Poetry in Ha’azinu

It’s a treat for me to be able to talk about Ha’azinu, the powerful poem in this week’s parashah. What I especially love about it is its concentration of thought-provoking images and metaphors, many of which help me understand the notion of God. Metaphors, as you know, compare two things that are not alike. Our knowledge of one of those things can be transferred to another sphere, and help describe it.

What I’d like to do in these next few minutes, together with you, is look at the metaphors created in Ha’azinu. I’d like to let you know how I understand them, and ask you to consider how you personally relate to them. I will suggest that the sum of these metaphors – and others that may resonate with you – is where we can relate to God.

I will be asking you to look open your Etz Hayim on page 1185. Please note that sometimes my translation is slightly different from that here in Etz Hayim.

[1185 – 2]* The first image I’d like us to look at comes from nature. God says:

What is this image suggesting? That, just as plants and animals and people need water to survive and thrive, these instructions will provide sustenance for our lives. Be patient, the image says; the watering process is ongoing.

And now, after we’ve received these ‘instructions,’ the rest of the poem is an abbreviated history of God’s relationship with Israel.

Let’s look at [*1185 – 4 ]. Again, a metaphor from nature. God is called “the Rock, ” spelled with a capital R.  Later in the poem God sarcastically points out that Israel has followed fake-gods, non-gods. And there the English translation spells ‘rock’ with a small “r.”

God as the Rock implies strength and steadiness. The metaphor suggests that God provides a safe sturdy place even when other things are unsteady. In our lives, we can sometimes describe a person as a ‘rock’, upon whom we depend.

Now let’s look at [*1186 – 6b].

Here we come across the first parent metaphor. Here, God is father, and he’s shocked that ‘after all he’s done for them’ his children are not loyal. After all, God created this child, made her who she is, and keeps her alive. (6). In addition the father is the family historian and moral compass.

We even see a ‘real father’ referred to – the father who is the family historian and moral compass:

[*1189 – 18] We find the metaphor of God as mother later on in verse 18 on page 1189. God as mother gives birth to Israel, yalad .  She writhes in labor pains h.olel.   These are physical, as well as emotional connections.

[*1187 – 9]        Let’s go back to page 1187.  In verse 9 there’s a metaphor from the world of law.

We see that God picked Israel from among all the peoples of the earth to be God’s own, God’s ‘portion,’ God’s own inheritance. In this legal metaphor each party, both God and the people God has chosen, have rights and also responsibilities.

[*1187 -10]  In verse 10 we find a beautiful extended nature metaphor.

An eagle, a nesher, hovers above the desert, which is “a howling wasteland;” it sees Israel, a bedraggled, defenseless people. The nesher watches over them, glides down, places them in a nest, rouses them and carries them in his pinions and brings them to a place where they can thrive.

But from this beautiful metaphor we return to family disloyalty. Please look at [*1189-19]. Sons and daughters are described from the perspective of their parents (19-20; 29). The children turn away from God; they are a ‘turnabout’ generation, tapuh.ot. And, as children often do, they don’t realize the consequences of their actions. As God points out, they don’t see how what they do now will affect them tomorrow.

God as father becomes furious and decides to hide himself from his children. He punishes them by his absence, and he allows misfortune rain down on them.

And, as the narrative of the poem continues, Israel suffers famine, plague, fanged beasts, enemies and war.

[*1190 – 27 But at this point something very different happens. We see what the scholar Nehama Leibowitz called ‘a very daring anthropomorphism.’ God admits to dread.  He’s not the angry parent any more, but now a vulnerable parent, fearful of what he has wrought. I want to point out here that the Hebrew word for dread or fear is not pah.ad or aratz, or y’areh, but gur, a word used less frequently in the Hebrew.

The interesting thing about this metaphor is that when God says, “I dread the taunts of the foe,” we see a total change in behavior. Now he will not let Israel be destroyed.  God will save Israel and battle Israel’s foes.

This metaphor of God’s feelings, of course, expresses human emotions, as are all of these emotions that we attribute to God.  What has happened in the poem is that God faces the complexity of competing needs – Punish Israel? Let Israel survive? Competing needs just as in our lives. This metaphor suggests that these moments of dread, of vulnerability, can lead to positive change, to a constructive re-thinking of an issue. Here the metaphor suggests, that’s okay. Even God re- thinks issues.

The extreme opposite of this image of the humanized God is found at the end of the poem. Now God is a violent military warrior in the hallowed tradition of gods of the ancient Near East. Back in those days, as we know from many texts, every city had its own gods and each god had a defined role. Here I’d like to read a few verses from the Baal cycle, which comes from the ancient city of Ugarit. Ugarit was located Mediterranean coast north of Israel, in what is now Syria and it was destroyed in approximately 1200 BCE. Here is a description of the warrior goddess Anat. [Baal cycle, 1.3]:

This warrior-god tradition was carried into the Hebrew Bible, as were many other concepts from the ancient Near East. Here at the conclusion of Haazinu God vows that He will destroy those who have harmed Israel.

[*1192 – 40 ] God says,

I must tell you that I’ve had trouble with this metaphor. Yes, I accept that it is an inheritance from the warrior-god of pre-biblical society, and yes it is good to know that we have a strong army here in the USA; we have good policemen in Philadelphia. But more personally I realize that there have been times in my own life that I have fought, fought desperately for something, not with a flesh- devouring sword, but with all the abilities I had.

So we’ve pretty much come to the end of the poem. I’ve hoped to bring a sense of the vitality of the metaphors and also connect these images with your own experiences, and perhaps in that way see a connection with the divine.

 

Haazinu. D’var torah at BZBI, 2016, Susan Zeelander
Translations: JPS, with some JTigay, JPS alternatives.
*Words in brackets are page #’s and verse #’s from Etz Hayim.

 

 

 

 

Tags: God, metaphor, Poetry