The Song and the Rain

There is a specific kind of quiet that happens the day after Yom Kippur. Not silence but a lightness, almost physical, as if something pressing against your chest for ten days finally eased. I woke up this morning, drank coffee for the first time in twenty-six hours (but who's counting?). The fast was over. The gates had closed. The new year was no longer ahead of us; we were in it.

Ha'azinu — "Listen" — is Moses's song, delivered on the last day of his life. It is not what you'd expect a dying man to sing. Most of it is a prosecutorial brief: God was faithful, the people were ungrateful, punishment followed, redemption will come. It's fierce. It names names. And it begins with this:

הַאֲזִ֥ינוּ הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וַאֲדַבֵּ֑רָה        וְתִשְׁמַ֥ע הָאָ֖רֶץ אִמְרֵי־פִֽי׃

Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter!

— Devarim 32:1

Heaven and earth as witnesses. Moses calls the whole creation to the stand. And then, before the indictment begins, he says something unexpected:

יַעֲרֹ֤ף כַּמָּטָר֙ לִקְחִ֔י        תִּזַּ֥ל כַּטַּ֖ל אִמְרָתִ֑י כִּשְׂעִירִ֣ם עֲלֵי־דֶ֔שֶׁא        וְכִרְבִיבִ֖ים עֲלֵי־עֵֽשֶׂב׃

May my discourse come down as the rain, My speech distill as the dew, Like showers on young growth, Like droplets on the grass.

— Devarim 32:2

Rain and dew. That's the image Moses reaches for on his last day — not fire, not the splitting of seas, not tablets cracking against stone. He wants his words to land the way water lands on something growing. Gently. Persistently. In a way the soil can actually absorb.

There's a reason we read Ha'azinu in the space between Yom Kippur and Sukkot. For ten days the liturgy pressed us — who we were, who we failed to be, what we'd change. Kol Nidrei. The Al Chet.

The long, relentless list of ways we missed the mark. All of it serious, all of it necessary, and all of it a kind of storm. Then the gates closed, the shofar sounded, and we broke bread. The storm passed. Now what?

Moses answers the question before we ask it. After the severity comes rain — not another flood, not another warning. Rain. The kind that makes things grow.

The song itself is sharp. It does not flinch from the ugliness of what went wrong and what will go wrong again. God calls the people crooked and perverse. There are arrows and plagues. But running underneath all of it is verse four:

הַצּוּר֙ תָּמִ֣ים פׇּֽעֳל֔וֹ        כִּ֥י כׇל־דְּרָכָ֖יו מִשְׁפָּ֑ט אֵ֤ל אֱמוּנָה֙ וְאֵ֣ין עָ֔וֶל        צַדִּ֥יק וְיָשָׁ֖ר הֽוּא׃

The Rock!—whose deeds are perfect, Yea, all of whose ways are just; A faithful God, never false, True and upright indeed.

— Devarim 32:4

HaTzur. The Rock. Moses reaches for the most solid, unmovable thing he can name and says: this is who God is. Perfect in action, just in all ways, faithful.

The people wander; the Rock does not.

That word — tzur — shows up five times in the song. It's the refrain underneath the melody of accusation and consequence. Whatever else happens, the foundation holds.

I thought about that last night at break-fast. Our rabbi had said something during Ne'ilah about the gates closing as an act of mercy — not shutting us out, but holding us in.

A woman I didn't recognize was at our table — first time at shul, she said, visiting a friend. She asked what happens after Yom Kippur, what comes next. I wanted to say everything, but I said: now the joy starts.

Earlier this week, the Jerusalem Post reported on Jewish college students across the country holding enormous Rosh Hashanah dinners on their campuses.

Three hundred fifty students at the Chabad at Pitt. Five roommates at the University of Michigan who rented tables and chairs and cooked for seventy people in their parking lot, running dishes between apartments because they needed more ovens.

Students wearing their Magen David necklaces visibly on campuses that had been hostile to them for two years. Not because the hostility stopped. Because the holiday came and they showed up anyway.

Young growth receiving the rain.

Moses knew he wouldn't cross the Jordan. He knew the people would fail again — the song says so explicitly. He sang it anyway. And the frame he chose for that song was not a warning but a wish: let my words fall like rain. Let them land on something living. Let them sink in.

There's a line near the end of the parsha, after the song is finished and Moses steps back into prose:

כִּ֠י לֹא־דָבָ֨ר רֵ֥ק הוּא֙ מִכֶּ֔ם כִּי־ה֖וּא חַיֵּיכֶ֑ם וּבַדָּבָ֣ר הַזֶּ֗ה תַּאֲרִ֤יכוּ יָמִים֙ עַל־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֨ר אַתֶּ֜ם עֹבְרִ֧ים אֶת־הַיַּרְדֵּ֛ן שָׁ֖מָּה לְרִשְׁתָּֽהּ׃ {פ}

For this is not a trifling thing for you: it is your very life; through it you shall long endure on the land that you are to possess upon crossing the Jordan.

— Devarim 32:47

Not trifling. Not an artifact or an heirloom or a tradition you keep out of habit. Your life. Seventy students in a parking lot in Ann Arbor knew that, even if they couldn't have named the verse. The woman at our break-fast table knew it too, or she wouldn't have asked what comes next.

The rain doesn't fall all at once. It doesn't need to. It falls on young growth, on grass, on whatever is ready to receive it. The song carries the storm inside it, but the frame is gentleness — the patient, persistent work of water on living things.

The coffee was good. The morning was quiet. The year has begun.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham