Rabbi Dr. Rebecca Joseph
This week’s Torah portion is Ha’azinu: Deuteronomy 32:1 – 52
How does one create an ethical will, a Jewish legacy document passing on values, stories, wishes and advice to your loved ones and their descendants? Rabbi Steve Lader, an expert on the subject, advises starting with two questions:
What is your biggest regret and how can your loved ones avoid the same? What do you wish you had done, why and what will doing that thing hopefully bring to your loved ones?
Like me, you will likely respond with questions of your own along the lines of “Why begin with regret,” a negative emotion too often associated with weakness and shame? Is this how I want to be remembered by future generations?
Nearing the end of his life, Moses, too, considers his legacy. Parshat Ha’azinu consists primarily of a 43 verse-long poem in which Moses makes his last, fervent appeal to the Israelites. Its subject is the greatness of God and God’s loving actions toward Israel despite Israel’s past and anticipated future disloyalty.
With his successor, Joshua, at the ready, the poem is followed by Moses exhorting the Israelites to take his words to heart and make sure that they are taught to subsequent generations so that their descendants will continue to exist as a people in possession of the land they will settle on the other side of the Jordan River.
Describing the ultimately indescribable, Moses employs parental metaphors and rich imagery from the natural world. Rock (Tzur) is unique in the Torah to this poem. It appears six times with related attributes including perfect actions, just ways, and true faith (Deuteronomy 32:4); protection (32:15); birthing (32:18); supreme might (32:30); and superiority among deities of the nations (32:31, 37). This is not coincidental.
Rabbeinu Bachya explains that when Moses uses “Rock” here, he praises God with the same word he had once used sinning against God. Moreover, Moses has acted in this manner before. A midrash (Shemot Rabbah 5:23) teaches that Moses began the song of thanksgiving after the crossing of the Sea of Reeds with the word az, to atone for a previous occasion when he had used the word az, criticizing God for having worsened the fate of the Jewish people from the time he, Moses, had been appointed as their leader (Exodus 5:23).
Moses’ regret does not change the outcome of his past actions. The recitation complete, God commands him to ascend Mount Nebo in Moab where, facing Jericho, he will see the land that the Israelites will inhabit in the distance and then die on the mountain. As if he could have forgotten, God reminds Moses that he will not enter the land with the Israelites because he and his brother Aaron “broke faith with Me among the Israelite people … by failing to uphold My sanctity among the Israelite people in the rock-striking incident in the wilderness” (Numbers 20:1-11).
In “The Power of Regret,” Daniel Pink writes, “If we know what we truly regret, we know what we truly value. Regret — points the way to a life well lived.” For all its challenges, triumphs and human failings, Moses’ is a well-lived life. Never great at communicating his feelings, on the last day off his life, he has succeeded in using his regret to clarify what matters most — faith and continuity of the relationship between God and Israel — and to act on both leaving a legacy of love.
We can in this tender season and beyond take comfort knowing that Moses will die on the mountain and, like his brother Aaron before him, “be gathered to his kin” (Deuteronomy 32:50).
Rebecca Joseph is a community rabbi based in Sterling, Virginia.
