song's last note is not ruin. It is return.
When the song is finished, God speaks to Moses one last time on the same day. Climb this mountain, God says. Mount Nebo, in the land of Moab, facing Jericho. Look at the land I am giving your people. Look at it carefully, as far as your eyes will go. And then, on this mountain, die. Moses does not argue. He does not plead. He has already pleaded once, at the beginning of Deuteronomy, and God told him no. This time he simply turns, faces the mountain, and prepares to climb. The parasha closes on that moment - Moses at the base of the mountain, the song behind him, the land in front of him, the last steps of his life still ahead.
There is a specific thing a song does that almost nothing else does. It returns you to yourself. Not just to a memory - to the actual version of you that existed when you first heard it. You are back in the room. You are back in the year. You are back inside the person you used to be. And in that moment of return, without having to try, you can see the distance between who you were then and who you are now.
This is what Moses is doing on the last day of his life. He is not just leaving the people something they will remember. He is leaving them a mirror. The song he composes describes an entire human arc - being brought to abundance, growing prosperous, forgetting who brought us there, straying, facing consequences, and ultimately being turned back toward home. Every human life moves along some version of this arc, and the song is precisely constructed so that whenever a person finds themselves anywhere on it, they can locate themselves honestly. Am I in the abundance right now? Am I in the forgetting? Have I turned away from something, and am I only now noticing? What return is still available to me? These are not abstract questions. They are the exact questions Yom Kippur, two days from this Shabbat, is going to ask each of us to sit with for a full day. No work, no distractions, no way to look away. Just the arc of the year we have just lived, and the honest work of locating ourselves in it. Moses composed this song, on the last day of his life, so that no generation would have to face that work without a language for it. This Shabbat is when the tradition quietly hands us the song - and the days that follow are what we do with it.
→ Think about the words that have actually stayed with you across your life. Which ones are they? What is it about the form they came in - a song, a story, a prayer, a phrase from someone you loved - that made them stick where other words did not?
→ Moses calls heaven and earth as witnesses because they will still be here long after he is gone. In your own life, what serves that function - what are the "permanent things" that hold you accountable to who you said you wanted to be?
→ Yom Kippur is two days away. If you had to name one thing from the year ending that you want to leave behind, and one thing you want to carry into the year ahead, what would they be? What would it take to make the second one "sing" rather than fade?
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