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Sermon Kol Nidrei Lev Chadash 2025

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In the daily Amidah and also many times during the Yamim Noraim, we recite a prayer:

Shema koleinu Adonai eloheinu, chus verachem aleinu, vekabel berachamim uvratzon et tefilateinu שמע קולינו יהוה אלוהינו, חוס ורחם עלינו, וקבל ברחמים וברצון את תפילתינו. 

Hear our voice, O Eternal our God; spare us and have mercy upon us, and accept our prayers in mercy and favour.  

It is based on a passage in the book of Psalms (65) where we call God the “shomei’ah tefillah” – the one who hears prayers.

Yet this psalm begins with a phrase that is hard to understand and so is often mistranslated:

 לְךָ֤ דֻֽמִיָּ֬ה תְהִלָּ֓ה אֱלֹ֘הִ֥ים בְּצִיּ֑וֹן וּ֝לְךָ֗ יְשֻׁלַּם־נֶֽדֶר׃

“To You, silence is praise, God in Zion, and to you vows are paid”

Followed by the verse which informs our prayer                שֹׁמֵ֥עַ תְּפִלָּ֑ה עָ֝דֶ֗יךָ כׇּל־בָּשָׂ֥ר יָבֹֽאוּ׃

“Hearer of prayer, all human beings come to you”

The psalmist begins with silent praise, and with the completion of vows made to God, and only then says that God is the one who hears prayer – the prayers of all human beings.

The Talmud tells us that “Devarim she’balev einam Devarim” – words not formed out loud are not halachically valid – in the case of promises, just having an intention is not enough. (Kiddushin 49b) – and yet the psalmist understands – the feelings in our hearts, the ideas in our minds – these too form part of our connection to God.  We do not HAVE to verbalise them for God to hear them.

We Jews are – par excellence – a people who exist within words. We have always relied on them to make sense of what is happening to us, to communicate with others, to create and to transmit meaning. We read our texts and examine every letter, every word, to draw meaning in every generation. We protect the language of those texts, turning the object that holds the narrative into a holy item, a sefer torah.  From the moment Moses tells the Children of Israel to write his words into a sefer that will travel with them for all time, we are bound to the integrity and extraordinary elasticity of the Hebrew language.

Two of the most frequent verbs in torah are  “Amar” and “Diber” – to say and to speak.   Between them they appear almost seven thousand times in Tanakh – far outstripping any other verbal root. We are the people of the book. Words are our currency. Just as God brought the universe into being through the power of speech, so do we create meaning and develop understanding through words.

Yet since 7th October 2023, we find ourselves heartbroken and lost. The phrase that is most often heard in Israel and in Jewish communities is  “Ein milim – there are no words”.

 It feels like there is no vocabulary for what we have experienced and what we continue to live through.  The medium that has sustained us and provided for us – language – has suddenly shattered and we are left feeling adrift and powerless in a hostile environment.

Unable to use words to describe or to make sense of our reality, we are like Noah – famously silent in the face of the destruction of the world by flood. Or like Aaron who was silenced by his grief when two of his sons died after having offered strange fire before God. We are overwhelmed, voiceless, unable to know what we can possibly say or do to make sense of what is happening, or to be able to act in order to change it.

In the book of Psalms there are many pleas for God to hear our prayer, to listen to us and to act.  And there are even more petitions that God not be silent but that God responds to us. It is a regular theme, the lack of words between us and God and the ensuing fear of abandonment.

But silence does not have to be a negative thing. Silence can express our feelings even beyond the ability of words to do so.

In Pirkei d’Rav Eliezer, a medieval midrashic text, we read that “The voices of five objects of creation go from one end of the world to the other, and their voices are inaudible. When people cut down the wood of a fruit tree, its cry goes from one end of the world to the other, and the voice is inaudible. When the serpent sloughs its skin, its cry goes from one end of the world to the other, and its voice is not heard. When a woman is divorced from her husband, her cry goes from one end of the world of the world to the other, but the voice is inaudible, when the infant comes out from the mother’s womb and when the soul departs from the body, the cry goes forth from one end of the world to the other, and the voice is not heard.” Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer 34:4

The midrash is describing moments of existential trauma – and the accompanying sound of the inaudible voice.  

The sound of silence reverberates through Jewish tradition. Possibly the most well known is the story of Elijah and his encounter with God.

“There was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of the Eternal; but the Eternal was not in the wind. After the wind—an earthquake; but the Eternal was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake—fire; but the Eternal was not in the fire. And after the fire—the voice of slender silence [kol d’mamah dakah].” (I Kings 19:11-12)

Kol d’mamah dakah.  When Elijah heard this, he wrapped his mantle about his face and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold a voice was with him and said to him: “Why are you here, Elijah?”

God here is a sound, or paradoxically we might say that God here is the silence within the sound. And somehow the communication is complete. With this one question, Elijah is comforted and challenged and given back his life’s meaning. Having fled Jezebel in fear for his life, having begged God to take his life, having reached the depths of despair and stayed in his cave alone and paralysed with sadness – it is the sound of the silent question that returns him to life.

After the seventh of October, we have no words. Like Elijah we are fearful and we are angry and we feel ourselves to be so very alone. It is almost as if we cannot begin to imagine a future, because imagining something usually requires language and we have no words. But while language may structure imagination and help us to communicate it to others, there is another, visceral, sensory, intuitive human faculty that allows us to imagine without words.   We can dream, perceive, feel, pray – all without words.

Elijah is reminded by God that ultimately the connection between us and God does not require words.  The overarching sound of Elul and of the Yamim Noraim is not all the words spoken in prayer, but the cry of the Shofar. It is a sound that takes us back to Mt Sinai, to our first meeting with God as a people, to the creation of a covenant that cannot be broken.

The word shofar itself comes from the root shin-peh-reish which has the basic meaning of “to be hollow”, though it has a secondary meaning of “beauty”.  Again, there is the curious and paradoxical connection here – instead of silence and communication, we have emptiness and beauty.  It seems that always in our tradition the idea of there being “nothing” is challenged and juxtaposed with the idea of there being “ something” that is very special. What seems to be silent is in fact full of communication, what seems to be empty turns out to be full – nowhere more clear than the wilderness in which the Jewish people were formed – Midbar – a word which connotes empty wilderness, and yet which is formed from the root “davar” which as a noun means “a thing” or “a word” and as a verb means “to speak”.

While we may feel ourselves to be empty and hollow, with no words with which to imagine a different future or to create a new idea, our tradition comes to remind us that we are not alone, not abandoned. As the psalmist writes, even silence is praise of God, and God hears even what we do not speak or even form into words.

While we are a people of words, living in a world which our tradition tells us was created by the speaking of God – “God said…. And there was….”  We are also a people of commandment, of covenant and of action.  While the verbs for speech are the most frequent in bible, the verbs “to be” and “to do, to make” are the next numerous in our texts.   In a world where words feel inadequate or wrong, we are still able to act in order to fulfil our purpose and meaning. Our actions at this time may indeed speak much louder than words ever could.

I’d like to conclude with a story by Loren Eiseley, (The star thrower, an essay published in 1969 in The Unexpected Universe)

One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a child picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the child, he asked, “What are you doing?” The child replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.” “Child,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!”

After listening politely, the child bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, said…” I made a difference for that one.”

At the moment we may have few or no words. We may be hurting and filled with fear and pain and anger. We may feel less safe, and less certain of what the future will bring than ever before. But even so, we are Jews. We must bring our whole selves to living our lives. We will petition God to hear our prayers, blow the shofar to call both our attention and God’s attention. And each of us, in our own way, will find our way forward. We will find beauty in the emptiness, praise in the silence, and through our actions our voices will be heard.

Vayelech

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Parashat Vayelech is the shortest sidra in our torah cycle with just 30 verses. And even when paired, as it often is, with Parashat Nitzavim, the additional 40 verses still leave us with the shortest torah reading in the year.

And yet so much happens in these short verses. Moses concludes the speeches he has been making to the people since the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy;  speeches retelling their history, reminding them of particular values and responsibilities,  reflecting on their journey, reiterating the importance of their covenant with God and the responsibility to be faithful to this covenant relationship.  Three times in this chapter he exhorts them to be strong and resolute.  Twice he states that God will not fail or forsake them.   Having addressed first “all  Israel” and then Joshua in front of all the people telling him that he will lead the people into the land, Moses then writes down “et HaTorah hazot” – this teaching, and gives it to the Levites who carry the Ark of the covenant, and to all the elders of Israel, and then instructs them about Hakhel – that every seven years on the festival of Succot there was to be a full gathering of everyone in the community, men, women, children and strangers alike, to listen to this teaching and to learn and so to follow it faithfully.  He specifies that the children, who had not lived the experience of the exodus and desert journey, must listen and learn, so that they would understand their story, would revere God and follow God’s teaching in the land to which they were about to cross.

God reminds Moses that the time of his death is approaching and tells him to bring Joshua to the Tent of Meeting so that He may instruct him. As both Moses and Joshua enter the tent, God appears in the pillar of cloud and rather than instructing Joshua, God tells Moses that he will soon be dead, that afterwards the people will forsake God and follow the alien gods of the land, and that  the consequences of this will be terrible.  God’s anger will be unleashed and God will hide the divine face from them because of their evil deeds.  They will understand that their troubles have come because God is not with them, but God will hide the divine face from them. God instructs Moses to write a poem and teach it to the people of Israel” as a witness against them”, because, God tells him, God already knows what plans the people are devising that will take them from the path, even before they enter the Land that God promised them.

So Moses writes a second document, the poem we know as Ha’azinu, and teaches it to the Israelites.  An interpolation in the text then informs us that God commanded Joshua bin Nun, telling him to be strong and of good courage, because he will be the one to lead the Israelites into the promised land, and God will be with him.

Now the text returns –  we read that Moses concludes his writing “as Moses completed writing the words of this Torah in a book, until they were  finished” (v24) he gave it to the Levites and told them to put it at the side of the Ark of the Covenant “as a witness against the people”.  He speaks of the stubbornness and defiance of the people even while he is still lives – so how much more so will they be stiff-necked and self-centred once he is no longer around to correct them?  But who is he addressing at this point?  Only the Levites who will have a particular role in the ritual life of the people,  or the whole community? The text is ambiguous.

Then Moses tells the Levites to gather all the elders and officials of the tribes for him to speak to them and call heaven and earth as witness against them. He tells them he knows that once he is dead they will act wickedly and eventually the consequences of them failing to act according to God’s teachings will bring about catastrophe because God will lose patience with them. And then the chapter ends with the introduction to the poem, where we are told that Moses recited the words of the poem to the very end, in the hearing of the whole congregation of Israel.

The sidra is part of an ongoing narrative that comprises the whole of the Book of Deuteronomy, structured as the final exhortations of Moses to the people as they camp across the Jordan waiting to enter the promised land. But it is also one moment in time that explores the dying days of Moses’ leadership and of his life.  It is a liminal moment before the next stage, the change of generation as the old leader leaves the stage, and the people around him know that life will change, that they will move on from their nomadic existence into their committed promised land.

But it is also a literary gem, one short chapter that is tightly written, with repeated words and phrases forming triggers within the text.

Twice we read of Moses writing down words – torah – in a book which is then given to the Levites to care for alongside the Ark of the Covenant. Twice we are told that the people will forsake God and the consequences of this will be devastating. Twice Moses is told that he will shortly die.   Twice we are reminded that God made an oath to deliver the people to the Land promised to them. Twice people are told that God walks with them, will not forsake them, twice we are told that the people will forsake God and regret this bitterly.

Are the people to be strong and of good courage because God will be with them – as is asserted three times in this short text. Is there no possibility that they will not become weak and fail to live up to the covenant with God when they reach the land? How can these two assertions co-exist?  And yet they do.

And there are so many questions. Is Moses at 120 years too weak be mobile, in his words “I am not able to go out or to come in”, when we are told right at the start that Moses went out (Vayelech) to speak to the community – a word that appears unnecessary in every other instance of his declarations.  And what are we to make of this when later we are told that at his death his  was eye undimmed, his physical strength unabated.

The repeated use of a written text to “act as witness” against the people is also problematic. The hope is asserted that the people will hear and learn and act according to God’s teachings – so why should the text be a kind of hostile hostage to fortune?

The timeline of the text is odd  – narratives are fractured as well as repeated, there is an almost wandering quality in the story. What happens when is hard to pin down, there is a sense of the ambiguous, even among those repetitions of key words, phrases and themes. There is a dreamlike quality to this text, a sense of trying to make sense and transmit something of the utmost importance, but of occasionally losing the thread.

The repetitions form a kind of spiral in the text, but they also act as parentheses within it, and in the centre of it all are two individual stories  – the first is Hakhel – the commandment that every seven years the whole people are to  as one community and listen to the teachings in order to learn and to do. The second is the moment when the leadership passes from Moses to Joshua, when both are in the presence of God at the tent of meeting and Moses is told of his imminent death, that Joshua will take his place.

In my work as Spiritual Care Lead at a hospice I spend many hours with people in their final weeks and hours of life. And I recognise the way this text is written – the urgency alongside the ambiguity, the way a person reflects on the past and projects  themselves into a future they know they will not see – yet still see themselves in the continuity of experience.  The repetitions and the fractured narratives. The need to retell and record and to impress on others the learning they have acquired in their own lives. The story telling and the imperatives, the fears and the repeated reassurances – even while knowing those reassurances cannot be guaranteed.

And I see two big themes at the end of life for those who see themselves connected to others – Firstly,  that even though the individual is themselves leaving this life, there is a desire that the connection will continue, that the family or friendship group will continue to see each other, support each other, reiterate and reclaim all that they share that binds them to each other and to the dying person, so that the thread of relationship and shared understanding will both give meaning to the lived life of the dying person, but also take them forward  long after they are no longer physically present.  We write on gravestones the acronym taf nun tzadi beit heh – may the soul of the deceased be bound in the threads of life – an expectation that like a woven fabric in time, every soul and life is woven together, each one necessary for what will be woven after them.

The mitzvah of Hakhel creates regular future gatherings so that connectivity and meaning will not be lost. It weaves each person of the community together, binding everyone into the connecting threads of life

And the second is the need for someone to step up and into the roles of the dying person – for the next generation to take their place in holding it all together, so that the person can die with the reassurance that all is not lost, that their life built the sort of meaning which will outlive them and they will impact on the future because someone else takes up the link in the chain of eternity. Joshua, who has been at Moses’ side throughout the journey, is now invested in this role, and will indeed take them into the land.

How do these two themes find a way to express themselves? It is always with words. Written or spoken, whispered or in the notes section on the phone, in a diary or a poem or a song. We embody all that we are into Devarim – words that can transcend time and cross space, that will speak to generations we will never know and that can sit quietly for decades or even longer, until a reader comes to encounter them and invest them with new life.

The sidra is short but the message is eternal. We each walk along our own pathway in life, but we walk together – as the text tells us, God walks alongside and will not forsake us if we pay attention to our covenantal relationship.  Generations come and generations go, we mourn as we lose the people so precious to us to death, but we never lose their stories or memories, the way they impacted on us and shaped us in life, the way their voices speak in our souls. 

The relationships we nurture will nurture us – and more. They will create the continuity of meaning, create the bridge down the generations, and like the poem we will read in the next chapter, will mean that the meaning of our lives will never be forgotten.

Vayeshev – the transformation from brat to tzadik begins here

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The narratives of Joseph occupy a large tranche of the book of Genesis – in the next four weeks we will focus almost entirely on the life and the experiences of this eleventh son of Jacob and first son on Rachel.  By the end of the book of Genesis we’ll know more about Joseph than about anyone else in his family before or since. We’ll know about his dreams, his relationships, his skills, his political exploits, his love affairs, his character flaws and strengths, his successes and his failures; his problems.

The narratives about him are long and somehow ponderous, telling the stories repeatedly, hammering the same points – the sibling rivalry, the parental favoritism, the tricks of hiding precious articles and retrieving them later;   It is hard to understand just why we are told every last detail about the life of this particular man, what we are supposed to make of this weight of information.

Tradition tells us that the stories of Joseph foreshadow the future experiences of Israel.  Reading the text we see that they also reconcile many of the themes that have come before. Joseph acts as a linchpin in the Genesis narratives – reliving and reworking the lives of his ancestors, and finally dealing with some of the issues which had held them back, finishing the business so to speak, and so allowing the people of Israel to move on in their religious journey.

The narratives of Joseph end one chapter of identity and open another.  No longer will individuals know God in the way that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob personally experienced and encountered the Divinity.  With Joseph comes the exile into Egypt which will culminate in Sinai and peoplehood.  A different sort of belonging to God is introduced here – one can not really say people are ‘relating to God,’ because in all of these narratives God is at one remove, a spectator in the story, hardly present except in the shadows at the edge of perception.

The metamorphosis which occurs with the life of Joseph is almost entirely a human one rather than one that speaks of divine interest – though it does have a flavour of fairy tale to it Political rather than theological, the transformation is very much of this world:-  A family changes radically when the favourite child falls victim to his own beliefs.  A poor immigrant succeeds beyond his wildest expectations in his adopted country.  A servant becomes a political master, changing the way the country structures itself and its socio-economic policy.  A slave becomes a prince.  A penniless Jewish refugee with no family or friends builds himself a life amongst a people not his own.

With Joseph we have a new construct with which to view our lives.  He is a Diaspora Jew, maybe even a secular Jew, certainly a political rather than a theological Jew.  Elie Wiesel describes him as “the first person to bridge two nations and two histories, the first to link Israel to the world…. In the context of the biblical narrative he was a new kind of hero heralding a new era…”  (in ‘Joseph, or the Education of a Tzaddik’ – Messengers of God p144/5

So not a patriarch, but certainly a recognizable human being and role model, giving us a different way of being.  Our problem in many ways is that we are far more like Joseph than like anyone else in the narratives – building our world on a political rather than theological basis, allowing God to be a spectator in our lives, at the margins of our identity.  Joseph is a role model with outstanding flaws for us to deal with, focusing so entirely on the present world that he seems to ignore the next one, becoming not so much integrated between two cultures as appearing to be assimilated into one almost without trace of his origins visible.

Yet Joseph is described in tradition as a Tzaddik – a Just and Righteous person.  The weight of the narrative must be trying to tell us something more – Joseph’s position as the mid point between the clearing up of past rivalries and the foreshadowing of future exile and oppression must yield more for us.  Again it is Elie Wiesel who identifies the critical point – “One recognizes the value of a text by the weight of its silence. Here the silence exists, and it weighs heavy…. “ First there is Joseph’s astounding silence during the brutal scene at Shechem, in which all his brothers except Benjamin participated.  When his brothers faced him with their hate – Joseph was mute.  More striking yet is Jacob’s silence – from the day that Joseph was taken we are told, he did not speak for 20 years.  He didn’t even speak to God.  He didn’t search for his son, didn’t go to the place where his son was last seen – he lived instead in a solitary, silent place, only resuming his conversation with and prayers to God after the family reunion, when God encouraged him to go to Egypt.

And what do we make of God’s actions – God too is silent.  Jacob didn’t address God in his interminable inconsolable grief, but neither did God address Jacob.

And Joseph in Egypt, as wealthy political potentate – where were his words, the one’s he could have sent back to Canaan to tell of his life’s story and put his father’s mind at rest?

All the words that began this story, the terrible words that Joseph spoke about his brothers, the words of peace they could barely bring themselves to utter, the words of his dreams, the words he was to bring back to his father – all those words at the beginning of Joseph’s stories descended into silence when Joseph descended into the pit, and the silence became heavier and heavier until the moment of the family reunion in Egypt, until Joseph could no longer suppress the words, no longer restrain himself.  But this time his words were changed, they became the words of a man who had transformed himself, not just from the arrogant sibling who considered that the universe should worship him, into  caring and beneficent brother;    not just from immigrant slave to ruling prince.  The transformation was from spoiled and self-centered brat into Tzaddik, a man able to forgive the wrongs done to him, a man able to transcend his history and reflect not only his humanity, but the reflection of God that is at the core of all humanity.   The heavy silence was not a time of nothingness but a time of real change, change that ultimately allows us to move on from the preoccupations of this world – the rivalries and jealousies, the acquisitiveness and the defence of the self – and move into the book of Exodus, into the beginning of the redemption.

Tradition tells us that Joseph was a Tzaddik.  A Tzaddik not because God had made him one, not because he was brought up to be one, not even because his life inevitably trained him to be one.  Joseph was surely a Tzaddik because in the face of the pain of his conception and the difficulties of his upbringing, in the face of his own weaknesses and drives,  he still managed to overcome his experiences and actually transform himself, actually allow his humanity to develop, to become something he didn’t have to be, without any supernatural help.  Everyone else changed as a result of their encounters with God. Joseph changed despite not encountering God in any observable way.  As a role model, this is the Joseph we should be reflecting – not the assimilated but the searching Jew, who found God in the unlikeliest places because God is there to be found.

 

Devarim: Shabbat Chazon:- Both Vision and Words to understand how we got to this position and how we stand with God.

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On the Shabbat before Tisha b’Av the liturgical calendar demands that we begin to read the book of Deuteronomy – Devarim, and for the haftarah we read the vision of Isaiah, the reading which unusually gives the Shabbat its special name – Chazon, vision. This haftarah is the third of a set of three haftarot that do not match up with the torah reading, but rather with the three weeks before the ninth of Av, and are called the haftarot of rebuke.  (In this case while today is the 9th of Av, it serves as the Shabbat before as we do not fast on Shabbat, and Tisha b’Av observance will begin tonight)

All sorts of cycles of Jewish history and philosophy come together in the readings for this week, focussing us for the task ahead as we become aware of the nearness of Ellul, and the need for serious introspection.  And the words, the language of the readings, give us a number of hints, guiding our thought patterns gently but certainly, as we enter this time.

On Tisha b’Av by tradition we read the Megillah of Lamentations, known by its first exclamation of desperation and sorrow – Eicha. The word, meaning “How can this be?” or simply “Alas” is not particularly common in bible, yet it appears in both the torah reading and the haftarah today.  It is as if the exclamation is being used as a prompt to our subconscious –“How can we have arrived at this state once more after all our good intentions last year?”

The word is uncommon.  It is used only by three prophets – Moses, Isaiah and Jeremiah (here in Lamentations).  But there is another word which looks exactly the same in the unpointed torah text and the Midrash notes this with interest:  After Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil they hid themselves away from God when God came looking for them in the garden.  And God called out to them “Ayeka” – Where are you?

The words Eicha? And Ayeka? look the same in the unvowelled text.

The Midrash suggest that in that call God was showing all the despair that would later be the Jewish experience at the destruction of Jerusalem – “How lonely sits the city once great with people”. (Lam1:1)

The link is obvious – that it is the choices we make that bring about ill fortune, it is our own behaviour that is the progenitor of our despair.

But there is another way to look at this similarity of consonants – in the passage in Genesis God calls out to human beings “Where are you”, but we might as easily call out to God the same question.  As we survey the destruction of our worlds again and again, we must ask of God – “where are You?”

Some years ago I had a long conversation with a woman congregant who had been brought out of Germany as a child in the kinderstransport, but who had then had to live with the terrible pain of knowing that her family had not survived the camps, had written letters to her begging her to help them out of that hell, had died wondering if she would be able to save them.  She told me that she was not going to fast on Yom Kippur any more.  I said I thought that was reasonable – she was ill and on a great deal of medication, but that wasn’t her point.  “No” she said, “it isn’t the medication, it is just that for nearly 80 years I have been saying sorry to God every Yom Kippur, and now I feel I have done it.  Now it is time for God to begin to say sorry to me”.

Her life had been long and filled with all sorts of pain, emotional, spiritual and physical.  But she had come to the last stretch and she had a problem for God.  It was both the exclamation “Eicha” and the question “Ayeka” – “How could this happen? Where were You?”

The list of the calamities that are said to have occurred on Tisha b’Av is extensive.  The day that the spies reported back that the land was wonderful but would not be easy to take – and the people rejected Moses and Joshua’s urging to go into battle for it – was said to have been Tisha b’Av for example.  And as we consider the violent history of the Jewish people, surviving terrible destructions again and again, we are left with the questions – “How could it have happened again?  Eicha?  And: Where were You? Ayeka?”

As the pain of the Jewish people reverberates down the centuries, so do those two words.

Which brings us to Devarim – and Chazon.

God creates the world in the very beginning of Torah with words – God speaks and the world as we know it emerges.  The huge bulk of Torah takes place in the midbar, the place where the action of speech and the words spoken create a space in which God can be encountered.  Wilderness, unstructured and unowned land – the dimension where ideas can be embodied not only in our usual use of language but in our very existence.  And at the end of the book of Numbers, known as Bemidbar, the narration leaves us poised on the edge of the land, with Moses about to die and told to anoint Joshua, the only other survivor of the midbar experience, as his successor.  Moses passes on his authority of leadership, he climbs a mountain so as to see the midbar where he has spent most of his life, and the land of Canaan which he will never enter, and then he begins to speak. Devarim. Words pour from him in a torrent. His memories, his meaning, his purpose – his very soul. Facing his end he chooses to mirror the actions of God at the creation of the world – he uses words to bring into being the most important things he knows.  He answers the questions “Eicha” – how can these situations happen?”  And “Ayeka – where are You?”

The situations happen because we contribute again and again to them happening.  Where is God?– God is right here.  Moses wants us to know these answers. He puts an enormous amount of energy into reminding us, calling heaven and earth as witness. He rehearses our history – and our complicity in it.  He offers blessings and curses and repeats the simple rule – what we choose to do always has consequences.  And he tells us again and again how God is waiting for us, is close to us, is never far away and only waiting for our call.  Poor Moses – it is learning he can never quite pass on to us, for each of us has to learn it for ourselves.

Today is Shabbat Devarim. It marks the beginning of the book of Moses’ final and more distilled teachings to go with us into the future when Moses cannot.  It is the Shabbat before Tisha b’Av, a day of almost resigned and patient waiting for the worst after almost three weeks of semi mourning.  Words seem to be useless now. They cannot change the future.  We arealmost weighed down by the number of them being prayed and read, exclaimed or muttered.

Words are everywhere – we cannot get away from them. And they begin to lose their power to reach us, so many words surround us.

And so Isaiah brings us something else along to help us with all these words – he brings a vision, a different sense of how to interpret and understand the world.

The vision of Isaiah son of Amotz….  Isaiah’s vision projects onto the harsh reality around him and establishes a different kind of perspective. Isaiah reminds us that at the Creation God spoke, and God saw.  Sometimes, when the words aren’t enough any more, it is important to draw back and to see. To notice, to observe and perceive, to witness.

We Jews are a people of words, and we can use words in so many clever ways. We are sometimes able to block out our reality for a time with a judicious use of language.  We are sometimes able to confuse ourselves or others about the truth of our lives.  We can construct so many different worlds, from the minutiae of our legal system to the legends chronicled in our midrashim.  By declaring time sacred, we can make it so for the period of Shabbat.  By asserting our scriptural narrative we can make order in the universe.  But sometimes we need not to declare or proclaim, but to look, and to really see.  We may have a prayer called “Shema” – Listen!  which we expect others as well as ourselves to hear as we recite it, but we also have a torah reading “Re’eh” – see!

Moses, our greatest prophet, said of himself that he was not so good with words.  He had instead the experience, the encounter, the vision, to take him and our people through the wilderness and to the edge of the promised land. Our prophets were also men – and women – of vision, something we occasionally choose to forget.

But this Shabbat we are reminded – Chazon as well as Devarim – Vision as well as words, to look as well as to speak and listen.

As we enter Tisha b’Av we will need both of these senses fully honed.  And in the run up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur which these liturgical events signal to us, we are reminded- use words to understand the world and explain it to ourselves and to God, use words to pray, to ask, to meet each other – but never forget the other sense – stand back and really take a long hard look at our world and our place in it.  Watch ourselves and perceive our own contribution to where we now are.  Forget our clever use of words just for once, and instead, use our sight our foresight, our imagination, our revelation – get in touch once more with our own vision.