OCTOBER 3 • 2024 | 45

literate elites who controlled the 
administration of government. To 
this day, many professions use a 
technical vocabulary intelligible 
only to insiders, so that their 
knowledge is impenetrable to 
outsiders.
Judaism was different, 
profoundly so. I have speculated 
that this is connected with the fact 
that the birth of Judaism happened 
at roughly the same time as the 
birth of the alphabet — proto-
Semitic, appearing in the age of 
the patriarchs, and whose earliest 
traces have been discovered in the 
Sinai desert in areas where slaves 
worked.
Mesopotamia, from which 
Abraham came, and Egypt in the 
days of Moses, had the world’s two 
earliest forms of writing, cuneiform 
and hieroglyphics, respectively. 
But these systems — pictograms, 
ideograms and syllabaries in which 
symbols stood for whole words 
or syllables — involved too many 
signs to be taught to everyone. The 
alphabet, with its mere 22 symbols, 
for the first time opened up the 
possibility of a society of universal 
literacy.
Judaism bears the mark of this 
throughout. Abraham was chosen 
to be a teacher
“For I have chosen him, so that 
he will direct his children and his 
household after him to keep the 
way of the Lord.” Gen. 18:19
Moses repeatedly speaks about 
education. “Teach them to your 
children, talking about them when 
you sit at home and when you walk 
along the road, when you lie down 
and when you get up.” Deut. 11:19
The verb l-m-d, “to teach,” occurs 
no less than 17 times in the book of 
Deuteronomy, making it a motif of 
the book as a whole.
Above all is the personal example 
of Moses himself. Deuteronomy, 
as a whole, is a massive adult 
education experience, the Master 
Prophet taking the whole people 

as his disciples and teaching them 
both the law — the commands, 
statutes and judgments — and, no 
less importantly, the history that 
lies behind it.
This rises to a climax at the 
end of the book, in the form of 
the “song” of Ha’azinu, this week’s 
parshah, which is preceded and 
followed by these words:
“Moses recited the words of this 
song from beginning to end in the 
hearing of the whole assembly of 
Israel.” Deut. 31:30
“This is the blessing that Moses 
the man of God pronounced on 
the Israelites before his death . . . 
Moses commanded us the Torah, 
an inheritance of the congregation 
of Jacob.” Deut. 33:1, Deut. 33:4
Note the insistence, in the first 
of these two verses, on the fact that 
Moses is speaking to everyone, 
not an elite. The second passage 
contains the famous line quoted by 
Rabbi Yannai’s guest as proof that 
Torah belongs to everyone. It is the 
possession not of the learned, the 
elect, the specially gifted, not of a 
class or caste. It is the inheritance 
of the entire congregation of Jacob.
Not until relatively modern times 
did this idea of universal education 
spread beyond Judaism. It did not 
exist even in England, then the 
premier world power, until the 
Education Act of 1870. It has taken 
the internet revolution — Google 
and the rest — to make it a reality 
throughout the world. Even today, 
some 70 million children are still 
deprived of education in countries 
like Somalia, Eritrea, Haiti, 
Comoros and Ethiopia.
That education is the key to 
human dignity and should be 
equally available to all is one of 
the most profound ideas in all of 
history, and it was born in those 
powerful words, immediately 
following this week’s parshah: 
“Moses commanded us the Torah, 
an inheritance of the congregation 
of Jacob.” 

Spiritual Growth
W

hen Moshe asks in his 
final speech, at the 
opening of Parshat 
Haazinu, that his words “come 
down like rain, his speech as 
the dew, like showers on young 
growth and droplets on the grass,” 
he is invoking a common trope 
in Jewish thought — the 
Torah should be like water. 
For this to be a meaningful 
simile we must understand 
both what is Torah and 
what is water. 
Water in Genesis 1:2 
serves as the foundation of 
Creation. “The earth being 
unformed and void, with 
darkness over the surface 
of the deep and a wind 
from God sweeping over 
the water.” Water is mutable 
and mobile. It typifies the 
interconnectedness of all 
creation. And all living things need 
water to survive. 
Torah, meanwhile, is more 
than the book or the scroll. Like 
water, it is foundational, mutable, 
mobile and the source of our 
interconnectedness. It is what we 
are meant to drink, and it is our 
life. 
To some, the Torah might seem 
it is trapped on the page or in the 
distant past. Others recognize 
the Torah in the stories, rituals 
and practices that have given life 
meaning and guided them through 
good and bad times. 
Moshe’s plea is that his words 
will be like rain and dew — gentle 

and penetrating enough to not just 
water us but grow us.
In Avot de Rebbi Natan we 
receive an origin story for the great 
Rabbi Akiva. How did Rabbi Akiva 
start out? He was 40 years old and 
had never studied. Once he stood 
at a well. He said, “Who engraved 
this stone?” They told him, 
“The water, which drips 
upon it every day.” And 
they said to him, “Akiva, 
are you not familiar [with 
the verse], ‘As the waters 
wear away the stones’?” On 
the spot, Rabbi Akiva made 
the following deduction: “If 
something soft could chisel 
its way through something 
hard, then surely the words 
of Torah, which are as hard 
as iron, can penetrate my 
heart, which is flesh and 
blood!” Immediately, he 
returned to studying Torah.
Like Rabbi Akiva, we may feel 
like we love parts of being Jewish 
but not the whole. We love the 
holidays but not the prayers. The 
Kiddush but not the services. 
The food but not the people. The 
people but not the politics. 
Rabbi Akiva was right, living 
interconnected by Torah is hard. 
But it is meant to be the kind of 
hard that grows our souls. 
May you be blessed to be shaped 
by the living waters of Torah in 
5785. 

Rabbi Blair Nosanwisch is a rabbi at Adat 

Shalom Synagogue in Farmington Hills.

TORAH PORTION

Rabbi Blair 
Nosanwisch

Parshat 

Haazinu: 

Deuteronomy 

31:1-52; 

Hosea 14:2-

10; Joel 

2:15-27.

