Sidrah
Parashah of the week: Ha’azinu
“Moses came, together with Hosea son of Nun, and recited all the words of this song in the hearing of the people” Deuteronomy 32:44
October 3, 2025 11:18
“Moses came, together with Hosea son of Nun, and recited all the words of this song in the hearing of the people” Deuteronomy 32:44
October 3, 2025 11:18Songwriters, I’m told, either write music, then add lyrics or first the words and then the music – though I’m sure there are plenty who say it’s more complicated and that the two evolve together.
When it comes to listening and appreciating, I’m one of those people who loves a song for the music and can never quite remember (or make out) all the lyrics. And while liturgically I get irritated by synagogue melodies that don’t bear any relation to the meaning of a prayer (one all-pervasive tune for Aleinu springs to mind), in other contexts I do delight in some songwriters’ ability to juxtapose dark and moody lyrics with a deliciously dissonant upbeat tune.
At this time of year, there are some High Holy-Day melodies, such as for Kol Nidrei, where the importance of the music seems to have surpassed that of the text.
Our Torah readings throughout the year are brought alive by the cantillation (leyning) as often sung in synagogues, though even without musical expression the cantillation marks still serve a grammatical function, like punctuation marks, and add to the meaning of the text.
This week’s portion doesn’t even need the vowels or punctuation marks to set it apart as something different. In the Torah scroll the text is suddenly written in columns, or rather each line in the full column is broken into two equal halves. Some calligraphic curiosities are only visible close up but you’ll see this week’s divided column even from the back of the synagogue. It’s not just text. It’s poetry, perhaps even a song.
The word shirah can mean song or poem, and here Moses and Joshua recite all the words of the shirah in the hearing of the people. Which words exactly, we may wonder. These words at the beginning of Ha’azinu, laid out in metric columns, seem likely.
But there are also clues in a verse from the previous chapter (31:19) where they are instructed to “write down this shirah and teach it to the Israelites”.
The commentator Rashbam explains that when words are arranged in a particular order, this is called a shirah, and moreover that this shirah that is to be taught to the Israelites must be the poem, or even the whole portion, of Ha’azinu.
19th-century German commentator Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenberg suggests that the song in question is not just Ha’azinu but “every word of Torah from Bereshit (the first) to l’einei kol Yisrael (the last)”. All Torah is a song.
All year, every year, we add new interpretations to this Torah. And the beauty of Torah, suggests another 19th-century rabbi, Yechiel Michel Epstein, lies in the combination of these different voices together.
In the Song of Torah, in life, it is only by bringing different voices together that we can create harmonies.
Image: A new Torah scroll being completed in Berlin last year (Photo:Getty Images)
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