Nitzavim-Vayelech - 12th September 2009 - 23th Elul 5769

At the end of his life, having given the Israelites at G-d's behest 612 commands, Moses is instructed to give them the last; command 613:

Now therefore write down for yourselves this song, and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song may be my witness within the people of Israel. (Deut. 31: 19)

According to the plain sense of the verse, G-d is speaking to Moses and Joshua and is referring to the song in the following chapter, "Listen, O heavens, and I will speak; Hear, O earth, the words of My mouth." Oral tradition, however, gave it a different and much wider interpretation, understanding it as a command for every Jew to write - or at least take some part in writing - a Sefer Torah, a scroll of the law:

Said Rabbah: even though our ancestors have left us a scroll of the Torah, it is our religious duty to write one for ourselves, as it is said: "Now therefore write this song, and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the people of Israel." (Sanhedrin 21b).

The logic of the interpretation seems to be, first, that the phrase "write down for yourselves" could be construed as referring to every Israelite (Ibn Ezra), not just Moses and Joshua. Secondly, the passage goes on to say (31: 24): "Moses finished writing in the book the words of this law from beginning to end." The Talmud (Nedarim 38a) offers a third reason. The verse goes on to say: "that this song may be My witness within the people" - implying the Torah as a whole, not just the song in chapter 32.

There is something poetic about this being the last of the commands. It is as if God were saying to the Israelites: "It is not enough that you have received the Torah from Moses. You must make it new again in every generation." The covenant was not to grow old. It had to be periodically renewed.


So it is to this day, that Torah scrolls are still written as in ancient times, by hand, on parchment, using a quill - as were the Dead Sea Scrolls two thousand years ago. In a religion almost devoid of sacred objects (icons, relics), the Torah scroll is the nearest Judaism comes to endowing a physical entity with sanctity - and this is an understatement. The Torah is less like an object than a person. In its presence we stand as if it were a king. On Simchat Torah we dance with it as if it were a bride. If one is, G-d forbid, damaged or destroyed we bury it as if it were a human; we mourn as if we had lost a relative. Judaism is the story of a love affair between a people and a book, the Book of Books.

What though - if we take the command to refer to the whole Torah and not just one chapter - is the significance of the word "song" [shirah]: "Now therefore write down for yourselves this song"? The word shirah appears five times in this passage. It is clearly a key-word. Why? On this, two nineteenth century scholars offered striking explanations.

Netziv (R. Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin) interprets it to mean that the whole Torah should be read as poetry, not prose (the word shirah in Hebrew means both a song and a poem). To be sure, most of the Torah is written in prose, but it has, argues Netziv, two characteristics of poetry. First, it is allusive rather than explicit. It leaves unsaid more than is said. Secondly, like poetry, it hints at deeper reservoirs of meaning, sometimes by the use of an unusual word or sentence construction. Descriptive prose carries its meaning on the surface. The Torah, like poetry, does not. (Kidmat Davar, preface to Ha'amek Davar, 3).

In this brilliant insight, Netziv anticipates one of the great twentieth century essays on biblical prose, Erich Auerbach's 'Odysseus' Scar'. Auerbach contrasts the narrative style of Genesis with that of Homer. Homer uses dazzlingly detailed descriptions so that each scene is set out pictorially as if bathed in sunlight. By contrast, biblical narrative is spare and understated. In the example Auerbach cites - the story of the binding of Isaac - we do not know what the main characters look like, what they are feeling, what they are wearing, what landscapes they are passing through:

The decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is non-existent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal . . . remains mysterious and "fraught with background".

A completely different aspect is alluded to by R. Yechiel Michal Epstein, author of the halakhic code Arukh ha-Shulchan (Choshen Mishpat, introduction). Epstein points out that the rabbinic literature is full of arguments, about which the sages said: "These and those are the words of the living G-d." This, says Epstein, is one of the reasons the Torah is called "a song" - because a song becomes more beautiful when scored for many voices interwoven in complex harmonies.

I would suggest a third dimension. The 613th command is not simply about the Torah, but about the duty to make the Torah new in each generation. To make the Torah live anew, it is not enough to hand it on cognitively - as mere history and law. It must speak to us affectively, emotionally.

Judaism is a religion of words, and yet whenever the language of Judaism aspires to the spiritual it breaks into song, as if the words themselves sought escape from the gravitational pull of finite meanings. There is something about melody that intimates a reality beyond our grasp, what William Wordsworth called the "sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns / And the round ocean and the living air." Words are the language of the mind. Music is the language of the soul.

Music is central to the Judaic experience. We do not pray; we davven, meaning we sing the words we direct toward heaven. Nor do we read the Torah; instead we chant the weekly portion, each word with its own cantillation. Even rabbinical texts are never merely studied; we chant them with the particular sing-song known to all students of Talmud. Each time and text has its specific melodies. The same prayer may be sung to half-a-dozen different tunes depending on whether it is part of the morning, afternoon or evening service, and whether the day is a weekday, a Sabbath, a festival or one of the High Holy Days. There are different cantillations for biblical readings, depending on whether the text comes from the Mosaic books, the prophetic literature, or the Ketuvim, 'the writings.' Music is the map of the Jewish spirit, and each spiritual experience has its own distinctive melodic tonality.

The 613th command - to make the Torah new in every generation - symbolizes the fact that though the Torah was given once, it must be received many times, as each of us, through our study and practice, strives to recapture the pristine voice heard at Mount Sinai. That requires emotion, not just intellect. It means treating Torah not just as words read, but also as a melody sung. The Torah is G-d's libretto, and we, the Jewish people, are His choir, the performers of His choral symphony. And though, when Jews speak they often argue, when they sing, they sing in harmony, as the Israelites did at the Red Sea, because music is the language of the soul, and at the level of the soul Jews enter the unity of the Divine which transcends the oppositions of lower worlds. The Torah is G-d's song, and we collectively are its singers.

The Connection Between Spirituality and Songs
London Jewish News & Jewish Telegraph
September 1999

The sociologist Peter Berger called them "signals of transcendence" - moments when you feel lifted beyond yourself and infinity seems almost within reach. That, for me, was the mood in the Edgware Synagogue for choral Selichot this year.

The shul was packed. I've rarely seen so many people gathered in a single building to pray. It was lovely to see so many people from different communities, spanning the religious spectrum, coming together in harmony. The music was magnificent. We've come to expect nothing less from Rev. Lionel Rosenfeld and the Shabbaton choir. This year, though, there were two newcomers - Rev. Shimon Craimer, a star of the future who, at the age of twenty-one already has a voice of rare sweetness and power, and thirteen year old Stuart Morell, whose poise on what must have been for him a nerve-racking occasion was impeccable. Together they created a moment of artistic and spiritual perfection.

There was a time, not so long ago, when chazanut and choral synagogue music were in decline. I remember having to close the chazanut department of Jews' College for sheer lack of interest by congregations. In the past few years, though, they've made an unexpected recovery, because of the pioneering work of many of our chazanim and choirs. Collectively they have brought a new idiom to the music of prayer, a delightful blend of the new and the traditional with special emphasis on the use melody to mirror the meaning of the words. The result has been that this year there were a record number of choral selichot services. We are in the midst of a Jewish musical renaissance.

I'm delighted. Judaism has long recognised the close connection between spirituality and song. Az Yashir - the Song at the Sea - was the first great collective tribute of the Israelites to God. Many of the Psalms were written to be sung, and the Levites used to provide choral accompaniment to the Temple service. To this day, music is the pulse of Jewish spirituality. We don't read the Torah; we sing it. We don't say our prayers; we chant them. We don't even read the Mishnah and Gemarrah; they too have their special tune. Each text, and each period of the year, has its own melody. Song charts the biorhythms of the Jewish soul. There's a reason for this. When language is invested with deep emotion it aspires to the condition of music. As I put it once: Words are the language of the mind. But song is the language of the soul. That is why melody moves us in a way mere speech cannot. Judaism is a dialogue between earth and heaven, and when words become holy, they become song.

The supreme example of this is Kol Nidrei. The words of Kol Nidrei are dry and unemotional. Indeed they are not even a prayer. They are a legal formula for the annulment of vows between us and God. But the tune of Kol Nidrei is something else. Few compositions have ever caught so powerfully and poignantly the mood of the Jewish soul as it comes before God in search of forgiveness. It instantly establishes the solemnity of the day - the drama of human finitude in the presence of eternity. The music transcends the words. It communicates what words cannot say.

I used to regret the fact that, in the modern era, Jews had contributed so much to the music of other cultures and so little to their own. Mahler's Eighth Symphony is a Catholic mass. Irving Berlin wrote, "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." George Gershwin wrote some of the finest negro spirituals. Hopefully, though, the tide is turning. It should. Judaism is an intellectual faith. But it must also be emotionally compelling if it is to speak to both hemispheres of the brain. Besides which, music is the closest we come to expressing the inexpressible. As Joseph Addison wrote: "Music, the greatest good that mortals know / And all of heaven we have below."

At the end of his life, Moses gave the Jewish people the last of the 613 commands - that in every generation each of us must write (or at least have a share in writing) a Sefer Torah. Unusually, though, on this occasion he described it not as Torah but as shirah, 'song'. My explanation is that if we are to make the Torah new in every generation, it must speak to our hearts as well as to our minds. It must become our "song of songs". The Torah is the libretto of the Jewish people and we are its choir. The revival of Jewish music is essential to a renewal of the Jewish spirit. So I hope we have a musical, as well as a sweet, New Year.