By Anya Friedman-Hutter

As we rapidly approach the end of the Torah in time to start it back over again, Parashat Haazinu brings us another of Moshe’s goodbye speeches. This one comes in the form of a poem, delivered to the Israelite people about to reach the Promised Land, and it is intense. Moshe dramatically declares that God is great and the Israelites are Her no-good children, always turning away and doing evil. We should strive to follow God, Moshe says, because She created us in Her image (although I’ve been reading recently that many interpret the Torah to say that women and non-men are not in God’s image – a conversation I’d love to have another time), but because we keep worshiping false gods, She will turn away from us and destroy us – only to come back again so that our enemies know She has our back.

Why is it that, as much as we talk about the right way to do things, we keep turning to injustice and mistreatment? What is it about humans, in Moshe’s poetic account, that makes us incapable of just doing what God says? When I teach stories from the Torah to chanichimot or my students at the shul where I work, we always run into biblical characters making mistakes. The ancestors we idealize tricked each other, killed people unjustly, objectified women, and a lot more. Even Moshe Rabeinu hit the rock out of impatience and fear! I think that the Torah shows us these characters making mistakes, turning away from God and the right path, so that we see that messing up is human.

We spent the last week and a half reflecting on teshuva, the process of returning, committing to relating to people in a way that feels right. The intense examples of sin that Moshe brings up remind us that everyone messes up, and when we turn away from what is right in favor of what is easy, it is possible to turn back toward the right path. Moshe is reminding us, in a kind of dark and foreboding way, that teshuva is possible and necessary.

Additionally, Moshe instructs his Israelite

listeners to pass on his message to their children. He wants future generations to know that they will make mistakes and stray from the right path – indeed, right after his poem, God reminds him and Aharon that they will not reach the Promised Land because of their mistakes. This fact makes it all the more powerful that Moshe wants to guide others in the right direction – he’s educating from a place of vulnerability, asking the next generation to do better than he did.

We make mistakes with our chanichimot all the time. Ellen Frankel’s awesome book The Five Books of Miriam writes about this parasha as advice to parents, but I think it applies to us as educators, too: she says that when we set out to work with young people, we “both wound and heal them” (p. 299). Like Moshe, we’ve done good and we’ve messed up, but we know that our chanichimot have the potential to do better. This means that it is imperative that we as educators keep on bringing the ideal we hope that we and our chanichimot will strive toward. We will not reach the Promised Land – and by that I don’t mean simply the land of Israel, but our vision for a just Israel, a just Jewish people, and a just world – so we educate our chanichimot in the hopes that they will get closer to it.

My Tavor peeps know this is my favorite quote and hear it a lot, but it feels relevant so I’ll share. This is from the book of Pirkei Avot and helps me keep on doing the work of education and social justice when the going gets sticky:

לא עלייך המלאכה לגמור, ולא את בת חורין לבטל ממנה.

Lo alayich hamlacha ligmor, v’lo at bat chorin lehivatel mimina.

It is not upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.