Haazinu: The spiral 

The poem is introduced with a request that  eternity  ( heaven and earth) serve as witnesses to the truth of what is to follow.  The story begins with  Gd finding desperate Israel in the desert and bringing them from survival to flourishing.  By emphasizing the role of their own actions in their success, prosperous Israel takes credit for its triumph, rejecting Gd's role and ultimately rejecting Gd.  Gd rejects the renouncing  people  and removes their protection.  Enemies arise and nearly destroy Israel.  Gd comes to the rescue and Israel rises from the devastation. Coda: Moshe delivers the poem with instructions to keep the rules of the Torah as a away to prevent the downfall. Afterward: Moshe is given his terminal instructions. 

The cycle of ascent, triumph, complacency, defeat and rebuilding describes all the human histories of survivors; and it is the survivors who tell the story. The events take place through time, a process that we perceive as linear and progressive, so the circle can be viewed from the side and it becomes a sine curve, a spiral.  The circles are not all equally large in this time axis. But the periodic nature is inexorable. 

In my  lifetime, we have  seen the ascent and  apogee of the process.  My parents were impoverished, uneducated immigrants who had lived the lowest point in Jewish ( maybe all) history.  Every affliction enumerated in every execration of the Torah had been visited upon them and their  (murdered)  families.  I came into the world as they rose, became American citizens, seized their portion of the promised opportunity.  My generation became doctors, lawyers, wealth workers, scholars.  People of achievement. The hard work paid off...was it the only active force?

I cannot have the magical beliefs of my grandparents.  I have seen photographs of  earth taken from the moon and beyond, so heaven can no longer be the blue firmament that I see when I look up.  That has become the light diffraction pattern of water vapor in the atmosphere  and I am convinced that beyond  the atmosphere there is the darkness of space organized into stars with planets, and galaxies. I am somewhat less sure that the laws that govern the motion of the celestial beings are universal (note the dark matter and the cosmological constant in this years Physics Nobel Prize), but the estimation of these laws, as they apply locally, has improved and fostered progress.  The awareness of an older explanation for nature is an aid to the skepticism necessary to drive reform and improvement. 

From the perspective of the poem, science has encouraged the attribution of events to the No-gd  (v.21), and some even insist upon this principle.  I do not understand anything well enough to leave out the theological cosmological constant: Divine intervention.