Two twins were about to be born.  They spent all their time together for nine months, sitting . . . and sitting . . . and doing whatever it is that fetuses do in their spare time.  One day, they felt this very strong movement all around them, they felt pushing and the voices outside got louder, their whole environment began to change.  Everything began to change. In what seemed to them like mere moments, they felt a great wave of pressure and one of the twins disappeared. The other was horrified and scared . . . and confused. I mean, the twin who had gone away was his best friend in the whole womb.  He thought he was gone forever . . . everything was very different and very scary.  It felt like an ending.  Now, clearly from the outside, we see this as a beginning, for what could be more exciting and new than birth itself! It is the start of every opportunity we know of.  But to a being who does not know of such things, it is petrifying. It is the crossing of an unknown threshold, a movement into a space that has no definition, no explanation .. . there are not even words to describe what it could be like, let alone what could be wonderful about it. 

We, too, are at a time of many thresholds, in our parsha, in our lives, and in this world. 
In this week’s parsha, Ha’azinu, our people are standing on the threshold of entering into the land God has promised us . . . all they have yet to do is cross the Jordan River.  They are scared, though . . . how can they possibly know what is on the other side? From the outside, we can see that having a homeland is better than wandering in the desert . . . but that’s unfair because we can understand the stability and the opportunity ahead.  Wandering is their reality . . . they walk and they eat food from heaven, and they follow Moses. . . . and there is comfort in familiarity.  Deciding to break free of the comfort of familiarity and move into an entirely new existence is a challenge, a necessary, but daunting step they must take if they are to cross the threshold to their future.   Just as our twins were on an unknown journey toward birth, a breaking of familiarity, our ancestors and in turn, we, are on such a journey toward something we may not yet comprehend and cannot yet name.

The first thing we’ll deal with in connection to our parsha is this whole idea of crossing a threshold:

As we saw in the story of the twins, crossing a completely unknown threshold with no answers and no concept of what lies ahead can cause a great deal of fear.  Our people looked to their leader for guidance and Moses delivers to them the song that we find in Ha’azinu.  It is a song of warning, of the story of their Exodus, of their failures, and of the hope for and promise of their future redemption.  It is both encouragement and chastisement.  Moses begins “Ha’azinu hashamayim va’adabera, v’tishma ha’aretz imrei-fi—Give ear, O Heavens, and I will speak, and may the earth hear the words of my mouth.”  Ha’azinu comes from the word “ozen-ear” and is directed at the Heavens, while “tishma” means “hear” and is directed to the earth. Midrash teaches that when Ha’azinu is used in the Tanach, one is calling to someone nearby, while “Tishma” is used to call to someone far away.

So, why would Moses direct this word of closeness “Ha’azinu” to the heavens and the word of distance “Tishma” to the earth around him?  Well, Moses was the greatest prophet, the greatest of the priestly class and known as Moshe Rabbeinu, the greatest Rabbi.  He, of all humanity, came the closest to knowing God, as we say in Yigdal “Lo kam b’yisrael k’moshe od, navi umabit et t’munato-Never has their been a prophet like Moses, who sees God’s image like no one else.”  This is a holy guy living his very last day on earth.  He is nowhere near earth . . . and, more importantly, nowhere near the people who live on it.  His extreme holiness brought him closer to the heavens than he was to the earth and the people.  And . . . Standing at our threshold to our new existence, scared and unclear about the future, apprehensive and doubting . . . I offer that Moses could no longer be our leader.  He was too far from us already, he was too close to the answers that we did not have . . . we could not take such a wild and scary step as crossing the Jordan with a leader who occupied the space between this world and the next . . . because our problems and our fears and hopes were this world.  We needed someone who was secured to earth, feet firmly on the ground. He had to be part of the community, not above it.  In the story of the twins, Moses is like the twin who already was born.  He was gone, his existence had already changed so dramatically that he knew things the first twin . . . our people at the shore of the Jordan . . . had no idea about yet.  He had crossed an entirely different threshold and would no longer be able to truly communicate with the twin still in the womb . . . the language would have been too different to express what a leader needs to express . . .  Even Moses’ song comes to us in words of Torah, words that are inherently esoteric.  So Moses passed on this job to Joshua, a member of our community who was fully involved in this earthly sphere.  As Joshua was able to lead his people over their threshold into Eretz Yisrael, we think about at what thresholds we are standing and what are we doing to break free of our comfortable familiarity.

We sit here in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur about to enter an entirely new year. From an objective, outsider, point of view, perhaps our choices seem easy . . . it’s easy for us to see the greatness of crossing the Jordan into Israel and for the twin to be born, right?  Our moments of crossing over, however, do not allow us to view our situation from the outside, as a bystander. We are right smack in the center of our decisions and our choices.  Our High Holy Day liturgy is in the middle of reminding us that tzedakah, tshuvah and tefillah divert God’s decree . . . and we have and will spend days in prayer recounting our transgressions and praying for forgiveness . . . but what is it that we are really trying to do here?  Perhaps we are trying to cross over our own threshold . . . into a new year that actually looks and feels different to us.  We are begging to break free of the comfort of familiarity and make honest changes in how we act with other people.  It is much easier to be complacent . . . but complacency will never let us cross our threshold into a different place, to become a different person. We must demand change in ourselves using the intimate “ha’azinu” and not the distant and impersonal “tishma” . . . speaking to ourselves from a distance, a gap that stands between halfhearted change and full blown crossing over into a new world.  We need to be personally active and intimately involved in our decisions to move forward.  We must be Joshua and we must let go of Moses for the time being. 

The world is also at a great threshold.  While I have no words to describe the horrors in the United States and I continue to struggle with the meaning and the process toward healing . . . we can see that the world is at a point of crossing over.  Again, we are inside of it now, so it is incredibly difficult to take an objective view and think, ah, yes, of course, our choice is so easy, look at the opportunity ahead of us! Rather, We are much more like the twin left behind . . . we are scared, things have changed, it is horrifying.  But we have choices . . . and there is a process ahead if we are not afraid to break free from familiarity and move forward.  Our situation can feel too big and too much to express . . . we cannot understand it and we fear what will come from it.  The leaders of our world must now cease being Moses and begin being Joshua for us.  Crossing this threshold can mean creating a new world.  As Joshua-leaders, they need to be entirely present with the people of the world . . . they need to act not as if they know what is on the other side of the crossing . . . that is totally useless to us . . . but as brave leaders ready to act on behalf of their communities.  They need to act for peace . . . there, I’ve said it—it is incredibly trite, but incredibly true.  They cannot make wild promises about world war, assassinations, wiping terrorists off the face of this earth, “hunting ‘em down” . . . because that is a “tishma” . . . that is distance from the desires of the communal need for peace.  We need a “ha’azinu” . . . something that tells us that our leaders are intimately involved with our lives, our fears, and our desire to truly cross over this difficult and unknown threshold.

Having begun to understand the thresholds before us, our text gives us an idea of what such a period of transition might look like:

Near the beginning of this Song, Moses tells us “Shichet lo lo—Corruption is not God’s."  Rashi explains this verse, saying that the corruption in the world is not due to God, but rather to human beings. God’s creation was and is “Tov me’od” . . . what we do with it is our deal.  Even though it is easier to blame God for what goes on around us, or what goes wrong in our lives or in the world, we need to understand that the responsibility for these things lies within us.  We must then be personally responsible for our actions, the results of our actions, and for those around us with whom we share this world.  We can actively choose to be corrupt in our dealings with others, or we can obligate ourselves to be honest and kind.  According to this statement, the manner in which we conduct ourselves with others will determine how and if we cross the thresholds before us.  Corruption is not God’s . . . both corruption and the removal of corruption from our world rests with us.

According to Moses’ song, God has something of a remedy in store for us, or at least, a lesson of grand proportions.  Moses tells us that God responds to acts against humanity, saying “Astirah panai meyhem, er’eh mah acharitam—I will hide my face from them, and see what their end will be.”  Basically, God will wash His hands of us and see how we hold up.  In fact, this is not the first time we encounter the idea of God hiding His face from us.  In Shmot 34:18-23, Moses asks to see God’s face and God responds that no one can see God’s face and live.  Instead, God passes before Moses and allows him to see God’s back.  There is a connection between this moment in Shmot and our parsha.  So, from Shmot, we understand that when God hides His face from us, the result is that we can only see God’s back.  In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides teaches that here, God’s back is actually a metaphor for creation.  Moses may, then, come to know God only through God’s creation.  In Ha’azinu, God hides His face from us in response to our corruption. We can interpret this action from the passage in Shmot to mean that we can see only God’s back, which Maimonides has interpreted for us to mean “God’s creation,” or, humanity. In effect, God will display for us humanity and basically say “deal with it.” Having no other choice, we will be forced to deal with the people around us, work with them, learn to accept and understand each other. . . Or we simply cannot cross our next threshold . . . not in the parsha, not in our own personal lives, and not as a world.

These are the tasks that God has given us and this Song is the blueprint for how to carry out what we must do.  We can accept this challenge now and cross this threshold or we can ignore it and stay inside the womb, believing we are safe.  The choice is ultimately ours.

We are standing on many thresholds today, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, between searching and forgiving, between sadness and healing . . . between wandering and Eretz Yisrael.  As we find ourselves at a time of inner searching and struggle, moving from one year to the next, Moses has led Israel to the Jordan River. We are on the brink, we feel that threshold, the excitement and the fear of the new day . . . will we be able to handle it? Will we be strong enough to cross it and create a new space for life?
One name used for our ancestors was Ivri’im—those who cross over . . . the responsibility to cross over these thresholds is written in our name and weaved throughout our existence. With God’s help, and with words of Torah, we can begin to see what it is going to take to be pro-active in these major events of change so that we can see our future with hope and not fear, knowing that we have both God and God’s creation as our partners. Ken y’hi ratzon.

By Stephanie Kolin

HUC-JIR Rabbinical Student