When Torah Becomes a Song

In this week’s brief parasha, something highly significant occurs: Moshe is told that he will soon die and that, in the future, his people will violate the Torah and break the covenant—an unmitigated disaster.

“My anger shall be kindled against them on that day, and I will forsake them and hide My face from them… and many evils and troubles shall befall them, so that they will say: ‘Is it not because my God is not in my midst that these evils have overtaken me?’”[1]

This is hardly the message Moshe hoped to hear at his life’s end.

“Write This Song”

And then, unexpectedly, the tone of the parasha changes radically, as if God has a change of heart.

“Now therefore write for yourselves this Song, and teach it to the children of Israel… that this Song shall testify before them as a witness, for it shall not be forgotten from the mouth of their seed… And Moshe wrote this Song on that day and taught it to the children of Israel.”[2]

Moshe is to write a song? Is this God’s final charge?

About which song is God speaking? Opinions vary—whether it is the whole Torah, only Sefer Devarim, or specifically the following parasha, Ha’azinu.[3] In any case, it concerns the Torah. But now the Torah is called a shir, a song—not merely a book or a scroll. Why the change?

Why a Song, Not a Book?

A book’s words can lie flat on the page. A song is different: it lifts words so that they soar, beyond limitations. A song bubbles up, rising up from within, until one is overwhelmed and touched from the deepest levels of the soul.

Song expresses meaning beyond the logic of prose. An authentic song reveals the ineffable and protests against the rigidity of a purely verbal mindset.

Such a song is not just a stylistic choice. The difference between a word spoken and a word sung is that music refutes human finality. It is an antidote to words becoming slogans; it reaches beyond the capacity of propositions. Hence it is shattering—propelling the listener toward something the mind alone cannot grasp and the word alone cannot reach. In its unique capacity, it is a small, subtle prophecy.

The Limits of Reason, the Reach of Prophecy

As the Rambam teaches, reason has limits even while the soul is in the body; it cannot grasp what lies beyond nature. There is a category of knowledge higher than philosophy—prophecy—which does not rest on the validation of reason. If prophecy is genuine, it cannot be adjudicated by proof; to demand this would be like trying to contain all the world’s water in one small cup. Our faith rests on the principle that the words of Moshe are prophecy and therefore beyond speculation’s tribunal.[4]

And so it is with song.

It is as if God realizes that His words, if encountered as flat text, may be reduced to rote—the “curse of fluency.” Even observance can become a pitfall if it descends into spiritual indifference. What is needed is to pierce the armor of apathy.[5]

The Torah must be sung juxtaposed to its obviousness—read as protest against the secularization of the sacred text, as some have (mistakenly) proposed from Spinoza onward. Only a song can smite a person so deeply that one never fully recovers from the encounter. Song is resistance to becoming stale.

It is as if God is telling Moshe: I told you to read the Torah—but that road leads to mediocrity. Even after Sinai’s voice, Israel fashioned an idol; idolatry is the petrification of spirit. I should have taught them to sing My words.

Learning as Chant

Our Sages, elaborate:

“Rabbi Shefatya said in the name of Rabbi Yochanan: Whoever reads the Torah without melody, or studies Mishnah without tune—of him Scripture says: ‘I also gave them statutes that were not good, and laws by which they could not live’ (Ezek. 20:25).”[6]

God’s words can be internalized only as song—a song of rebellion against the world’s mediocrity, a protest against confining the word to a cage. Proper exegesis must lead to such ecstasy that there is no difference between the one who sings the song and the one who is the song—between reading the Torah and becoming a walking Sefer Torah.

The song that endures

I remember my first encounter in a Yeshiva. To my astonishment, the students were all singing. They learned in chavrusa, in pairs, “talking in learning” about mind-splitting sugyot. But they did not just discuss them; they chanted them. Three hundred yeshiva students arguing—in sing-song. Even those learning alone sang softly to themselves. Coming from a university background in which study takes place in silence, here I encountered holy commotion. It was astonishing!

Tradition has it that when a Jew came to the Temple to bring a sacrifice for the atonement of a transgression, the priest would look at him and read his thoughts. If he found that the person had not fully repented, the priest would ask the Levites to chant a melody in order to bring the sinner to full teshuva. 7

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was asked by a young admirer whether he should become a poet. Rilke replied: only if you cannot live without being one.[7]

So too here. Only when we cannot live without being vocalists of the Torah will we become as a living Torah.

God’s message to Moshe is this: Tell the Israelites to turn their lives into a work of art—a song. If they do, and hold fast to My word, they will be blessed. If not, disaster awaits. Life without song is doomed to fail. How striking it is that Judaism needed to become a song: we pray in song; we read the Torah in song; we learn in song. To live the covenant is to sing it.

Notes

[1] Devarim/Deuteronomy 31:17–18.

[2] Devarim/Deuteronomy 31:19, 21–22.

[3] See Sanhedrin 21b; Rambam, Sefer HaMitzvot, Positive Commandment 18; Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Sefer Torah 7:1; Rashi to Deut. 31:19 (identifying the “song” as Ha’azinu).

[4] Rambam, Kobetz Teshuvot haRambam Veiggerotav, Lichtenberg, Leipzig ed,1959 letter to Rabbi Chisdai, 11 pp 23a-23b

[5] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom, ch. 16.

[6] Talmud Bavli, Megillah 32a; Ezekiel 20:25.

[7] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter 1 (1903).