Haazinu. Becoming like the earth

“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak, and the earth shall hear the sayings of my mouth.” (Devarim, 32:1)

האזינו השמים ואדברה ותשמע הארץ אמרי פי. 

Just in time for Rosh Hashana, this week’s parasha invites us to connect heaven and earth: in the opening verse, Moshe asks the Skies to “lend an ear” to what he is about to say, and then he affirms that from this, the earth will hear.The earth will hear what the sky listens to.Bringing in the Sifrei, a midrashic commentary on this verse, he suggests that the sky embodied by the character of Moshe, represents the intellectual side of chochma (wisdom): our capacity to understand things in an analytic way that enables us to so that we would have the ability to listen to “difficult things.”

We need this ability to dissociate emotionally- in a positive sense. This is what makes us bear, emotionally, difficult news and situations. This is what doctors, therapists and judges do all day. This is what army commanders are doing right now, on Israel’s four borders.

But living from this place wouldn’t be enough. It would leave us crippled. Emotionally crippled.

This is why, the Mei Ha shiloach suggests, it is the earth that will “hear”.

The earth, embodied by Yoshuah (whose names means “salvation), represents to him the heart. And the heart, who “cries for salvation”, needs to hear things in a soft way.

The head can bare the tough reality. The heart needs compassion.

And, the Hasidic Master says, this is what happens to us about receiving Torah- just like about receiving emet (truth), that is, reality: if we resist reality, it will impose itself on us.

It will be tough, like the first rain that overwhelms the earth.

But then when we open up to it, when we cry for salvation, and open our hearts to receive compassion, torah- which really means divine “guidance”- the guidance of  Life Source, comes to teach us through compassion.

This is the soft dew that irrigates the earth with the water of Life, the water of hope, the flow of Hesed- loving kindness.

It is up to us to receive it too. And we can, if only we make ourselves like the earth: open to receiving truth, and compassion.

May it be so this year. Shana tovah