Haazinu: the empty spaces

Haazinu: the empty spaces

Ha'azinu is the parsha for the Shabbath Tshuva', the sabbath of return and repentance.  The Shabbath between Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur when we consider our behavior over the last year and the plans for improvement for the commnig year. On this sabbath we read the poem that Moshe said that the people will never forget. 

It is a ballad of national origin, national struggle to the point of near destruction, and ultimate salvation.  It preaches faith.  Verse 21 is climactic They incensed Me with no-gods, Vexed Me with their futilities; I’ll incense them with a no-folk, Vex them with a nation of fools.  The translator chose to render the singular  "ayl" as a pleural.  That is probably an attempt at historicity. The translator posits that the people of the time could not be without a god, thus the no-god is a worthless god, a myth - as opposed to the true Gd. This is consistent with the emphasis, throughout the Torah, on straying and worshiping such false deities.  But in our age, we recognize the no-god  at all position. It often presented as the position of science.

The no-god position has shades of meaning. The Haazinu verses suggest that the listener "ask your ancestors."  There is a suggestion that  the experienced have a corrective perspective . But the (young) transgressor may  believe that  time (sometimes designated a  false deity -Chronos) has changed the way the world works. I have heard this from adolescents.   We live in new and better times, with fewer restrictions and greater freedoms , spelled out by Instagram and TikTok.  These new norms will lead us to the paradise ( of future consumption). 

A prodigal son (not my own son) once told me that the scientific understanding  of the world assures that everything is predetermined. Thus, his behavior could  be directed entirely to his momentary pleasures and whims.  This no-god is also a surrender to  a belief in a thoroughly determined, and thus  predictable, universe.  It merely removes the concerned entity from the guided universe. 

Every year, at this pre Yom Kippur time of  Haazinu,  the lens of significance is applied to my world. I  look at the legacy brought by my grandchildren, with all of the ambiguities of their development in a "changing" world.  I live in the current pandemic, and the intimation  that there are more to come (based both upon the parhsa and science [the current covid plague is the third of its kind in the past 20 years {SARS, MERS, not mention Ebola}])

Haazinu is written with significant spaces between the phrases.  The form emphasizes the significance of the the saying.  It also emphasizes the (Godel)  incompleteness. For the believer, science partially fills  some of the space.